Series Debut
This book may not be for everyone, but for those who enjoy words, dictionaries, and a virtual visit to Oxford, it’s absolute catnip. Set in the workplace of the Clarendon English Dictionary (a thinly veiled Oxford English Dictionary), the story follows the solution of the mystery of the missing sister, in this case that of dictionary diva Martha. She and her staff, Alex, Safi, and Simon, along with her boss, Jonathan, who makes infrequent appearances (he’s busy with a book tour), become the core group that solves the puzzle presented to them.
Martha returned to Oxford from Berlin to take this job and has settled into an uneasy truce with her father, Gabriel, as they attempt to coexist in her childhood home. Missing from the family is Rebecca, Gabriel’s beloved wife and Martha’s mother, who was lost to cancer, and Martha’s older sister, Charlie, who has been mysteriously missing for decades. As the book opens, the staff receives a letter from someone named “Chaos,” loaded with the kind of clues that only a lover of words and word games could decipher.
It was sent to the right place. When the four at the dictionary begin to realize they have all received postcards with the Clarendon on the front, and a cryptic message on the back, they become even more motivated to solve the puzzles in Chaos’s letters. As they work each one of them exhibits a well-defined personality: young, enthusiastic Safi, older, elegant Alex, and the perpetually disappointed Simon, who seems to feel life has shortchanged him in some way.
Martha finds herself forced to confront many hard realities on her return to Oxford, including her guilt over her sister’s disappearance and her continuing melancholy over her mother’s death. The Chaos letters (there are more of them of course) lead her to the police to report what she’s found, and the narrative is rich with the thrill of the hunt, as the staff at the dictionary love words, and these texts provide them crucial word puzzles like no other.
The dictionary, which researches words, trying to uncover their original usage, is also the home of Shakespeare devotees, including boss Jonathan, a Shakespeare scholar, as so many familiar English words and expressions are rooted in the Bard’s work. Words, their meaning and the importance of language itself provide the structure for the story, with different exotic terms (for example, “videnda,” meaning things deserving to be seen) serving as epigraphs for each chapter.
This book may not be for everyone, and there will be those who find it meandering and slow to reach a conclusion, but personally I enjoyed every side trip. I loved the graveyard where Martha likes to have her lunch, the little park near C.S. Lewis’ home where Charlie’s bike is found, the antiquarian bookstore, the visit to Oxford University, and perhaps my favorite, the description of Oxford’s May Day celebration. I enjoyed the different words and the mental process as the main characters deciphered the clues in the letters. At the conclusion the author manages a resolution which is joyful, melancholy and answers a lot of questions all at the same time. If this defines the kind of book you’re looking for, I predict you’ll love it as much as I did. — Robin Agnew