Review | ‘The Vivisectors’ by Missouri Williams: the violence of understanding others

The novel is largely set in a university in an unnamed but decaying city where the plants grow uncontrollably. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock Journalism often labours under the impression that it has a ‘view from nowhere’, to use critic Jay Rosen’s turn of phrase — that if it strives to be objective, it can be. This leads only to mistaken ideals. Journalists always have a view from somewhere, just that it is not readily apparent in most of their work. One place it becomes especially noticeable is where journalism intersects frequently with other people’s choices, where those people’s interiority matters as much as the logics and incentives an observer can reason they are following. The view from somewhere is altogether inescapable when other people become mirrors of us, when the ‘somewhere’ itself enters the picture and, in that reflection, we behold ourselves.It is impossible to fully know another person. No matter what resources you bring to bear, no one else can be made entirely predictable to your own mind, to the point where you can predict what they are going to say or do years from now. Even should you try, what you will ultimately discover is a meld of some of them and some of you. (Remember when Elon Musk said he conceived his now-dormant Hyperloop idea because he feared his co-travellers on buses and trains might be serial killers?)From the moment you read the title of the book, The Vivisectors, by English novelist Missouri Williams, it will confront you with the inalienable illusion of the perfectly sovereign observer. The gardeners in the novel’s university in an unnamed but decaying city are fighting just this battle with the plants that refuse to stop growing. Its personae, on the other hand, only slowly learn that even should you cut into another person to know them, you will only be vivisecting something that has ceased to be a person. Change defies control eternally. Even when it fails, the control has no meaning left. Author Missouri Williams | Photo Credit: Robin Christian (thebookerprizes.com) Embrace the unknownThe novel, longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, is centred on the particularly human compulsion to interpret and explain other people, and the violence that ensues. Agathe is a withdrawn young woman living with her uncle and working for a wealthy academic abroad. Her mother has just survived suicide, and barely. When the academic becomes fascinated by a charismatic yet abrasive student named Adam at the university, she asks Agathe to befriend him and study him on her behalf, and the two eventually become close. Agathe experiences new forms of intimacy she lived her life avoiding even as foreign students protest, academics split into factions, vegetation overwhelms the city, and Adam faces expulsion.The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas recognised the foundation of an ethical life to be the existence of another person who exceeds whatever account others can give of them. Literature, on the other hand, has rightly recognised the unspoken anxiety that undergirds every relationship with another. Marcel Proust was obsessive about it in his In Search of Lost Time. Similarly, The Vivisectors reveals, simply gathering more information about someone does not stem the questions; it allows them to dance on each new possibility and proliferate. Agathe’s own father, an author, admits his novels are animated by his fruitless attempts to reconstruct her through invented daughters.Williams herself writes in a noticeably architectonic style that holds together the novel’s paradoxically increasing sense of estrangement, with sentences that seem analytical and sensuous at once. She breaks out on occasions with flashes of startling lyricism as much as, somewhat unfortunately, letting her characters theorise about themselves at length, creating passages of airless, even exhausting prose. Ultimately, the reader finds Williams is herself a vivisector — perhaps the tale’s sole blemish.But what The Vivisectors renders visible in exchange is worth treasuring: the shadows of a condition that also haunt our attempts to understand the animal kingdom — from animal culture and intelligence to the virtues and pitfalls of anthropomorphising — and the ostensible lifelessness of machine intelligence. That our efforts need not be so fraught if we embrace, at the outset, a modicum of unknowability. The Vivisectors Missouri WilliamsFourth Estate₹699mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in Published - November 06, 2026 05:00 pm IST