In the mid-1990s, Paul Griffiths set himself a challenge. He would attempt to give new voice to Hamlet’s Ophelia using only the vocabulary scripted for her by Shakespeare in the original play. In 2008, 13 years after he’d begun, his novel Let Me Tell You was published. Among its admirers was Harry Mathews, the indefatigable North American writer and member of the renowned experimental literary group Oulipo, who described it as “beautiful and enthralling” and “a great success in Oulipian terms”. At the time Griffiths was curious to see if his chosen constraint might provoke another writer to take Ophelia further. Perhaps he got fed up waiting, for it is Griffiths who has produced an exquisite sequel.
Whereas Let Me Tell You is set before the action of Hamlet, thereby offering Ophelia the chance to dodge the fate that awaits her in the play, Let Me Go On is set after it. She is dead: “So it’s all over now, over and done with. Thank God.” Now named O, she finds herself, ghostly white, in “this all-over white, this white on white” new place. In these early pages, in which Griffiths wields the word “white” 23 times, we might assume this is heaven. But the author is also conjuring the blank page before him – and, indeed, before O – at the moment of starting the book. “There’s no one here but us,” he writes, “and we are nothing. We are white, white, white.”
O embarks on a journey to find out who she is in this afterlife. “But what is ‘I’ now?” she asks. “There’s the fear it means nothing, the fear of being nothing.” Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, she has many extraordinary encounters along the way – and Shakespeare nerds can enjoy working out who is who and from which of the plays they hail. The rest of us can cheat: the acknowledgments list characters in order of their appearance, and their names tally with the alphabetical initial-letter title of each chapter. In Chapter I/J, for example, there is an entertaining riff on Tweedledum and Tweedledee, played here by Imogen from Cymbeline and Romeo’s beloved Juliet.
But you do not need to be a bard buff to enjoy this clever and rather beautiful little book. More contemporary cultural references will catch you off guard, such as Mistress Quickly boasting that she’ll persuade “Cold Play” to do a set at the King’s Head, or the moment you realise you are reading the lyrics from James Brown’s Sex Machine, or the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun. That Griffiths pulls all this off with a vocabulary restricted to just 481 words is impressive. His technical skill as a writer lends the text a flow that covers over the Oulipian constraint. Were the limitation not spelt out on the back cover, I doubt most readers would even notice.
What makes this experiment so satisfying is the immediacy of the text: the language and its rhythm are true to unaffected human speech. Just as the original Oulipians insisted that by tightening the rules, you liberate the literature, so the text is a metaphor for O’s own journey. Speaking from the confines of the words in the play, she finds out who she now is and so, perhaps, becomes free. Griffiths has paved a way out and it’s an open road: “this is not the end, by no means the end. I have a long way to go from here.”
• Let Me Go On by Paul Griffiths is published by Henningham Family Press (£12.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
