The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams: Strange, disturbing and sometimes very good

Missouri Williams’s The Vivisectors opens not with a bang, but a whimper: the narrator’s mother has attempted to end her life and failed, managing only to become paralysed and dependent.

Her vegetative state reflects a broader sense of regression and decay that permeates the novel: a forest spreads outward from the city’s centre and slowly devours its infrastructure, held in-check only by a monkish sect of mysterious gardeners.

Agathe, our grumpy narrator, works for a woman she loathes, a lecturer at a university, which also seems to be rotting from the inside. News of a heated exchange between a teacher and a student, in which one of them, or both, have taken offence, consumes the university; the scandal intrigues Agathe’s boss, far more than her own research, and she enlists Agathe to befriend the student and find out what happened.