The Vivisectors - Missouri Williams
I finished The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams yesterday, and it's the seventh book from this year's Booker longlist that I've read. *(As I mentioned in my review of May We Feed The King I'm transcribing these over from tiktok, so they're a little out of sequence on the blog.) It's taken me a little while to sit down and actually write this up, because I needed to work out how I feel about the book first, and if I'm honest, I'm still not sure I know the answer.
Of everything I've read from the longlist so far, this is probably the most formally interesting. The narrator tells us, very early on, that she's going to give us nothing. No names, no specifics, nothing to hold onto. And she sticks to that promise with a sort of stubborn commitment I have to admire even as it frustrated me. For a good chunk of the book we only know two characters by name. The setting is just "our city" or "their city". There's barely any detail about what these people do, where they live, or what's actually happening at any given moment. It's aggressively opaque.
It took me a few attempts to actually get into it. The prose is so dense that light seems to bend around it, and at times it reads like an 18th century classic, which is not a period of fiction I've ever really got on with, for exactly this reason. Everything is detached. Everything is opaque. It took three or four separate runs at the first chapter before I found my feet and could actually keep going.
So what is it actually about? Hard to say, because the book is working very hard not to tell you. For a while I wondered if it was a loose retelling of the Eden myth, the quest for knowledge that gets humanity thrown out of paradise, not helped by the fact that one of the only named characters is called Adam. A bit on the nose, maybe, but that's where my head was for a large chunk of the read. Later I started leaning towards the Tower of Babel instead, that scattering of a once-unified people into different factions and tongues. But this is me grasping for meaning in a book that has absolutely no interest in handing any to me.
I described this to my wife as an anti-novel. It's interrogating the point of fiction itself, and it does that not just through its form but through its characters, who deliver these lectures on the state of literature and art, on how nobody cares about writing any more. They're doing this within their own crumbling, Gothic, faintly 18th-century world, except that world has phones in it, and the internet, and cars. The setting is constantly anachronistic, a blend of the mythic and the mundane, and it becomes pretty clear that when the characters are mourning the fall of literature and the humanities, they're not just talking about their own fictional world but are talking about ours.
Along the way it dabbles in a lot of the big anxieties of the moment: climate catastrophe, mass depersonalisation caused by social media and the internet, capitalism straining under the politics of immigration, rape culture, the alleged male loneliness epidemic, falling literacy, fascist attempts to strangle art and academia. There's a lot going on in here. The trouble is that all of it gets buried under the book's own opening promise to give us nothing. The tone stays detached and disinterested throughout, so rather than actually digging into any of these issues, it just gestures vaguely in their direction and shrugs. It isn't that the book has nothing to say so much as that it's already decided it doesn't want to say it.
I think this is a really fascinating book, and I also think I'm going to struggle to talk about it properly for a while yet. I know it's going to be divisive among longlist readers, and I think it might end up being the most divisive book on the list this year, which I mean as a compliment. There's a huge amount you can say about a book that refuses to say anything about itself. If I'd had this in front of me during my Master's, I'd have written tens of thousands of words on it without breaking a sweat.
But did I enjoy it? And does enjoyment even matter here? This is exactly why I've mostly given up giving books numerical ratings. I've been doing that on Tiktok purely for the Longlist, so I can sort them into my own shortlist once I'm done. Part of me wants to give this an 8 or 9, call it a masterpiece and be done with it. Another part of me wants to give it a 2 or 3 and tell it to commit to something instead of hiding behind its own detachment. I'm landing somewhere in the middle, a strong 6, which puts it just above M John Harrison's The End of Everything on my current ranking.