This is the fifth novel from the versatile poet, translator and storyteller Christopher Meredith. It follows his acclaimed short-story collection, Brief Lives, and was published simultaneously with his poetry collection, Still. 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.

Vernon, the author/narrator (who constantly struggles with the difference he feels between telling and writing), is a man obsessed with and fascinated by language, its etymology and its grammar/glamour. This leads him into endless digressions on his own choice of words to tell his story, but the digressions often reveal more than he anticipated.

Vernon, his wife Hannah and the other significant characters are all south Walian. Vernon’s written style gives no indication of this except where he quotes dialogue, and this is indicative of how much ‘Vernon the writer’ is a careful construct. Although the few words of Hannah are quoted and endlessly analysed, it is her pauses and her silence which characterise her, in contrast to Vernon’s addiction to words and – in a crucial scene – his logorrhoea.

This is a story of love, passion, loss of love and – in a delicate examination of the word ‘care’ – perhaps its final return. Even for an autobiography, the writer is unusually self-centred. Few of the other characters are fully named (Vernon’s twin children are totally anonymous!), although Mr Crockett inspires Vernon to an exploration of ecclesiastic architectural terms. It is only through a conversation in the final section (and in his native register) that Vernon seems to gain an awareness of the reality of the lives of others. He muses at length on Hannah’s state of mind, but either her brevity or his loquacity prevents him from really understanding her. The abiding impression of and for Vernon is that of isolation.

Vernon is at once comic and tragic, both consciously and unconsciously, and the subtlety of Meredith’s writing is a delight. Vernon’s professional life as a clerk in Personnel or Human Resources departments results in some of the most conscious comedy but, at the same time, he is aware that he is an agent of those who are ‘downsizing’ industries, destroying many careers and even lives. This process was the focus of Meredith’s first novel, Shifts, set in his native Tredegar in the late 1970s and drawing on his own early experience as a steelworker. That knowledge is a shadow behind Vernon’s ironic, rueful success as an executioner.

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.

A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Books Council of Wales.

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.

The novel’s appeal derives primarily from its garrulous narrator, a fascinating and intolerable creation whose grammatical idiosyncrasies shape his entire life. Vernon’s philological pomposity is equalled only by, and is dependent upon, his absurd verbosity. To provide a distinctly lowbrow reference that he would no doubt abhor, Vernon’s prose resembles that episode of Friends where Joey produces ridiculously complicated sentences by overusing an online thesaurus. The influence of verbiage on his life is traced through a narrative drenched in puns, volunteered etymologies and syntactic tangents. Whether he’s expounding on the merits of the letter ‘v’ or discussing the history of his own name, an addiction to articulation drives the story.

This allows the form and content of Please to intertwine; the morphology of the text informs the events that it describes. Vernon’s loquacity produces some beautiful and striking description — such as a topographical description of a brain scan — but, most of the time, it is a means of probing the ways that language eludes, rather than fixes, precise meaning. This lends the text a meta-fictional vein, with both reader and Vernon analysing the narrative as it is being written. Despite claiming to be relatively uninterested in literature, Vernon is in fact performing a close reading of his own life. This is not to say that Please is a dry or needlessly abstract; Vernon’s narrative is cleverly constructed and precisely assembled, and his linguistic fixations enhance, rather than hinder, the elucidations of the plot.

His aspirations for verbal mastery are, however, doomed to failure, and this provides the tragicomic kernel of the entire text. Words are impossible to control, producing meanings far beyond their original definitions, and punctuation twists perspective, forcing sentences into rhythms that reshape their meaning. The title is an example of this: a mundane and underwhelming word which, in the right context (or with the right punctuation) can signify demand, desire or desperation... as the end of the story hints, sometimes it is the moments where we choose not to speak that define our lives. Perhaps, in the midst of this dense word soup, this is what Vernon and Meredith have been trying to say (or write) all along.