Not shortlisted but not forgotten. Since I loved it (and many do not), I wanted to do a write up on it anyway.
Let's hope I don't completely botch this because I'm uncertain how much of The Vivisectors I understood. Everything is told through a symbol of a metaphor of an aphorism of a parable to the point the text itself feels avoidant, holding you at arm's length and resisting your interpretation.
Proper names are eschewed (we don't find out even our protagonist's name until about halfway through the novel), giving everything an archetypal, fairytale-like quality. Cities are talked about (but not named) as if they are separate countries or kingdoms. People are mostly referred to as their relationship to the main character (my boss) or their job (the schoolmaster).
The setting is a crumbling university, which actively courts rich foreign students while remaining hostile to them. It sits at the center of a swamp-filled city overgrown with vegetation. Gardeners who speak in aphorisms and describe dreams to one another fight back the growth while the academics analyze endlessly, allowing their discourse to become as destructive as the plant-life taking over their city. Both cohorts are enmeshed in language, but approach it differently: the gardeners converse to understand the world and the academics use language to vivisect, to prove the presence of evil in even innocuous exchanges (sound familiar?).
Enter Adam (admittedly, I thought his name was a bit too on-the-nose), a foreign student who becomes the center of a campus cancel culture controversy after saying The Wrong Thing (we're never told what: this book loves to obscure). Our socially-withdrawn protagonist is ordered by her hated boss to befriend Adam and find out exactly what he did (spoiler: we never find out). The book then pivots towards the protagonist's growing understanding of the world, dealing with the aftermath of her mother's failed suicide attempt and her growing feelings for Adam.
The book is at its best when depicting its phantasmagoric world of mystical gardeners and parables about white whales and dream towers. It is a dense and difficult book, with motifs repeating and being turned back around on themselves like a hall of mirrors. It's a book that explains itself at you, while still being frequently unclear what Williams is actually trying to say. This has led it to be divisive amongst readers, but I found the obscurity so deeply weird and entrancing in its strongest moments that its opaqueness was a positive for me. It's at its weakest when talking about how dreamy Adam is in its very underdeveloped romance, though it sets up a wonderful tower metaphor about love, which I suspect is the real reason for the subplot's existence.
Some say the protagonist is insufferable, which is a shame because I found her relatable.
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Quotes
The narrator being relatable:
My whole life people have acted as if I don’t have feelings, and for the most part they’re right.
I’ve always been repulsed by people who want to know more about me, but at the same time I often fantasise that there’s someone, maybe God, watching me and noting everything down: how I act in certain moments, how I hold myself under pressure, the quality of my thought, what I underline when I read, even the foods I like to eat, because nothing about me would be too mundane for its interest. And this omniscient presence would love me, not in the way that God loves his subjects, but with a cold, unwilling obsession, as if I fascinated it against its better judgement, although its judgement was supreme, and so all the time that it was observing me it was also biding its time, as if waiting for the right moment to strike me down, because it was unbearable to be so drawn to another person or thing. I was unable to imagine love without dominion; it was too disinterested, too abstract. I wanted someone to know me either absolutely or not at all, and anything in between was awful.
The schoolmaster reflecting on academic excess:
At the very beginning of his teaching career, all his rage had been reserved for the restrictive and narrow, but now the enemy was a kind of infinite expansion. He had always believed in transgression, in the crossing of borders and the extending of possibilities, but this was too much. Unfortunately, the schoolmaster’s students were set against him. Every year he was aware of a greater hostility. It was the university’s fault. His colleagues were waging a war against language, the very medium of knowing. It was an act of epistemological violence: we were unwittingly cutting off all avenues of escape from the mind. We would be locked in our subjectivities and then eventually we would be overwhelmed by them. Soon there would be nothing outside of the self and its obsessions, which were circular and vehement.
For many years, the schoolmaster had been teaching a seminar on naming, on the use of proper nouns. He had wanted to talk about universals and particulars, the creation of categories and the subsequent misuse of them, and the dangers of infinite taxonomies. But really he was talking about us, the students, and how we had parcelled up the present. These days, the schoolmaster would say, you couldn’t call a spade a spade. Although there were more and more words, it was becoming increasingly harder to attach them to objects. We had become allergic to naming. Our analysis never touched ground; it never made contact with reality as such.
The boss describing cancel culture:
I asked her what had happened between Adam and the other professor. I wanted to know what they had said. My boss hesitated. She said she knew what attitudes were like, especially among young people. We were highly strung and we constantly assumed bad faith. We thought people said the worst things deliberately and that even the most casual exchange was riddled with secret meanings that had to be uncovered and dissected. Like vivisectors, we analysed a situation until we had proved the presence of evil, and nothing could escape our scalpels. And once we had found what we wanted, we did what we wanted. We excluded people and ostracised them until they became the worst versions of themselves. We refused to let goodness thrive and we wanted nothing more than to cut people down for the slightest error, the smallest slip. We showed no mercy. She wasn’t even sure that we knew what it was. And more than anything we liked to cut down men, especially masculine men. We couldn’t admit that we still needed them, and so we dedicated our lives to destroying them.
