Somewhere in the middle of The Vivisectors, a young woman stands at a window and watches seven gardeners working on a lawn. There is glass between them. She can see their mouths moving and she cannot hear a word.
So she closes her eyes. And then she listens anyway.
What follows is twenty pages of seven numbered gardeners arguing about what a perfect garden is, whether a gardener may ever fall in love, and why the greatest gardener is an artist of eternal murder. It is not a hallucination, exactly. It is not presented as one either. The novel simply decides it can do this now, and does.
What The Vivisectors Has Actually Built
The plot, such as it is: an ancient European-ish city is being swallowed by an enormous park. Two men fall out in a classroom over a single word, each convinced the other has weaponised his ancestry, and one of them goes to the administration rather than back to the other man. The university then tears itself apart for an entire summer while the gardeners who keep the vegetation off the buildings quietly stop work.
Our narrator is a young woman who is paid an enormous hourly rate to be a wealthy foreign lecturer's entire brain. She writes the woman's thesis, her lectures, her marking and her emails, the last in a careful impersonation of her employer's second-language English, complete with charming little errors designed to disarm the reader.
Her employer sends her to make friends with the student and report back what he says.
Nothing in the book has a name. Not the city, not the university, not the boss, not the boss's son. The narrator's own name arrives on page ninety and only because she gives it to a stranger.
The Narrator of The Vivisectors Is the Reason to Read It, and the Reason You Might Not
I read a lot of cold narrators. The one in The Vivisectors is something else.
She grinds her teeth in her sleep until they have gone translucent. She walks so far and so compulsively that her socks come off bloody, because her step count is the last thing she has any ambition about. She says the middle of herself is a big dead rock, and she means it as a description and not a complaint.
Her opening move, courtesy of her uncle over breakfast, is to tell you that the first person is the safest form if you want to write something appalling about someone, because they will never believe you capable of it. Then she narrates three hundred pages. Missouri Williams has essentially handed you the manual and dared you to use it.
I found her horrible company. I also could not put her down, and that gap is the whole experience of the book.
Three Times The Vivisectors Turns Into a Play
The gardeners are the first. The second is a common room where three international students talk past each other: one furious about the mould in her halls, the fees, the libraries she isn't allowed into, the fact that their role in this city is decorative; one trying to tell a long story about his great-grandfather at a desert siege and being interrupted every time; and one who has started reciting a song that the black spot of damp on her bedroom wall used to sing to her. It is genuinely one of the strangest and best things I have read all year.
The third is a roomful of elderly men in a library at dawn, and it produces the story about the tower.
I am going to say almost nothing about it. A woman has lived her entire life in a tower. A man decides to climb it. She watches him the whole way up and never once calls out to him, because she doesn't want to break his concentration, because she doesn't want to take his victory from him, because she has been taught that love is a form of restraint. Then it goes wrong at the summit, and the storyteller's verdict on her is that a rope was always available and reaching out was the one option she never thought of.
That verdict is the book. Everything else is Missouri Williams turning it over in the light.
Where The Vivisectors Overplays It
The diagnosis gets made too many times. This city is exhausted, this language is emptying out, nobody will act, look at the park. It is said by the employer, by her teenage son, by a sacked philosophy professor, by three students, by seven gardeners, by the student at the centre of the row, and by the narrator in a magnificent page-long rant about a mirrored tower built on a collapsing mountain. Individually they are all good. Cumulatively they start to sound like one person clearing their throat.
There is also a small girl in this novel, the gardener's autistic daughter, whom every single character uses to prove a point and none of them ever addresses. Her employer delivers a page and a half about her that is one of the ugliest speeches I have read in a long time. The book plainly means that as an indictment. It is also true that the narrator does exactly the same thing in prettier language, and that the child never gets one moment that is hers.
And the narrator does something in the final thirty pages that is, by a distance, the biggest act of her life. It gets a paragraph. Nothing follows from it. I have gone back and forth on whether that is the coldest and most honest choice in the book or a piece of avoidance dressed as nerve.
Content in The Vivisectors, because it needs saying: an attempted drowning in the opening chapter and its brain-damaged aftermath; the killing of a disabled woman by a relative; a lot of ableist theorising given a very long runway; a dream of forced sex; racism and an antisemitism-adjacent institutional fight rendered entirely as allegory. If the first of those is close to home, the Republic of Consciousness Prize list is a good way to find this author's earlier work at a safer distance.
If You Finish This and Need Something Else
If The Vivisectors has left you wanting the same weather, go to Missouri Williams's own debut, The Doloriad, which won that prize and is nastier than this by some margin. Then Milkman by Anna Burns, for the other novel that refuses to name anybody or anything and makes the refusal into the horror. Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters is the natural ancestor for an all-night gathering of old intellectuals who cannot stop declaiming at one another. And if you want the thing this is arguing against, reread The Secret History and count how much it flatters you.
The Verdict on The Vivisectors
Near the end, the narrator finally tells someone a story of her own. It is about a fishing village, an albino whale everyone loved, and a rotting albino whale that washes up on the beach at exactly the moment a sign would be most welcome. The villagers look at the corpse, decide it cannot possibly be theirs, bury it, and go on waiting.
She calls it the greatest love story of all time. Six pages, no ornament, and it undid me completely.
That is what Missouri Williams can do when she stops arguing and starts telling, and it is why I will read whatever she writes next.
It is also, in six pages, a reminder of how little of The Vivisectors works that way. Most of the novel is making the same case about a tired city over and over, in seven different mouths, and the one enormous act the narrator commits near the end is given a paragraph and then dropped. I spent most of the book wanting to get away from the person narrating it, and I do not think the book earned as much of that discomfort as it asked for. Our Booker Prize 2026 longlist guide has gentler places to begin.
