Pip William’s first novel, the inordinately successful The Dictionary of Lost Words was always going to be a tough act to follow. But when The Bookbinder of Jericho came my way I was soon swept up in Peggy’s story – the work she does at the Oxford’s Clarendon Press in the bindery’s folding room with other women. It’s a segregated working environment, the women collating the pages from the printing room, folding them ready for stitching and binding, a man’s job. Just as it’s men who are always the machine operators and compositors, mechanics and readers.
Oxford itself is also segregated along class lines. Peggy and twin sister Maude live on a canal boat, still missing their mother who died several years before. The are ‘town’, the ordinary working folk who live outside the walls that separate the academic inhabitants of Oxford – or ‘gown’. But we’re on the brink of World War I, and things are set to change.
Peggy can’t help trying to read the books they are folding; she’s smart and yearns for a higher education. Her mother was also a reader, and their canal boat is crammed with books and parts of books that didn’t made the grade, But her sister needs her, or so she thinks, and Peggy sticks by her side. Maude is a little fey, her fingers always busy folding even in her spare time, her conversation a parroting of the phrases of others. The arrival of Belgian refugees, and in particularly Lotte, a grief-stricken woman who joins them at the folding bench, shakes up Peggy’s relationship with her sister, challenging her excuses for avoiding change.
I’d been walking past Somerville all my life, imagining what it was like for the women on the other side of the wall. Now, here I was, a little bit of Jericho littering an Oxford quad. I remembered when I first thought of being one of them – I’d been listening when I shouldn’t have been. She’d be well suited to the Oxford High School, my teacher had said. I know that, Ma had replied, but she won’t leave Maude. My teacher persisted. I think she’s bright enough for college. Ma sighed, It’s not always enough, though, is it? I’d thought of the income I could start earning at the Press, the difference it would make. I’d stopped listening
Other characters breeze through the book and rock Peggy’s world. There’s Gwen, the upper class girl she meets when the two volunteer to read to wounded soldiers. Gwen is ‘gown’, but finds Peggy’s world fascinating. Peggy can’t be sure if her friendship’s genuine or is she just a pet project? Then there’s Bastiaan, the badly scarred Belgian soldier Peggy is drawn to during her hospital visits. He would definitely be ‘gown’ if he were at home, studying architecture, but war has a levelling effect and the two meet as equals.
Tilda is the girls’ mother’s great friend, a flamboyant actress who becomes a VAD at the front, her letters revealing the horrific realities of life in the field hospital at Etaples. There’s Rosie in the canal boat ‘next door’, whose son Jack marches off to war with so many of the boys from the Press. We also momentarily meet Vera Brittain (Testament of Youth) when Peggy attends a function for the refugees at Somerville – the women’s college Peggy eyes with longing.
As Peggy’s views of things are challenged by her new acquaintances, the war grinds on, news of horrific battles and casualty lists filtering back to Oxford. The book is divided into parts which roughly equate to a year in the war, and a book from the presses. In the background there’s another battle going on – the battle for women’s rights, the suffrage movement on hold for the duration. This enlivens the conversations Peggy has with Gwen, but it’s hard for Peggy not to feel bitter. The vote for women when it comes will only be for women over thirty and landowning ones at that – the vote by no means universal.
As the plot goes, The Bookbinder of Jericho isn’t exactly riveting reading. Like Peggy’s life, all the action seems to be happening to someone else, somewhere else. Peggy seems to be in a kind of holding pen, waiting. As a reader I found myself waiting too. What makes the book interesting is the world Pip Williams has created. The little enclave in the printing presses of Oxford is well researched and described in detail. Lovingly so. Then there’s Peggy and Maude’s canal boat and life on the water. Everything tucked into corners to make the most of the space. The frugality of their world – apart from paper, which is everywhere.
So The Bookbinder of Jericho gets top marks for characterisation and world building, for bringing history to life. But I did find myself rushing through it to get to ‘the good bits’ rather than savouring it. There’s still a lot to like and even more to think about so I’ll probably read this author again. This novel’s gets three and a half out of five stars from me.
Judith McKinnon 