Please

by Christopher Meredith

Punctuation killed my wife. So opens Christopher Meredith's novel, Please . Octogenarian Vernon, who has never written anything longer than a memo, tries to write the story of his apparently unremarkable courtship and marriage from the 1960s to today. How should he do it? His lifelong obsessions are language and reading; most of what he knows about the world comes from dictionaries and reference books, and from these and the language of old novels he concocts and wrestles with his voice. From beneath Vernons comically elegant struggles and games with language a picture emerges of a man and woman across half a century, of how passion, infidelities, murderous fantasy and obsessions can be undercurrents even in the most ordinary of lives. Please  is a love story about the impossibility of being in love and the impossibility of telling stories. Sophisticated and controlled, it explores how hard it is to know yourself or others, how language has the power to conceal even as it reveals. How much can we know? How much can we say? Meredith's fifth novel, full of humanity, sly humour and verbal invention, is his shortest and arguably his funniest, most innovative and most outrageous. It's a tragicomedy touching on themes of the limits of knowledge, on isolation, and male frailty in new and playful ways. The whole gradually and inexorably unlocks the meanings of its extraordinary opening sentence in a complex and dazzling psychological and linguistic entertainment that ends in a surprising, dreamlike and ultimately moving denouement.

Paperback

Published April 8, 2021

About the author

Christopher Meredith (1955-) is a Welsh poet and novelist, writing mainly in English.

Reviews

[Aiden O'Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our narrator Vernon is a true original and not to be pigeon-holed as bookish / aspergerish / frustrated academician. In the first few chapters he begins a clandestine relationship with a married woman – both are in their twenties – and though he throws words around prodigiously, he never nails it down that he is a believer in True Love.
And that becomes the fulcrum of the whole novel, the question of whether love is possible, whether we live in a universe of mechanical brutality and cloaking self-deception. The story spans from the 1960’s to perhaps around 2015. Vernon is well into his seventies, and these issues are still unresolved, he can still look at his wife and wonder if he ever knew her, still feel anger at the universe. The real-world author, Chris Meredith, conveys this convincingly.
There are many layers of pleasure to reading this novel. There’s the crossword-lover’s savouring of rare words. There’s the detective’s enjoyment of distinguishing the real motives among the decoys. For readers of sufficient decades there’s the pleasure of self-recognition and the awareness of how we constantly reinterpret ourselves through memories.
This would make a great sun holiday read for an aged 50+ book lover. It's both donnish and emotionally fierce. The prose style by its nature would lend itself to self-indulgent verbosity, but the book is a tight 160 pages.

[Tôpher Mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

A strange, yet ordinary, story in which octogenarian Vernon relates the love of his life. The author plays tricks with the narrative form, with asides on linguistics, having the narrator address the reader directly etc. and all done with amusing wit and a sly charm. The light and dark are mixed with an often moving effectiveness so that this short book has a range and emotional impact that is quietly impressive. This is a small but brightly shining gem of a novel.