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Fiction

Peggy the obscure

Pip Williams’s new novel
by •
May 2023, no. 453

The Bookbinder of Jericho by Pip Williams

Affirm Press, $32.99 pb, 438 pp

Fiction

Peggy the obscure

Pip Williams’s new novel
by •
May 2023, no. 453

First, a confession. I am one of a tiny minority of readers who were underwhelmed by Pip Williams’s first novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020). I thought it a splendid idea, one undermined by facile messages about how women’s words were ignored by the men who recorded our language and its meanings. Clearly, I was in a minority: Dictionary became an international bestseller, one of the most successful Australian novels ever published. Friends raved about it. I wondered what I wasn’t getting.

Fortunately, I’m getting much more from Williams the second time round, where the feminist message is more subtle. Here is another historical novel about women working in a man’s world of books and learning. As it happens, the novel also had an unexpected and sobering personal message for me.

I am proud to be an Oxford graduate, from a time when it was hard for women to get into the university: there were far more colleges and places for men. But my difficulties were as nothing compared to those facing Peggy, the young woman who narrates Williams’s story. I had many privileges: a good education, supportive parents, a comfortable assumption that I was entitled to take my place in academia. Peggy lives in the early twentieth century, a time when education for women and girls was far from assumed. Moreover, she is on the wrong side of the class divide. There are doors she sees every day that she literally cannot enter.

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Jane Sullivan

Jane Sullivan is a literary journalist and novelist based in Melbourne. Her latest book is a bibliomemoir, Storytime (Ventura Press, 2019).

The Bookbinder of Jericho

The Bookbinder of Jericho

by Pip Williams

Affirm Press, $32.99 pb, 438 pp

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Comments (3)

  • Oxford is a favoured setting for novels exploring tensions between town and gown (from Jill Paton Walsh’s renovations of Dorothy Sayers’s texts to R.F. Kuang’s more recent dismantling of power in 'Babel') but Pip Williams’ depiction of 'The Bookbinder of Jericho' embraces issues of language and loyalty that troubled an ancient walled city and not simply a district in a university town in a country fractured by class, education, repressed aspiration or diminished opportunity. At its heart is a love story that celebrates a gift of creation in one man’s restoration of women’s words arbitrarily censored. The bookbinder who sorts, repairs, and steals fragments of revered texts in order to read the byways of a world beyond the ‘lane’ that is Oxford, is an agent registering change at a place and time of world crisis, where words have irremediably tipped order into chaos. Beyond the grand rhetoric, where the limbs of compatriots and enemy are being amputated or the horrors of witness transcend speech, mute silence shouts. Williams’ text is metaphoric, an evocatively nuanced investigation of the power, eloquence, saving grace and inadequacy of the languages of the world’s words. But Williams implies that the narrow boat, with its remnant but resilient human cargo fighting to stay afloat, offers a potential for recovery in the face of change. For its kindness and acuity this generous book will undoubtedly be reread and rightly treasured.
    Posted by Lyn Jacobs
    01 June 2023
  • Thanks for your insight, Jane. I'm absorbed in this book at the moment. Like you, I'm finding it hard to visualise Maude as a rounded person, but am swayed by Peggy's emotional ties to her. The bonus of the fine read is the historical background which is offered to us through Peggy's eyes, opening up absorbing knowledge of those changing times and a personal comparison to now.
    Posted by Jill Rivers
    08 May 2023
  • You weren't alone. I bought 'The Dictionary of Lost Words' but was underwhelmed. I couldn't understand the hype. I thought it was unambitious and lacked depth. I'd not thought to read 'The Bookbinder', so thanks for the heads up.
    Posted by Linda Cockburn
    29 April 2023

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