By Lionel Wethercombe
If The Devil Wears Prada had been rewritten by a thwarted member of the London Library after three years on the Mayfair Book Groupette’s waiting list, the result might look something like Lionel Wethercombe’s debut, Waiting for Pascal.
The premise is simple, and almost certainly autobiographical: a man applies to join “a small, exclusive, literary society somewhere north of Piccadilly” and spends the next 312 pages doing absolutely nothing except wait to be accepted. The plot, if one may call it that, is a sequence of increasingly humiliating “application challenges,” ranging from composing a 2,000-word denunciation of Ulysses (“every page like brushing your teeth with a hedgehog”) to being interrogated about the moral resonance of ochre pigment by a woman appearing to wear a dead bird as a fascinator.
Wethercombe has clearly done his homework—or at least his eavesdropping. The Mayfair Groupette, here fictionalised as “The Bibliotemporal Circle,” is rendered in minute, slightly bitter detail: the arcane voting procedures; the unexplained vetoes (“Your aura doesn’t belong in this postcode”); and, of course, the inscrutable Afghan hound, Pascal, who holds the power to make or break a candidate with a single blink.
The problem—or perhaps the point—is that reading Waiting for Pascal feels alarmingly like the process it describes. There is a lot of exquisite set-dressing (inlaid writing desks, uncut pages, wine labels you have to Google), but the narrative moves forward with the stately inevitability of an understaffed parish council. Each chapter promises a decision “soon,” only to deliver another exquisitely irrelevant subcommittee.
It would be unfair to say nothing happens. In Chapter Twelve, the narrator manages to gain “provisional observer status” and attends a meeting devoted to a monograph on ecclesiastical textiles. This is followed by a 14-page description of an embroidered cope that somehow manages to be both ravishing and punitive. In Chapter Nineteen, he attempts to bribe a member with a bottle of pre-decimal Armagnac, only to discover it was already on the club’s “Banned Gifts” list.
To be fair, there are moments of sharp wit. Wethercombe skewers the literary-social complex of Mayfair with surgical precision, noting that “rejection here came not as a blow but as a raised eyebrow—quieter, crueller, and infinitely more expensive.” Yet the novel’s real triumph is its refusal to resolve. By the final page, the narrator is exactly where he began: outside the Green Room, waiting, clutching a notebook and a chilled bottle of something the Groupette will almost certainly disdain.
Some readers will find this infuriating; others will see it as art mirroring life. For the rest of us, Waiting for Pascal is a cautionary tale—proof that in certain corners of literary London, the journey is the destination, and the destination doesn’t want you.
