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Anyone who has explored London beyond its tourist hubs, or has at least glanced at the pages of a Zadie Smith novel, knows that multiculturalism gives the city its life.

Turns out that the alluring woman gracing the book’s cover is the same one who appears in these pages: intelligent, sensitive and engaging.

The worthy effort to emphasize that much of the artist’s inventive genius — unfurling in thousands of manuscript pages, rather than oil paint and tempera — makes the dull staging a perhaps unavoidable conceit.

The bundle she received included a slip of paper, dated 1959, which marks where officials had removed pages.

Herbert wove a complicated universe with oddball technologies, bizarre competing factions and religions that are easier to digest over the methodical consumption of hundreds of pages.