Lemprière's Dictionary

By Lawrence Norfolk

The Somerset Maugham Prize–winning, international bestselling debut novel: “a dazzling linguistic and formal achievement” set in 18th century London (Salman Rushdie).
 
In eighteenth-century London, John Lempriere works feverishly on a celebrated dictionary of classical mythology that bears his name. But when he discovers a conspiracy against his family dating back 150 years, he embarks on a personal mission that will pit him against enemies he never new he had, allies he never thought he would ever want, and a destiny he never imagined . . .
 
Told with the narrative drive of a political thriller and a Dickensian panorama of place and time, this “superbly entertaining” tale encompasses multinational conspiracies and a motley cast of scholars, eccentrics, prostitutes, assassins, drunken aristocrats, and octogenarian pirates—all brilliantly depicted across three continents and the world of classical mythology (The Washington Post).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9780802199430

Lawrence Norfolk

Lawrence Norfolk is the bestselling author of Lemprière's Dictionary, The Pope's Rhinoceros and In the Shape of a Boar, three literary historical novels which have been translated into 34 languages. He was born in London in 1963 but moved with his parents to Iraq shortly after. They were evacuated following the Six Day War in 1967 and he grew up in the West Country of England. He is the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the Budapest Festival Prize for Literature and his work has been shortlisted for the IMPAC Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Award and the Wingate/Jewish Quarterly Prize for Literature. In 1992 he was listed as one of Granta magazine's 20 'Best of Young British Writers'. In the same year he reported on the war in Bosnia for News magazine of Austria. His journalism and reviews have appeared in newspapers and magazines throughout Europe and America. He currently lives in London.

Book preview

Praise for Lemprière’s Dictionary:

Extravagantly spectacular … myriad wonders and pleasures abound … superbly entertaining.

—The Washington Post Book World

It’s a dazzling … display of intellectual pyrotechnics, one that immediately reveals not only Lemprière’s classical credentials but also his creator’s. Like Eco, he uses intellect to flesh out and give body to a simple mystery, so that knowledge itself becomes part of the point of the story.

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

An important and inspiring novel.

—Voice Literary Supplement

Astonishing … Lawrence Norfolk reveals a massive talent.

—The Boston Globe

A wonderfully ambitious extravaganza teeming with fertile inventiveness.

—Detroit News

This is an improbable and improbably good first novel of nearepic proportions … a tangled tale of political intrigue and financial chicanery.

—Details

Remarkable … Think of novelists Umberto Eco, Thomas Pynchon and Charles Dickens…. Then pull up a comfortable chair and settle in for a voyage to the late eighteenth century … an involving, tantalizing tale.

—The Orlando Sentinel

This is historical fiction of mesmerizing complexity.… It is a masterpiece.

—Daily Mail

A dazzling linguistic and formal achievement that also takes on a genuinely rich and underexplored subject, the East India Company.

—Salman Rushdie

LEMPRIÈRE’S

DICTIONARY

ALSO BY LAWRENCE NORFOLK

The Pope’s Rhinoceros

In the Shape of a Boar

LEMPRIÈRE’S DICTIONARY

Lawrence Norfolk

Copyright © 1991 by Lawrence Norfolk

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Originally published in Great Britain by Sinclair-Stevenson Limited in 1991. Printed in 1999 by Vintage, a division of Random House, London, England.

Printed in the United States of America

FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Norfolk, Lawrence, 1963-

  Lemprière’s dictionary / Lawrence Norfolk.

      p. cm.

  ebook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9943-0

 1. Lemprière, John, 1765?-1824—Fiction. 2. London

(England)—History—18th century—Fiction. 3. Mythology,

Classical—Historiography—Fiction. 4. Lexicographers—Fiction.

5. Conspiracies—Fiction. 6. Mythologists—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6064.O65L4 2003

  823’.914—dc21

2003042196

Grove Press

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

TO

S B-H

Barbarus hic ego sum, qui non intellegor ulli

1600: The Voyage Out

Schtlaumpp!

THE YOUNG man dropped the book. The boat would wait for him. He rubbed his tired eyes behind their spectacles and looked out across the river. A gull skimmed over the water, measuring the wind. He wrapped his coat more tightly about him and glanced quickly down the quay. The chest on which he sat shifted slightly, unbalanced on the rough planks of the jetty. She would not come now. In front of him, the pacquet pulled gently on its hawser. A crewman was hard at work stacking crates towards the stern where the rigging obscured his view. Not here and not now. He cursed in silence. The crewman cursed too, the boat would wallow like a pig under the load. Morning sunlight shone down on them all, casting shadows that shortened towards midday. The young man felt it warm on his back. Inside, he was cold and his thoughts grew bitter. I have been brought to this. It was not my doing. The book stared up at him from between his feet. Sunlight glinted off his eye-glasses. Not my doing.

The gull was gone, but the Thames had other sights for him. Watermen paddled their wherries back and forth between the banks and shouted abuse at any vessel within earshot. A pacquet, identical to the one moored before him, had misjudged the tide and was now anchored a hundred yards downstream. A pinnace tacked hopelessly against the breeze. As the sun rose higher, the river water warmed, then sweated and stank. A fine haze lifted from its surface. The dark mud of Blackwall began to dissolve behind it, a widening strip as the tide turned and began to ebb. Upstream of the jetty, the Nottingham sailed slowly into view, new canvas crackling in the light wind. It passed him, sliding through the black water, until its stern turned, the sound of its sails growing quieter to be replaced by the sound of the water lapping at the jetty.

But the solitary figure on the jetty did not want to let it go and his gaze trailed in the wake of the Indiaman, shimmering now in the haze as it edged around the bend. The far bank cut across its prow and he saw then, in its slow glide, its massive disappearance, the other ships, the very first of them that had never been his to see before but only to read of, to learn of at a distance, to track belatedly to port. And here, the very wharf on which he stood, was where it had begun. His thoughts reached back after that first day, along the secret trail of years that had directed his steps to this point and extended back long before that; a trail of faded markers, faint signatures. His countenance changed and the bitter memory rose in him again. False modesty! Those names were strong enough to play me like a puppet… Not only me, all of us. All of our lives, mine, my father’s, his father’s and his before him, all the way back to Rochelle. The bloody succession led me here and from here I trace it back to the first of that long line. To you, François, my ancestor, who thought yourself master and ended as victim; to you and your legacy. His bitterness turned to anger at the dead man as he berated him silently from the other side of the grave and the sun glittered on the black water as it sped towards the sea.

The book lay between his feet. He bent to pick it up and as he grasped the cover its pages fell open and the dead man’s testament slipped from between the leaves. The sun drove its rays down onto the jetty. A gust lifted the folded parchment and pushed it over the rough planks like a tiny sail towards the edge. Let it go, he thought. The tide would carry it away, away down the river. Let it go.

But he could not. He watched for a moment then bent once more to retrieve it. The parchment was stiff as canvas, crackling as he unfolded it. Away down the river. Out to sea. He adjusted his spectacles. Across the sea, a port they had left too long and too late waited for them in vain. Rochelle, the mistake they could not put behind them, the hard mark his ancestor could not erase. His head dropped and the neat characters stared up at him.

"I, François Charles Lemprière merchant, to you my descendant, whenever you may read this whosoever you may be, welcome.

Perhaps you are my son or grandson but I think not. I fear this business will take many generations and more years to reach its settlement. But should you read this then that settlement will be close and writing to you here in this City of London, my refuge and my place of exile, I rejoice that you have come at last.

I ask myself how much will you know? More I think than I know myself. Tomorrow I go in search of them, to take back what they took from me at Rochelle. Tomorrow too I begin my search for you. I abandoned my first family when I left Rochelle, my six children and their mother Anne-Marie pregnant with a seventh. Now I must leave my second family on Jersey to settle the account and so I must leave you too, my unborn descendant. Now, while I write these words, I can only hope that you will find them.

Of my partners and our Company I will say little here. If you are reading this you know already how we took it from the Englanders. They were good years, when we stood firm and fought our battles together. But they are finished now, finished with the siege and forgotten with the dead at Rochelle. You will know much of that too, and of my own escape to press our cause in England. I could only watch from these shores as Rochelle sickened and starved, as rendition became defeat, and my promise to return the conqueror was proved a mockery. I could only wait for the slaughter of my family, my partners and all the citizens of that fated city. At the last I sent my partners word that they should flee for their lives and flee they did. But the manner of their flight I never could have guessed and that debt is yet to be settled. Tomorrow I go to square the account. Should you come to read this, the final tally will be made.

You have travelled a strange road to find these words, my message to you; strewn with the corpses who fell before you and trammelled with trials and hard labours. Perhaps you have journeyed from Jersey, perhaps the very house I built at Rozel. Like myself you have left home and family behind and perhaps you have grieved for them as I do now. But now you have come to join me. My old promise can still be kept. Together we may yet return to Rochelle as her conquerors. Once again, to you my unborn descendant, my successor, welcome."

The young man stared after the last words. So the final tally was made, and he had lost. The debt was owed him, but by dead men and if he was to dun them now then he must find them first in hell. He folded the parchment once more and replaced it within the pages of the book. The debt stayed and he had lost. She would not come now.

From further down the quay, the young man seemed the centrepiece in a picture of calm. The boat with its busy crew, the jetty, the river rolling by; they might all have been arranged for only this purpose. But within him, his recriminations grew with a life of their own as the memory of the distant day he sought took shape and the man he pursued stirred him to anger. The seeds were sown on the day the ships had sailed. For you would have been here, François, casting your shrewd eye over the ships under cover of the crowd, gauging their holds and the voyage ahead of them, weighing risk against profit. You could not know how many would pay at the last, nor how much. And you could not know the ultimate course your trusted colleagues would take. Yet you began it, even in ignorance you began all of it….

The long years of the feud and the twisted path he had taken back to its beginning came to the young man then as an image: a line of grey faces falling away at his approach, dead flesh, and behind the last of them a countenance that was alive and that he knew as he knew his own. His knuckles whitened as a vein of grim satisfaction rose to find its voice from within his anger. I found you out, François. I followed you back through every one of one hundred and eighty-eight years, losing all I cared for, watching your failure revisit my every step without knowing it, not even knowing my object until here, at the root of it, at the very beginning, I found you.

And while he sat on the jetty, he counted back through the catalogue of all that had happened, his inner anger growing until he truly mourned the death of the man he harangued for it meant that his ancestor was safe in the grave and could not be killed. He was cheated even now. But this time he would not be gulled and he would not be denied his recompense. For your ignorance François, and the innocence of those that followed, for the fact that she will not come, not now, and for my father I take you and that time both in payment, the beginning of it all: all I have left.

He cast his eye again over the dark swell and the wherries paddling hard against the tide which dragged the sluggish water down its channel. The water moved blindly as he looked into it, turning and wheeling upon itself as the unseen sea hauled in its net. The tide gathered pace as it always did, sucking the river down as it had always done, this day as every other. This year as all the rest, he thought, drawing it down the long line of all those years and he with it, all the way back to the time he had sought and found and now held in his mind’s eye, to see then what was there for any to see on the day the trail had begun.

A day, bright and chill as this one, the century newly struck, an air of promise and the ships, four of them, bobbing slowly at anchor, masts swaying with the river while behind them, on the packed quay, the crier ascends the platform, draws out his parchment and, shouting over the din of the crowd, begins to read,

"CHARTER GRANTED BY QUEEN ELIZABETH TO THE EAST-INDIA COMPANY, Dated the twentieth Day of April, in the forty-second Year of Her Reign, Anno Domini, 1600. ELIZABETH, by the Grace of God, Queen of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, &c. To all our Officers, Ministers and Subjects, and to all other people, as well within this our realm of England as elsewhere, under our Obedience and Jurisdiction, or otherwise unto whom these our Letters Patents shall be seen, shewed or read, Greeting."

To you too, thought the figure on the jetty, welcome. Finis exordium invocat.

The crowds shout louder, drowning him out. He continues inaudibly from the platform, waving his arms. No-one watches. All eyes are on the ships, the Hector and the Ascension, the Susan and the Dragon, yard arm and yard arm, decked with pennants, sides rising steep out of the water. Newly caulked, waist and wales encrusted with gingerbread, the closest onlookers can smell Stockholm tar and beneath it the vinegar used to scrub the decks. Below those decks, the stench of the ballast still mingles with both. The hard work has already been done. Sailors scamper up and down the ratlines for show and the junior officers preen. Good order prevails. The crowd has been here an hour and grown no quieter but their enthusiasm is more perfunctory now. They are waiting for a signal to prompt their wildest cheering and from the poop deck of the Dragon, Captain James Lancaster is almost ready to send it.

He leans over the side of the ship to direct the tying on of the row-boats’ hawsers to the bowsprit of his own vessel and shouts encouragement to the men who strain like galley slaves at the oars. Gradually, so slowly, the prow begins to turn. Captain Lancaster raises his arm and shouts to the men on the aft winch. He feels a slight tremor through the ship as the current catches it. He drops his arm, the men haul the anchor and the crowd erupts. The voyage has begun. The Hector, then the other two follow as the Dragon moves its slow bulk into midstream. The wind catches their sails, but it is the tide that moves them as the ships gather momentum. The sailors wave stiffly. From the shore, they already look like marionettes, tiny figures as the show moves further down the river. The crowds around the docks and the surrounding wharves wave back. Their shouts reach thinly across the intervening water. The sailors can barely hear them now, barely see them as they begin to undrape the bunting festooned about the wales, the ships emerging from the gaudy decoration, vessels of hard oak headed out in line for the East.

Along the riverbank, the curious have already begun to drift away. A vague disappointment that the spectacle is at an end works its way through the crowd, dividing it into twos and threes, little clumps which move awkwardly through each other as they disperse. The riverside wharves begin to clear, revealing those with reason enough to stay until the ships disappear around the river’s bend. A little way down the quay, the aldermen congratulate themselves on the smoothness of it all. Invited dignitaries criticise them in an undertone. The investors look tense. Was it madness? The risk of it all, will it pay? True venturers, they tell each other not to worry as their money floats down the river. And a close-knit knot of men there, eight or nine of them, set off a little, out of earshot. The orator is audible again as the crowd’s din becomes a buzz, a hum, a thousand private conversations.

"… that they and every of them, from henceforth be, and shall be one Body Corporate and Politick, in Deed and in Name, by the Name of The Governor and Company of Merchaunts of London, Trading into the East Indies, really and fully, for us, our Heirs and Successors, we do order, make, ordain, constitute, establish and declare, by these presents, and that by the same name of Honourable Governor and Company of Merchaunts of London, Trading into the East Indies, they shall have succession, and that they and their successors be and shall be, at all Times hereafter, Persons able and capable in Law, and a Body Corporate and Politick, and capable in Law to have, purchase, receive, possess, enjoy and retain, Lands, Rents, Priviledges, Liberties, Jurisdictions, Franchises and Hereditaments of whatsoever Kind, Nature and Quality so ever, they be to them and their Successors."

The nine men seem to pay close attention, looking away from each other, heads tilted to catch the words, an act. They do not care what he says. They have reached their decision and the purpose of their long journey from Rochelle is clearer to them. They too have thought of risk. They have counted the hazards of the journey that has just begun. The events that have led them to consider a venture on these hateful shores are unclear even to them but, despite the show of calm as they stand in silence together, the fact of their being so distant from home bespeaks the depth of their need, their restraint and their patience. For they will not invest in this voyage. They have counted the risks and now they count upon them. They will wait for the voyage to founder, for the ships to meet their fate. They will wait for the investors’ nerve to break and the Company to fail. They have their own idea as to what the scene they have witnessed might eventually mean.

Their hopes of failure sail on, the four of them, drawn by the tide past Gravesend, by the wind a little closer to the east and its dream of riches. They move downriver to the estuary, thence to an anchorage off the Downs to take on victuals. The barter goods are already stowed. They set sail again and news of them grows scarce. Tiny segments of their long journey drift back in the few ships that pass them on the open seas, from traders who have passed through the ports in which these ships berth. Stories that might tell of them, strange incidents without context or meaning which, as days turn to weeks, are seized upon as proof of their continued existence, if only that. The master gunner of the Ascension died after falling from the main yard and a shoal of flying fish swam by. A French vessel brought back his belongings. They had witnessed his burial at sea. And the two that resulted from it, for the firing of the ordnance had been careless. A stray shot had killed the Captain and the boatswain’s mate.

News turned to anecdotes, anecdotes to rumour, to flotsam carried on the sea-surface, altered and washed up in the port of London where the investors combed the wharves for whatever they might find until they were forced to admit that the gleaned scraps told them nothing. Thereafter, they contented themselves in discussion and plotting the desired course on maps. Their carefully drawn lines soon reached the area where the coasts became speculation and their apprehension grew.

They need not have fretted, thought the distant figure on the jetty. Almost two centuries later, he had read Lancaster’s log and observed in its terse catalogue of incidents and bearings a continuing acknowledgement of his fleet’s endeavour. Lancaster himself had emerged as a man built upon an inflexible determination to carry the voyage and all else before him or perish in the attempt. As the ships sailed on, the task entrusted to him became all his being and he saw each day’s progress as an additional, strengthening fibre in the fabric of himself.

The fleet had sailed south, reaching the Canaries on the seventh of May and the Tropic five days after that. Scurvy held off till August, then claimed a round hundred. They doubled the Cape on the first of November. A storm saw them through the Christmas of 1600, taking two anchors with it. They weathered that and those that followed, but the shoals of Adu almost claimed them. Hedged about by rocks with barely four fathoms, the pinnace was sent out to find a channel; found one, praise God. May came with fair winds and a sighting of Nicobar. June gave them Dachen and Dachen would give them their first boatload of pepper.

As the fleet sailed into the mouth of the Malacca Straits on the evening of the last day of June, the mariners saw the light of a hundred fires ranged along the coast. They burned all night and on the morrow Captain Lancaster took the row-boat ashore. The king of Dachen welcomed Lancaster and his men with fresh fruit and mutton roasted over charcoal. Lancaster gave the king a silver tray and showed him his letters of patent. The king sent his greetings to her Majesty in return and gave Lancaster an elephant. The Dutch were a surly lot, thought the king, and haggled well. He would do business with the Englanders. In August, Lancaster discovered the root of their fulsome welcome. It lay in Bantam, only a few days’ sail through the Malacca Straits. The king of Bantam had pepper to sell too; at a third of the price. An adjustment was proposed in Dachen and a new price negotiated. The English were as surly as the Dutch, concluded the king, and he resolved that henceforth the traders would be denied the hospitality of his table. The elephant was returned.

The four ships sailed between Dachen and Bantam, bartering for pepper, buying when they had no choice. The sailors liked the easy days’ sailing between anchorages while the merchants complained of delays, lading pepper into the holds and counting, always counting. The Dutch, when encountered at all, seemed almost to encourage them in their dealings. Their complaisance aroused Lancaster’s suspicion but he could discover no deeper purpose behind it in the weeks that followed; besides, trade was good. The summer and winter passed this way. A trading post was set up on Bantam and in the following February, with the holds full to bursting, Captain James Lancaster decided that time had arrived to begin the long journey home. On the twentieth day of August 1602, the four ships raised their anchors, fired off their ordnance and set sail for England.

In London, the investors had relapsed into helpless calm. They had not given up hope, and they had not given up waiting. But their expectancy had turned in on itself when it could no longer be contented with news. Now it was only the elapse of time. Although they met frequently enough, they no longer spoke of the four ships. They had heard nothing for two years. Their encounters were tense, hearty affairs, each singly aware of what now seemed their joint failure. Their thirst for adventure had diminished considerably and it appeared that nothing might revive it.

Their pessimism was to prove ill-founded however, for two oceans away, the roof of the world was lifting over the Indies. As the pressure dropped it drew in the winds and sent them gusting across the Indian Ocean where Captain Lancaster recognised them for what they were and hoisted all the canvas he had. The monsoon would carry them home.

First word of the fleet’s return arrived in unspectacular fashion by way of a French merchant who arrived in London to buy tallow. Tallow was not Julien Beaudeguerre’s usual line and England was not his usual market. Ordinarily, he bought carpets from the Moriscos, selling them to the wealthier burghers of Provence. Tallow was his cousin’s business, but he had fallen ill a week after landing the contract for a lodge north of Arles. A misfortune for everyone, but in particular for Julien. He had been prevailed upon. He had succumbed. He was here. Tallow was tedious stuff and his Morisco friends had not been pleased. They had proposed sending their rugs and carpets by ship to be collected by him in London. They had heard that a small fleet was making its way up the coast from their trading partners in Africa. Julien should seek news of them in London on the off-chance that this unlikely plan might work. Three days after his arrival, Julien duly began repeating what his Moorish friends had told him and he bent the ear of every mariner, water-man and wharf rat he could find. No-one could confirm or deny the five words that he laboriously spread about the port but when his phrase reached the ears of Philpot, De Vere and the other investors it lit their resigned acceptance of loss with a faint glimmer of hope. ‘An ‘Ector and tre others’ was Julien’s only English.

The process by which the fleet had faded from sight to rumour and thence to nothing had begun to reverse itself along with the Trades that were bringing them home. Beaudeguerre’s scrap was followed by others. All four were safe, said one report. All three, said another. Their holds were full and their holds were empty. Their crews were dead men kept alive by a strange light on the mast-head and they were pulled through the sea by mermaids. Word went around that a Frenchman had got ten guineas from Philpot and De Vere for his news and a flourishing trade sprang up in Shadwell where plausible stories were concocted to be sold to the waiting investors. The investors saw through these fabrications but paid anyway. They mentioned them casually to each other, laughing at the more fanciful. A report that the Saint Anthony had been captured and a cargo of silver taken proved popular enough to be sold twice. News grew more frequent in the weeks that followed Beaudeguerre’s arrival and the more blatant contradictions and wilder flights of fancy diminished. There were indeed four ships. And their holds were full to bursting. On the twenty-first day of September 1602 they were sighted off the Downs. The investors no longer tried to contain their delight. Surely, their boldness had paid off. Two days later, they learned for the first time that the cargo was pepper and knew then that their original daring, the assiduous maintenance of their hope and new expectation of its fulfilment were as nothing, not even dust, to the devious reversals of fate.

The four ships sailed up the Thames on the morning tide like women of strong virtue. A thousand seducers had courted them with destruction and they bore the scars of rebuffal proudly to prove it. Their masts were split, their sails patched and their sides a motley of leaking and replaced planks. The sea was an insistent lover. Aboard the Dragon, Captain Lancaster led his four vessels to where the pilot met them and picked a course through the shoals and sandbanks of the Thames. They moved slowly upstream towards Blackwall, whence they had set out almost three years before. He thought of the pepper which filled the holds, one million pounds of it, and the price it would bring. Eight shillings for every one of those pounds. The men had almost mutinied during the return and the ship had almost fallen apart, but they had returned intact and his heart was full of England. The crowds that had sent them off in such magnificence were no longer there, but London looked much as it ever had. As did his sponsors, the investors, whom he could see on the quayside as he approached the dock.

Philpot, Alexander Smith, De Vere and the others had met that morning and travelled together to Blackwall. When the four ships had set out, three years before, the investors had imagined all the possible fates which might befall them. They had foreseen shipwreck, mutiny, disease and death at the hands of natives. Their dreams had been of ships sinking in every imaginable circumstance: driven onto rocks, colliding in the night, attacked by whales and turned to funeral pyres by fire on board. They had thought that should the ships return with their holds full, there were no more perils or disasters to be considered. But now, as Captain Lancaster ordered all hands on deck to oversee their final negotiation through the entrance to the docks, he noticed a downcast air about the investors that had not been apparent from further down the river. How could they have known that the fate of the expedition lay not in the treacherous shoals off Adu, nor the storms around the Cape, nor even in the murderous whim of some distant, black-faced pashar? The fair winds and calm seas that had brought the expedition home safely had not benefited them alone. Scarcely a vessel had been lost on the East Indies route all that year; a fact which had helped keep hope alive in London. The Dutch fleet had brought back a cargo only weeks before that exceeded Lancaster’s many times over. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, it too was pepper, and in quantities that could only be described as a glut. The market had held for a week, wavered, faltered then dropped like a stone. Eight shillings a pound? One was the best price on offer, and hardly a buyer then. As Captain Lancaster bounded down the gang-plank to greet his colleagues in their triumph, it was all the group on the quayside could do to look him in the eye. The cargoes of the four ships that docked at Blackwall after a journey of two years and 22,000 miles were worth little more than sand and the Honourable Company less than that.

In the days that followed their initial, bitter disappointment turned to the deepest gloom. The price fell further and the few remaining buyers departed for the continent. Worry visited each of them and, hard on its heels, their creditors. The part-paid shipwrights, chandlers and victuallers learned soon enough of their difficulties and became nervous in turn. They called daily upon the investors and became brusque in their demands. The investors assured them that buyers had been found, it was only a matter of waiting. The creditors did not want to wait; they wanted their money. One million pounds of pepper lay in a warehouse at Poplar, unwanted. The investors met to resolve their difficulties but could decide on nothing. They would stand firm together and reaffirmed their faith in each other as good fellows and venturers worthy of the name. But solidarity would not pay their debts. What should they do? None of them knew.

No, thought the figure on the jetty, none of them knew. Ignorance and disarray: the beginning, when the Rochelais would wait no longer. The trail began to break up. He could find only brief scenes after that, glimpses of what must have taken place.

By the spring of the following year they would have known no more. The creditors would have called less frequently, not at all when they realised there was nothing to be had. The investors had been relieved, even knowing that the courts could not be far behind this respite. Alexander Smith had filed his bankruptcy in March. They could do nothing but wait for salvation without expectation or hope of its arrival and in this desperate conviction they were, as before, quite mistaken.

No-one would have paid any attention to the nine men walking down the gang-plank in April of that year. They exchanged small talk in an undertone. No-one heard what they said. Lodgings were taken above Lombard Street, but they were not seen there, nor at Saint Paul’s nor even at the market. They did not frequent the taverns. They stayed four days, then left. All nine had waited patiently since the day when they had watched the fleet set sail from Blackwall. Three years later, their business in London was brief and to the point.

The solitary figure imagined their boat sailing away, hazy, out of sight, as it ever was. Out of reach, even of the investors who were left then with their averted ruin and the sense of mutual betrayal that was its price.

Their solidarity had only existed by default. They had no choice but to maintain it. No buyer had split their unity because there were no buyers. Then, out of the blue, came the meetings. Arranged through intermediaries, mention of a small proposition, curiosity driving each to receive his visitor. Dark, foreign accents, courteous. All alike, save one. Then the offers for the stock, nominal amounts, accepted immediately, their company and its debts transferred at a stroke. Solidarity and their common cause would not save any one of them. Singly and unaware of the other, identical meetings, they would each have signed the agreements. Business was business. They were not children.

Fools and their money, thought the lone sitter. Even centuries away, he recognised the stealthy discretion of the Nine. It could only be theirs. He shivered in the cold sunlight.

Rochelle! A boat sliding past the twin turrets to enter the harbour. The long wait over, the stratagem brought to a close. Nine men breaking silence at last, laughing down the quay. They had what they wanted. Their leader, Zamorin, white hair standing out from the dark of his fellows. The end of one campaign and the beginning of another. A new spirit, a slogan to take them further; the resolution of their secret comradeship and a name for it. A joke to begin with, perhaps. Later only the truth.

He mouthed the name, heard for the first time only days before. He had not laughed. New to me as you, François. Or was it your creation? The new proprietors of the Honourable Company of Merchants trading to the East Indies would call themselves the Cabbala. He rubbed his eyes again. The trail was all but gone, rag-ends and splinters.

Other years, other voyages. Mounted by their new-found agents, bound in silence by betrayal, in honesty by fear. And profit. No, they were not children. The riches piled up as you knew they would. Very shrewd, François.

The crew had piled crates as high as they would go, forming a low tower in the pacquet’s stern. The last few would be lashed down in the bows. A sailor was leading a woman down the gang-plank, leading her by the hand. The Nottingham had disappeared and the last fragments of his vision flew after it. But it is mine still, he thought. You are still mine, François. The woman stumbled in her nervousness. You are mine or nothing, all of you. His face was grim again.

Riches even beyond their calculation. Influence even beyond their needs. The nine of them, moving further and further out, never looking back and never thinking that Rochelle itself might be where fortune would take her due. A fatal flaw, waiting for them in their neglect.

A single cloud passed high overhead, darkening the water, the boat and the jetty. The tide was running faster. He could hear it rushing against the wooden piles that supported the jetty beneath him. The woman had recovered her step. He thought of the lost girl. Not here and not now.

His anger seeped back in slow waves which rose and fell against the memory of the episode he had summoned up and whose recession seemed to invite it on. They lived on in his outrage and it was their story still. Forgive them. Father? Another unavenged. He thought of the tableau by the shadowed pool, high trees reaching up for the last of the summer sky and the water, red on grey, anger on forgetting. My own beginning, he realised. The beginning of my story, sea-fringed granite, red island in the grey-green sea, home. It seemed so distant, more distant than the Indies. And so long ago! A year, he told himself, only that. But a year like an age and its passing, far older than the first voyage. Impossible time. The young man felt his anger draw back, revealing slow puzzlement beneath. He recognised it as the onset of curiosity which had led him here, guiding his steps through a maze they had planted about him. But as he grasped it in this way, it too dissolved and fear rose to take its place. Then he realised that it was he who was falling, through the succession of his feelings and their memories, crashing through the decks of himself. Fear of pain, fear of blindness; childhood terrors, he dismissed them. Fear of the dead and his own guilt, closer, fear of death as the hard hand pushed him forward, the knife an inch from his throat, fear of losing her. He reached out to grasp the memory, but she slipped away, receding as fear fell away too, carrying her off and he was left alone. On the very lowest deck in the pitch dark and not a sound to be heard. Solitude was the last stage before the cold sea below. Solitude was a familiar. A young boy of four or five, pretending to read the Greek script, motionless over the page for hours on end, looking into himself. Older, surrounded by the rustling voices of his books and their protective murmur. A lie. The last deck splintered, gave way under his feet and he was falling through into the cold hands below that waited, wanting only to show him the secret beyond solitude, but he was not ready for that, not yet, and he would wait a little longer as the water tried to close over his head, rising up and shuddering back to cold flesh and bone, alone on the jetty.

My life, he thought with dispassion, hardly distracted by the shrill cry from further up the quay. My own beginning. Jersey was still his, even if all else was gone. He could recall it at will. His parents’ house slid back easily to him, and the nights that he knew he would now find eerie, for the intervening year had changed him. High above his head, the cloud passed on, freeing the sun’s rays to dazzle him and the crewman shouted up. The last one left. He started, but he would not give up the memory. He rose, sun-blinded, and felt it flood back into him. Stooping for the chest, he looked up as the quay emerged from white, breaking in on his thoughts for a moment, then falling back to the remembered island’s dark and he saw a slight figure waving, impossibly distant through the depth and silence of Jersey’s night as it came down upon him. Where he had embarked and his journey had begun, his beginning gathered about him as the sailor shouted again and he would not let it go, not then for the love of God, not there for the wealth of the Indies, nor ever save for her and the last call to the voyage out as it reached him across the waves on the island of his childhood.

‘All aboard!’

I Caesarea

THE WINDS blew high over Jersey, clearing the sky for the stars to glimmer down on the island below. Its gentle beaches and high cliffs were barely distinguishable from the dark water. The moon had sunk from view hours before. Some nights it shone bright enough to read by, but not tonight. The oil lamp which stood on the desk at which he sat threw a soft, yellow light. A book lay open before him and he studied it intently, his face only inches from the characters. His head followed the movement of the lines, turning slightly from left to right and back, moving slowly down the page. Outside, the murmur of the waves just reached his ears as they washed in and slapped against the cliffs of Bouley Bay.

After some time, the hunched figure brought his head up from his labours and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. His tall, angular body was cramped, legs twisted around the chair, elbows seeking a resting place amongst the clutter of papers on the desk. He shifted position awkwardly. When he brought his hands away from his eyes, the room had dissolved. The patch of dull red he was able to make out would be his bed and the lighter area beyond it the door. The floor he could feel with his feet and the window he identified by the slight gusts and breezes which blew coolly against his face. At this distance, yards rather than inches, the rest was lost to him in a flux of shadows; nothing but ‘air deprived of light’; he recalled the formula. Lucretius, matter of fact and unhelpful. As the objects about him drifted, disappeared and shaded into one another, John Lemprière felt the slight panic in his stomach to which he had become inured, an unwelcome sensation even now. He bent to the page, trying to focus his eyes once again.

The blurrings of sight had begun when he was fourteen or thereabouts and grown more and more frequent as he had entered his late teens. The world came to seem as it did now. Objects fogged and merged with other objects. Outlines broke and seeped into their surroundings. His myopia dissolved the world in a mist of possibilities and its vague forms made a playground for his speculations. His youthful panic had later become acceptance and, later still, something akin to pleasure. Only the faintest vestige of unease remained and he allowed his speculations, his daydreams and his visions free rein. The island itself could not compete with the routs of demi-gods and heroes, the noisy unions of nymphs and animals, with which the young scholar populated the fields of his imagination. His head had only to leave the pages of Tully, Terence, Pindar or Propertius to see their most delicate or lurid descriptions made flesh in the wavering dusk outside his window. Galatea had made sport with Acis in that land of visions. And Polyphemus had made sport with them both. There the last Punic war had been fought and lost by the Poeni whose Carthage burnt for seventeen days before twenty miles of its walls crashed in to quell the flames. Scipio Africanus was nothing but a trickster, but got the consulship he craved. Delenda est Carthago. So it was. Achilles sulked and raged for Patroclus, Helen awaited the nightly pleasures of Paris’s company. What matter if she were only the most beautiful of mortal women? Paris tasted better than any golden apple. Deiphobus better than both. The ancient kings whose lives flickered between natural and supernatural worlds, the ordinary loves of shepherds touched for an instant by hands that transformed flesh to wood, hamadryads and nereids, what vision was it that saw in the simple flames of an Athenian hearth the gory torture of Prometheus, in the nightingale’s song the rape of Philomel, in every tree a face, every stream a voice? And behind them lay the ukases which commanded not with reason, but with the simple certainty that it was their place to do so; perhaps the gods too were victims of that savage simplicity, he wondered? Victims to that clarity with its steel logic, its sentence without redress. Princes and heroes, nymphs and satyrs stalked the antechambers of the young classicist’s mind, disporting and dismembering, playing and replaying the scenes he chased through the pages of the Ancients.

‘He tripped over a bucket. It was plain in view, Charles.’ His mother’s querulous voice brought his head up from the page of Thuycidides and the Greek characters swam as his ears caught snatches of the nightly dialogue.

‘What of it? Did he hurt?’

‘Must he snap a leg before you’ll see it, Charles? You’re as blind as the boy.’ They spoke in the hush reserved for worry or intimacy. Lemprière’s fingertips brushed the chalky surface of the page before him. Three feet from his face he could not read it, inches and the letters were hard-edged and distinct. His parents were not intimate.

‘He’ll be a fine scholar, perhaps the finest of his age. What need for him to step over buckets?’

‘It’s the reading’s ruined his eyes. Ruined him.’ This last hissed, answered by Charles Lemprière’s snort of disbelief.

‘He’s grown strange to us Charles, you know it.’

‘He’s simply fond of his studies, the balance will come in time. I was the same, I remember it well.’

‘Oh yes, the Lemprières have ever been the same, that much I know. Nothing changes, does it Charles?’ Her voice was bitter.

Lemprière caught only muffled words after that, his mother’s soft sobbing. The debate was a familiar one to him. He stayed awake waiting for it, enjoying his central role. He felt intimate with his parents as they unknowingly told him all they felt regarding him. Normally his mother seemed to understand little of what he said, while his father held himself in reserve, harbouring feelings his son could only guess at within a stern outward aspect. This, however, was to be the last of these particular discussions for the next morning it transpired that a resolution had been reached. John Lemprière was to have eye-glasses.

So it was that a week later two figures could be seen making the four mile trek across the island from Rozel to Saint Helier. Taller, and walking half a pace ahead of his son, Charles Lemprière picked his way through the ruts of the road with a practised ease. An occasional glance at the sky reassured him that though they would be spattered with mud to the knee, they would at least reach their destination dry. His son stumbled frequently and each time he did so Charles would forbear to look back but would stiffen and wince inaudibly to himself. His wife was right of course, but blindness, of the eye or mind, had its benefits. It was possible to see too much. The path was passing through a wood. He ducked an overhanging branch and lifted it for his son. The pair walked on. Passing Five Oaks, they gained the brow of the slope and Charles saw St Helier laid out ahead, beyond it Elizabeth Castle improbably afloat in the harbour. It was only five years since Rullecourt and seven hundred men had got the governor out of bed to sign away the island. And, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he had signed. Elizabeth Castle stood firm then. Poor Moses Corbet, running through the marketplace with musket balls peppering his hat. There were more Martellos than cottages now.

His son heard Saint Helier long before he saw it. The town clamoured at him, open arms brushed at his jacket and the din of human voices as they transacted, bickered or greeted each other, enfolded him in an anonymous, urban welcome. He caught his father’s arm and was hurried through the crush as its sounds crested and broke over his head. Charles Lemprière, son in tow, carved a passage through the business, gossip and grind of Jersey. The market crowd thinned as they took a sidestreet past The Peirson and walked through streets which seemed unnaturally silent after the hubbub of the marketplace. Another turn and they arrived, breathing heavily, at the workshop of Ichnabod Bonamy, glassmaker and lensgrinder. Charles was reaching for the bell when a voice boomed from within.

‘Come in Lemprière!’

They entered and found themselves face to face with Ichnabod holding a coal shovel in one hand and a large, stuffed owl in the other.

‘Welcome, welcome you both. Are you well Charles? The boy I know of already, he of the stiff eyes, hmm? Forgive the owl.’ He put down the shovel. ‘I’ve been dusting.’ He pointed to the walls. There, perched, poised or nailed, were fixed rows upon rows of stuffed owls of varying widths and heights, beaks hooked downwards, eyes (of glass) fixed straight ahead in attitudes of mute disdain at the indignity of their position. It was rapidly becoming clear to Charles that many of them were not completely cured.

‘I have errands to run Mister Bonamy. Will two hours suffice?’

‘Splendid, splendid,’ rejoined the other as he polished an eyeball here, wiped a talon there.

‘Two hours then, John.’ But his son did not reply as Charles Lemprière hurried to the door in anticipation of the fresher air beyond it. The lensgrinder turned to his subject.

‘A legacy from the former occupant,’ explained Ichnabod to the young man.

John Lemprière was not listening. The glint of owlish eyes impinged dully upon him. Hundreds of them, paired and focused on his dim attempt to return their gaze, his mind adrift. Was this Cecrops’ Hall writ small? They would call softly to each other forming the delicate skein of wisdom’s ligaments as the light faded in the room. The gaping wound, the birth. Ichnabod, a name without precedent … sprang fully armed.

‘In here, John Lemprière!’

He walked slowly past the long counter to the small door at the back of the shop from which the voice had issued and entered. The room was square, its walls formed of the granite which in the shop proper had been concealed behind wooden panelling. The ceiling was disproportionately high and contained a skylight which threw a beam of light down onto a large mahogany chair. At the far end of the room was a large stove, a workbench and several cupboards through which Ichnabod was now searching. The stove burned hotly.

‘Sit on the chair.’ He did so, shifting uneasily in the unfamiliar surroundings. Pallas’ antechamber to Hephaestus’ forge thought the sitter. What is he doing? The lensgrinder seemed to find whatever he searched for and advanced on his subject carrying a large tray.

‘Hold this.’ And Lemprière’s arms were effectively immobilised as he sat facing the stove and holding the tray of glass disks before him. ‘Now for the frames.’ He loomed towards his subject holding a large wooden contraption.

Trapped in the chair, Lemprière felt flutters of panic in his stomach and his bladder tightened. He had a strong desire to throw the tray to the floor and fend off the apparatus which now seemed to have extended two large claws towards his face. Ichnabod fitted the bulky test-frames over his head and clicked the fastening shut.

‘My own invention,’ he explained proudly. The frames formed a kind of cube encasing the irregular sphere of Lemprière’s head. Singled out from the rest of his body, his skull felt acutely vulnerable in its wooden cage. He stared fixedly ahead suppressing a strong urge to get up and run, wooden cage and all, for the street outside. The lensgrinder took no heed of the young man’s anxiety. Focal length, dynamism, ease of accommodation: these were the subjects which concerned him as he dropped different lenses in front of the defective eyeballs.

The lens: a talisman for Ichnabod who did not believe in such things. Had not Archimedes used one to fry the Roman force at Syracuse? And did not Ptolemy set one on the tower at Pharos wherein he saw the ships of his enemies, six hundred miles distant? The simple disk, its smooth surface tapering gently to the rim, unchanged in two millennia.

It had taken him many years to master the basic processes of lens manufacture. But the processes themselves reached back through the centuries. Oh yes, Newton may be the man with his Opticks, but he could never apply his own rules. The simple glass ball, the careful cutting into disks with the emril-stone. A dunce might do that, but not the glueing-on of the handle (Colophonia gave the smoothest join), the heating to the prescribed temperature, the pouring onto the iron dish. And then began the long polishing. His upper arm ached at the memory. First with saldame, later with water of Depart and powder of Tripolis, the glass would begin to shed its coat of irregularities and the perfect lens within the brute hunk of glass would eventually emerge, its properties locked into its dimensions. He remembered the manufacture of each smooth disk as he dropped them into the slot before the boy’s eyes. Some nights he would press one between his palms, until its slick cold yielded to the heat of his hands and he exchanged it for another.

For Lemprière, the world was not so much composed of lenses as ceaselessly dispersed by them. As fast as his eyes adjusted to the new world heralded by one pair, it was replaced by another trumpeting its claims, only to be banished in its turn. He would signal his approval or disapproval by saying ‘better’ or ‘worse’, as befitted each case. Ichnabod, after perhaps two dozen pairs had been tried, stopped. He looked down at the tray, mumbled and seemed to make some brief calculations.

‘John Lemprière,’ he announced in magisterial tones, ‘prepare to see.’

Reaching down to the tray he picked up one of the few remaining pairs. Lemprière heard them click against each other and then against the frames. The stove glowed a malevolent red. The lenses dropped noisily down. His knuckles whitened around the tray.

‘Aagh! Get me out! Get me out!’ The tray crashed to the floor. The lenses grasped the room and hurled it at the speed of light into the captive’s face. He let loose a cry of fear. The lenses sucked his eye-balls through the frames, dashed them into the first elected object. The stove. He was in the flames. They were licking greedily at him. He wrestled with the wooden cage. The fire burned hot in his face, behind the flames two eyes caught his, an horrible, misshapen face, a twisted body, eyes black with ancient cruelties, the legs curling and unfurling at him, like serpents. I see you John Lemprière, hissed from each mouth. Erichthonius. Curling and unfurling, like snakes. Like flames. Just flames. Flames in a stove in a room. A room between Minerva’s shrine and Vulcan’s forge.

‘Welcome to the visible world, John Lemprière.’

On the floor between them lay the scattered lenses. They punctuated the grey flagstones like precious stones, gazing up mutely at the two men. Lemprière shivered and blinked. The stove was but a stove, the room but a room. And Ichnabod … Ichnabod was a man with a limp, a genius for glass and too many owls. Lemprière could see.

Icy waters surged silently eastward beneath the waves, shooting their jets forward, blunting and falling back to be gathered by the tidal force behind. Waters charged with a blind purpose streamed from the unlit, stony basins of the ocean-floor, stabbing through the placid sea ahead, feeling vague, coastal constrictions to either side before slamming against the stubborn peninsula at Cherbourg, scudding against its coast and slipping away into the channel.

Down from the slate-grey North Sea, channelled through the Dover Straits, raced the rival westward tides. They gathered force, swerved and fought their way through the eastward waters, gouging whorls in the sea’s surface. Sucking currents were shot sideways from the force of the conflict. The mass of two seas met to slice one through the other and in the midst of their battleground, registering the force of each blow and counterblow against its cliffs, stood a rock of granite. Twelve miles long and six miles wide, it surveyed the sub-surface drama of current and cross-current, tidal ebb and flow, and seemed to stand firm against the treacherous waters. The waters might climb forty feet, the tides hauling up the coast, or rage against the cliffs to the north but the red granite was old and hard. It broke through the turf in outcrops all over the island like scars from some elemental battle.

Hedgerows parcelled out the land amiably, scarcely disturbing the green vista which now and then would shade into drifts of purple heather or the darker green gloss of the ferns. On the southern hillsides the grass was beginning to brown in patches under the late summer sun. Innumerable tracks and lanes criss-crossed the verdure like cracks in a fine glaze. Where roads met, a few cottages might cluster about the crossroads, sometimes a church, a new villa, or one of the older seigneurial manors. The twelve parishes of the island, from St Brelade’s to St Ouen’s, St Clement’s to his own St Martin’s, traced their invisible boundaries on the island’s face, and these were subdivided further into vingtaines. More ostentatious evidence of the old desire to mark the earth littered the island. The druids had left their menhirs and poquelayes, the Romans their houghes, although raised fortifications seemed superfluous on the inland sites where they were to be found. Around the coast, Martello towers, observation platforms, castles and forts bespoke more recent fears of invasion from France whose coast, not fifteen miles distant, was just beginning to appear as the sun burnt the morning sea-mist out of the air.

To Charles’s right was Rozel windmill where, in a few weeks, apples from the new orchards would be brought for pressing. Below him, the hill fell away in côtils, each carefully cut shelf overgrown with couch grass. The slope had not been worked for six or seven seasons now. On the far side of the hilltop a flock of four-horned sheep started at some brief private terror and wheeled en masse before stopping just as suddenly. He turned back to the scene before him. The scent of cider apples was blown in and away by the southerly breeze, each seventh wave was just audible from the bays at Bouley, Rozel and Fliquet. The sound was carried and checked in the air, reaching him in sustained, sibilant whispers. Their dull repetition seemed to carry the ghost of a message that may once have been vital, but now spoke only of attrition and defeat.

Do not take comfort in our sound. Do not believe you can discover the least purpose in our action, they seemed to say. When your rock is worn flat as the ocean

Reviews for Lemprière's Dictionary

[legalmove · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Incredibly original novel in which ancient Greek myths play out in England, starting from the opening scene in which the protagonist's father is ripped apart by a pack of dogs

[p_s_patrick · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is the first book that I have read from this author, and I was very impressed. The text is very heavy on detail, and the plot itself is even more intricate. The story is top class, plenty to get your head around, exciting, clever, and full of suspense and intrigue. The book has a real cinematic epicness to it, which Is not often come across, and is almost overwhelming, comparable to the Satanic Verses in this respect. It's definitley one for people who like something to get their teeth into, for people who enjoy reading, I would not recommend it to poeple with less patience, or with only a passing interest, as it a full on book in the style of the writing and the span of the events. My top book of the year so far.

[bodachliath · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An extraordinary book in every sense - this one is a challenge both to read and to review. To start, how should we categorise it? It mixes so many genres - historical fiction, fantasy, classical allusions, grand conspiracy thriller, parody and even romance - a real postmodern mash-up. I first heard of Norfolk several years ago when I read A.S. Byatt's book of literary criticism On Histories and Stories, in which she extolled him as one of the cleverest young writers around. This is probably the book she had most in mind, though The Pope's Rhinoceros is equally complex and ambitious.Some of the pivotal events are real enough, the story of the East India Company, the siege of La Rochelle and the build-up to the French revolution, but the conceit of Norfolk's story is so outrageous that it can only be seen as a sort of self-parody. The two books it reminded me most of, for very different reasons, were Gravity's Rainbow and The Count of Monte Cristo.The hero (or at least the pivotal character) is John Lemprière, a young scholar from Jersey whose primary interest is studying Greek and Roman classics. His story is interleaved with a grand conspiracy - in Norfolk's version of history the East India Company is almost ruined when its first expedition in 1600 comes back with a cargo of pepper which is worthless in London because the Dutch have flooded the market, and its investors are rescued by a shadowy "cabbala" of traders from the Huguenot free port of La Rochelle who are unable to trade with the East directly. Most of the action takes place in the 1780s, when their descendants draw Lemprière into their intrigues by staging reenactments of scenes from the classics, the first of which involves the grisly murder of his father by fox-hounds. They also persuade him to start writing a dictionary of classical mythology (this is also something real, as are some of Lemprière's biographical details).The plot gets more and more complex, and veers further into the realms of fantasy, but Norfolk clearly loves the classics and has a fine command of arcane language. For all that, much of the book is quite readable and the storytelling is compulsive.

[thejohnsmith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hard work but worth the effort - this story, at first glance, revolves around John Lempriere writing his dictionary but the plot is more to do with a Cabala of entrepreneurs, their involvement in the start-up of the East India company and their total failure as decent human beings. Part historical fiction, part steam-punk and part pure fantasy its a book worth reading but not for those who don't enjoy a challenge.

[nealjking_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A highly complex novel: the plot is very intricate, and you have to remember almost everything that ever happens. However, I enjoyed the book.

[gbsallery · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Rich, intricate, linguistically brilliant, but hard work. I would like to have been able to rate this book more highly, if only by way of acknowledgement of the difficulty of packing this much intricacy into a single novel. However, the technique of retelling the story from multiple overlapping viewpoints seriously hampered the pace and readability; I say this as someone who loved the Baroque Cycle (Neal Stephenson), so it's not like it's the density itself which is offputting.The ending was also rather disappointing; if I had known it was going to be a ghost story, I wouldn't have started reading.

[randalrh · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Normally I wouldn't appreciate it when a historical novel goes all steampunk on me right in the middle, but this novel has enough else going for it that I don't mind, and Norfolk could probably make a case for narrative necessity once he'd had a couple of pints. This book has exquisite depth, breadth, and coherence, though Norfolk sometimes goes very far afield to bring some of the depth and breadth, and he doesn't always bring his references to bear. If you haven't read a few hundred other books first, in the genre and out of it, wait until you have before you read this one.

[tomchicago · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One blurb for Lempriere's Dictionary called it "Pynchon meets Dickens", and that is pretty valid. A dizzying, but memorable array of characters...Some plot points were a little murky, but not so much that I became lost. Lots of twists and turns... Satisfying--a good long read.

[clurb · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Whilst I generally enjoyed the plot, reading this book was a real trudging effort. The style of writing is very reminiscent of Dickins and the immense descriptive detail Norfolk uses is really quite stunning, but at the same time incredibly annoying when you're as gripped by the plot as I was and have to wade through it all. A long, slow, involved read, but one that entertains. Worth the effort. Just.

[larxol_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Terrific book, but bring your vocabulary. Warm up on these: poquelays, houghes, saldame, vraiker, crapaud, ker, furmity, and so on.

[dbsovereign · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I had to slog my way through this, but found it well worth the effort. A bit of Fowles' _A Maggot_ and a bit of Pears' _An Instance of the Fingerpost_, and plus some great spurts of just dreamlike meandering. "Really dreamy."

[shushokan · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Nonsense and very long nonsense at that. Set in the 18th century between London and Paris, the book links the East India Company, the French Revolution and Lempriere's Classical Dictionary. However the author has developed a style which values words over meaning and erudition over storyline. Try throwing in to the mix the fact that some of the central characters are autonoma while others can fly. There are so many other books that your time would be better spent elsewhere.

[le.vert.galant · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I closed the book after 200 pages. It was more than enough.