Fiction
Category: Fiction, Literary Fiction
Number of pages: 176
ISBN: 9781781726167
Publication date: April 8, 2021
Price: £9.99
“Meredith at his darkest and funniest. This is the work of a master.” – Tom Bullough
“The most wry, witty and wicked novel I expect to read this year.” – Sheenagh Pugh
‘It’s a virtuoso performance that lingers for a long time in the memory.’ – The Western Mail
‘Clever, funny and ultimately very moving.’ – New Welsh Review
’Please is a work of genius, a tragi-comic masterpiece.’ – Jeremy Hooker
‘Please is a literary high wire act and a tour-de-force, and withal, incisively human and mordantly humorous, of a piece with the narrator’s insistent voice.‘ – PN Review
‘Punctuation killed my wife.’ So opens Christopher Meredith’s novel, Please.
Octogenarian Vernon, who’s 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 Vernon’s 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.
“Not so much a tense novel as a novel about tenses, Please presents Vernon Jones, a self-taught grammarian and language enthusiast as he tries to unscramble life’s fiendish crossword. It’s full of paronomasia, therefore, and all kinds of lexicon-besotted word punning, as befits a real-life poet’s fifth adventure into the novel. Vernon is a lovely creation, a man living in the shadow of his failure in school exams, doomed to work in human resources and madly in love with his palindrome of a wife, Hannah.
Every one of Meredith’s novels has been utterly unlike any of the others and this one shows that one-man tradition to be very much alive. Tender and playful, linguistically inventive and probingly punctuated, this is a book of great heart and insight about new shoes, cuckoldry, Saycian fate and the quiddities of old age. ‘Please’ has many meanings but in the case of this fine novel it means ‘to cause to feel happy and satisfied.’ Indubitably so, as Vernon himself might have put it.” – Jon Gower
Christopher Meredith
Christopher Meredith is the award-winning author of five novels and five collections of poetry and also tranlsates Welsh to English. Prizes include an Eric Gregory Award, the Arts Council of Wales Young Writer Prize and the Fiction Prize for his first novel, Shifts. His second novel, Griffri, was shortlisted for the Book of the Year Award. His collection of poems, The Meaning of Flight, was long-listed for The Book of the Year Award 2006. His most recent full novel is The Book of Idiots (2012). He has given readings all over Britain and Europe as well as in Israel/Palestine and the USA. Born and brought up in Tredegar, he was a steelworker and a schoolteacher before becoming a professor of creative writing at the University of Glamorgan. He lives in Brecon. A collection of six short fictions, titled Brief Lives, was released in 2018.
In 2021 Seren published his short novel Please simultaneously with a new poetry collection Still. Buy both for the discounted price of £15.00 in our two-book deal.
“
I was hooked from the first sentence: “Punctuation killed my wife.”
In a darkly funny, meandering, auto-didactically erudite voice, Vernon tells us of his love for Hannah, the ups and downs of their marriage, his affection for the letter V. The story, meaty and layered, is studded with insights and unexpected turns. There is sex and betrayal, work, loss, existential loneliness, ambition, grammar, “the stuff of life that both hardens and softens us.” The writing is an utter delight, the work of a master enjoying his facility with words.”
Carin Clevidence , The Common
“In most novels, language is a means to an end. Syntax, grammar and punctuation work invisibly to guide us through the narrative and are subservient to the dictates of the plot. Please reverses this process with considerable relish, forcing form onto the stage alongside content, and in doing so makes language an active, conspicuous and even fatal force within its convoluted narrative. In Christopher Meredith’s inventive and witty fifth novel, words do not simply exist on the page but are poked and prodded in an extended and kaleidoscopic interrogation of their purpose and function.”
Gareth Smith, Wales Arts Review
“It is a tour-de-force of wit and the relish for language but still reveals the whole of an anguished life. It is parodic, dark and surprisingly touching, especially in the final chapters … The poet’s love of language and all its shades of meaning is both evident and parodied in this work. It is a story which is both told and concealed, with humour, pathos and an understanding of how lives are made and unmade by chance.”
Caroline Clark, GWales
“Please is an elegant, funny, and moving novel about love and loss … a story about a man who has hidden behind words for most of his life, and how he learns that not even words can keep the world at bay forever.”
Joshua Rees, Buzz Magazine
“As the novel’s intriguing opening sentence puts it ‘Punctuation killed my wife.’ In that sense you can read Please as a hyper-literary murder mystery but it works just as well as an engaging and comic account of the vagaries of marriage, the joys of buying new shoes and the extravagant compendiousness of dictionaries … Please is published in the same breath as Meredith’s latest volume of poetry, Still, a deeply resonant and intense series of meditation on memory, place, photography, nature and painting. Taken together these volumes confirm that here is a writer of great range and integrity, spanning prose and poetry in an assured way which pretty much demands a reviewer should use a sparkling word for bridging between the two.”
Jon Gower, Nation Cymru
“this is a very funny book (at least, I find it so, for me it is one of those I might hesitate to read on a train for fear of constant audible merriment) and that it has a lot to do with time and with how we interpret and fictionalise reality. Its concerns are at bottom serious and its humour often quite dark … It should also be clear that the narrative techniques allow of “evasion and ambiguities” which result in reveals, some sudden, some more gradual, which is why I shall say little about plot, except that this feature reminded me of earlier novels of Meredith’s in which character-narrators like Dean of The Book of Idiots and the eponymous Griffri realise toward the end of their narrative that what they thought they knew about their lives was in many ways mistaken. It culminates, as did Griffri, with a powerfully moving and enlightening encounter between two people.”
Sheenagh Pugh, Live Journal
