Lemprière’s Dictionary
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- £6.99
-
- £6.99
Publisher Description
As the seventeenth century opens, a band of venturers forms the Honourable Company of Merchants trading from England to the East Indies. In France, the siege of La Rochelle ends with the massacre of thirty thousand men, women and children. Almost two centuries later, in 1788, John Lemprière published his classical dictionary. This much is fact. Lawrence Norfolk tells us how the first two events led, inescapably, to the third.
This amazing tale encompasses the Great Voyages of Discovery and multinational financial conspiracies, and leads a motley cast of scholars and eccentrics, drunk aristocrats and whores, assassins and octogenarian pirates through two centuries and three continents to the brink of French Revolution.
John Lemprière reluctantly enters this world as an introverted scholar, obsessed by the myths of antiquity. At the end of this astonishing story he understands that it takes far more than learning to lay the ghosts of the past to rest.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Few discerning readers will care to hack through this choked jungle of historical fiction, fantasy and myth, despite the obvious intelligence and erudition British first novelist Norfolk displays here. John Lempriere, an actual 18th-century classicist and mythographer, perceives the world through the lenses of Greek and Latin fables. When he sees his father mangled by hunting dogs, just after both have witnessed a naked girl--John's adored Juliette--bathing in a forest stream, this evocation of Actaeon and Diana goads Lempriere to ``lay the ghosts to Antiquity'' by compiling his famed Dictionary . In 19th-century London, ancient ghosts proliferate. Lampriere views Pork Club revelers as Circe's swine; a grotesquely murdered woman who was fed molten gold is perceived as Danae, seduced by Jove in a golden rain; a Juliette lookalike, slain in a goatskin, is a latter-day Iphigenia. Interlarded is a bloated subplot, delineating a scam enacted generations earlier by a party of East India traders, which in 1627 led to Richelieu's crushing siege of the French city of La Rochelle when Huguenots sided with the English. During an eerie trance (paralleling the underworld visits of heroes Ulysses and Aeneas) Lempriere learns of his ancestor's meddling in the traders' ``Cabbala.'' It is the phantoms of history who drove him to authorship. Norfolk's superimposition of mythic patterns on urban life implies a model in James Joyce's Ulysses. While his scheme misfires, he is a writer of talent who may yet write a better novel.
