let me go on - Paul Griffiths

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let me go on

by
Paul Griffiths

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Title:	let me go on
Author:	Paul Griffiths
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2023
Length:	175 pages
Availability:	in: let me tell you / let me go on - US
	let me go on - UK
	in: let me tell you / let me go on - Canada

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

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Our Assessment:

B+ : good, clever fun

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
The Guardian	.	15/12/2023	Lara Pawson
Literary Review	.	12/2023	David Collard
TLS	.	15/12/2023	Nina Allan

From the Reviews:

"(Y)ou do not need to be a bard buff to enjoy this clever and rather beautiful little book. (...) 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." - Lara Pawson, The Guardian

"Having broken free from the circularity of her predetermined role O finds herself wandering in a strange land--the snowy white expanse of the unwritten page. Here she encounters others of her kind, characters in search of their author (.....) O's final flight from the labyrinth of "letter strings" in Let Me Go On is a connivance between writer and reader that contrives to be both uncanny and deeply moving." - Nina Allan, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       let me go on is the companion volume -- the sequel, as it were -- to let me tell you. It again is narrated by Hamlet's Ophelia -- and again is written under the constraint of using only only those words Shakespeare had Ophelia speak in the play, a mere 483 different ones, apparently. But while let me tell you presented the familiar Ophelia-story -- that of her life -- let me go on imagines something entirely new: Ophelia finding herself, as it were, in the afterlife.
       While early on she concludes: "So it's all over now, over and done with", Griffiths in fact has he embark on a new journey. For it supposedly being 'all over', and despite her claim: "No more me", there's no immediate finality for Ophelia (and the question of identity, of being (in some, if not necessarily living, form) remains a central one).
       The novel opens with a brief prologue of sorts, Ophelia assessing her situation. The final words there are: "So once again I say, one last time: Fare well !" -- the 'farewell' appropriately split, suggesting some future lies ahead rather than merely meaning 'Good-bye'. (While 'farewell' is said repeatedly in Hamlet -- not least by Hamlet to Ophelia, when he tells her: "Get thee to a nunnery, farewell" --, Ophelia herself never utters the word; the closest she get is a: "Fare you well, my dove")
       The novel then proceeds in the chapters of Ophelia's long road, each simply titled by a letter of the alphabet, alphabetically arranged, from 'A' through 'Y'. (I and J get a joint chapter; X and Z are omitted.) Each chapter is then also shaped by, or a meeting with, another -- almost always Shakespearean -- character (or several): Amiens (from As You Like It) in the first chapter, three fools in 'F', a whole raft of kings (from various history plays) in 'K', Laertes in 'L', Mistress Quickly in 'Q', and so on. Among the amusing choices: 'O' features Ofelia -- the Ophelia from the First Quarto, who differs markedly from the version of Ophelia Griffiths relies on (from the Second Quarto and the First Folio).
       Her fundamental nature -- the fact that Ophelia is a fictional character, Shakespeare's creation -- and the basis of the novel, in terms of the origin of the words it employs, come up repeatedly, such as in the exchange with the fools:

     ‘You should give more mind to us.’
     ‘That’s what we are here for.’
     ‘That and nothing but that.’
     ‘To help you, remember ?’
     ‘We’ll help you remember what you have to say in each speech.’
     ‘“Each speech !” That’s good !’
     Speech ?
     ‘In your play.’
     ‘The play you are in right now.’
     ‘As we speak.’
     ‘Ha! Another good one !’
     This lady is not in a play.
     ‘But you have been.’
     No, I have not.
     ‘And you are now’
     ‘We all are.’
     No !
     ‘It’s all right.’
     ‘Have no fear.’
     ‘We’ll not speak of your play—’
     ‘—the one you have come out of—’
     ‘—and the one you are in right now.’
     ‘There’s more to choose from.’

Ophelia is led to reflect:

Could it be true ? Was it a play ? Was it a play that I left ? And is this another ?
In a play your words are given you. You do not make them up yourself. You have no say. That’s how it is.

The novel's constraint here means that the words available to her continue to be limited; she can choose only from the ones previously set for her. And while she has 'left' Hamlet, her freedom here is similarly illusory: this is, after all, just another play (well, novel), with a writer who gives her -- while also still completely controlling -- 'her say'.
The final chapter acknowledges her first creator, opening:

With these words of Will’s the ground falls away from me. To look at it another way, the all of me rises.

There's a good deal of fun variety in the different chapters -- amusing also because of Griffith's sprinkling of anachronistic modern references and allusions into the text. It all makes for a fascinating and well-executed metafictional exercise, impressive in how it uses not just a familiar character but also (in limiting itself to her) familiar words. let me tell you added a dimension to the character, but essentially stuck to the same story; it is, basically (to somewhat oversimplify), a re-telling, from a different perspective. Meanwhile, let me go on reaches much further -- including in its clever use of so much of the rest of Shakespeare's work.
Each can certainly also be enjoyed alone, but the two make for a nice complementary pair -- and while the same constraint (the limited vocabulary) is used in both, they are very different works.

- M.A.Orthofer, 17 November 2025

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Links:

let me go on:

New York Review Books publicity page
Henningham Family Press publicity page
Q & A at Exacting Clam
Q & A at Music & Literature (at the Literary Hub)
Hamlet - the complete text

Reviews:

Paul Griffiths:

Official site

Other books by Paul Griffiths under review:

let me tell you

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Contemporary British fiction
See Index of Oulipo books
See Index of Series and Sequels under review
See Index of Real People in Works of Fiction
Other books from New York Review Books

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About the Author:

British author Paul Griffiths was born in 1947.

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