THE BOOKBINDER OF JERICHO
By Pip Williams
Chatto & Windus, Rs 699
Riding on the fame she acquired after the publication of her first book, The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams gives us yet another overwhelming tome brimming with historical awareness and threatening to consume the reader. The Bookbinder of Jericho reveals once more how well Williams can weave fact with fiction, make tangible the feeling of loss and despair and, at the same time, offer a glimmer of hope that keeps humanity afloat.
Peggy, the eponymous bookbinder of Jericho, with her twin, Maude, has, since her childhood, been working in the Oxford University Press bindery. But unlike the other girls she works with, Peggy pauses to glance at the words in the sections she folds, trying to read as much as she can even though the forewoman, Mrs Hogg, reprimands her — “Your job is to bind the books, not read them…” Peggy yearns for a life different from the one she leads but is sadly bound to it. Maude, as Peggy often remarks, is “different” and Peggy has convinced herself that she needs looking after. This becomes the greatest burden of her life and her resentment shines clear through the gaps in her words. Maude struggles with words and chooses the comfort of retaining lines and fragments that she can garner from the recesses of her mind and offer as hopefully effective responses. Peggy, on the other hand, is full of words: words sullenly repressed under her burden of resentment.
The Great War has called all the men of the Press to the Western Front and the bindery survives on the girls left behind. Peggy and Maude live on a houseboat, Calliope, parked in the canal in Jericho, a bilge of waste primarily from the Press. Calliope is a formidable library of books collected by the girls’ bookbinder mother and Peggy has taken the task upon herself since their mother’s demise. She knowingly ruins sections of folding so she may surreptitiously slip them out of the bindery, an act of thievery justified by her hunger for words. The boat is littered with these; some are partial sections, senseless in their incompleteness, while others are full books that have minute errors that render them “waste”. A litter of characters hover around the girls and each plays small but pivotal roles in the shaping of the plot and the girls’ lives.
Peggy’s greatest desire is to study. When she starts visiting as a volunteer the halls of Somerville which have been transformed into makeshift wards for those injured at war, she meets Gwen, already a student at the hallowed institution. It is also where she meets Bastiaan, a Belgian wounded badly at the front, and while she nurses him to normalcy with her words, a gentle romance brews between them. Both Bastiaan and Gwen, along with encouragement from Peggy’s other acquaintances, push her to apply for the scholarship programme at the university.
At the centre of the novel, decidedly, lies the War. But the Suffrage Movement and the rising reliance of the nation on its women to bring it back to its feet fiercely challenge the maleness of the War. While there are women who casually converse about the valuable role of education in their eligibility for a good marriage, Peggy refuses Bastian’s offer with a heavy heart, choosing a path that will take her to a career and independence. As she is enrolled as a student at Somerville, Maude, happily married, stands staunch in her support, as she always had with her limited repertoire of words, and we are reminded of Mrs Stoddard’s gentle utterance — “Maude doesn’t need you to hold her hand.”
Strong and resilient words build a concrete foundation for Williams’ narrative.
The flow is thick and sometimes the heavy chunks of historical truth can cloister the reader. However, the weight of the theme is borne proudly and, in the end, the effect is “stelliferous”.
