This is no cosy or dark campus novel. It aims to be a masterpiece of ecological and existential despair, but I found it so restrained that it felt purposeless. Its intentional flatness made for an undeniably alienating reading experience.
Set in a random university city which an aggressive vegetation is smothering, with a band of rogue gardeners hacking it back. The novel follows Agathe , who for the best part of the novel is nameless. She is a failed graduate student who works for her fraudulent professor boss.
The story really starts when Agathe’s routine of utter stagnation is disrupted with a campus scandal. Adam, a student, gets into a bitter conflict with a rising professor over claims of discrimination. For a brief moment this appeared to be a philosophical comment on latter day university causes but nothing of the sort.
Agathe’s boss persuades her to act as a double agent, befriending Adam to gather information, although this lacks a meaningful motive. Williams juxtaposes the university collapsing with the weight of the vegetation, with the university devolving into an ideological war between the academics and the gardeners. Alongside this, Agathe predictably becomes close to Adam but not really morphing into anything either.
Williams hypothesises about enclosure. Agathe posits early on that enclosing something creates emptiness; a walled field can only be barren. Every conflict in the book is a wall, like the overgrown park, to the walls she builds around herself.
The story is punctuated by anecdotes that highlight Agathe’s detachment. The novel opens with her mother’s suicide attempt, which leaves her incapacitated—Agathe has no feelings about it. Bizzarely, on one occcasion she sits on her paralysed mother’s lap in her motorised wheelchair, steering them both around the overgrown city as if out for a normal stroll. It’s a jarring image that lacks context. Agathe is a character so detached and devoid of desire that she is difficult to connect with. And in a not a convincing post pandemic future.
The final act, as the political conflict boils over into revolution, feels slightly rushed compared to the meticulous, plodding deconstruction of the early chapters.
The decaying, unnamed city creates a dark background to a paper thin plot. Williams does add interesting narrative, like a flooded museum with rotting paintings and a department store consumed by a massive tree. The rogue gardeners, operate with the subtlety of a sledgehammer in how they are part activist in an almost extreme way – the hybridity of being a gardener and mafia style group in control of the city is a challenge to accept. Philosophical treatises are Williams’ big things as she weaves in analysis in academic spaces, and the ideology around outsiders in the university and city.
This novel lacks emotion, or much of a plot or jeopardy, whilst heavy on philosophical discussion that requires the reader to do a lot of heavy lifting. The central narrator’s sense of lethargy and the deliberate opacity of the world-building mean you have to be willing to engage with the novel as an intellectual exercise rather than a thriller.
Rarely does a novel make me want to finish it just get my life back but this is one. The Vivisectors may be beautifully scripted in showing off its intelligence, but it does force the reader to confront the limits of empathy. Its icy detachment and misanthropic narrator make it a tough pill to swallow. The image she paints of the overgrown university and city isn’t enough to have kept me wanting. It is a book more easily admired than loved.
