I had been interested in reading The Liar’s Dictionary for quite some time, and now that I have read it, I have to say that I found it to be disappointing. It is not at all as interesting as the blurb on the back cover makes it out to be. As I was reading it, I kept waiting for more plot to occur, but it feels like not a lot happens in this novel.

The Liar’s Dictionary is about a woman named Mallory who works as an intern for a man who is in the process of digitizing his family’s infamously incomplete Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary. Mallory’s job is to deal with the anonymous phone caller who threatens the Swansby’s staff. She is also tasked with uncovering all the “mountweazels” in the Swansby’s Dictionary (to save you from Googling, a “mountweazel” is a fake dictionary entry that is used against copyright infringement). Mallory’s story is told concurrently with that of Peter Winceworth, a humdrum employee at Swansby’s in 1899 who is responsible for inserting the mountweazels in the dictionary. The blurb on the back cover makes it sound like the two timelines are closely linked, but in actuality the connection is rather loose. Mallory and Winceworth are connected by their employment at Swansby’s and by both being at points in their lives when they are questioning why they work there. The present timeline does not resolve anything from the past timeline. This is not at all what I was expecting, considering I read a lot of fiction where past and present timelines converge.

Neither Mallory nor Peter Winceworth are interesting enough characters for me to care what happens to either of them. Winceworth is a wet blanket that does not really stick up for himself against his domineering coworkers. He is unhappy with his job, but his one act of rebellion is to have his fake words inserted into the dictionary, which no one notices for over a hundred years anyways, before he slinks off into the night to live an uneventful life. Mallory spends her days at Swansby’s ruminating over dictionary entries and reluctantly answering the phone when it occasionally rings. This does not make for very riveting reading. It is her girlfriend, Pip, who livens things up when she comes in and takes charge of the plot, but by then it is too little, too late.

A novel about a dictionary is, of course, an homage to words and the etymology of words, but as an avid reader and an appreciator of the written language, even I found Williams’ numerous tangents on different words to be tedious. I think most people will find The Liar’s Dictionary to be a boring read.