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.”
