Readers hoping for an easy time will be alarmed by the first page of Missouri Williams’s new novel. The Vivisectors opens with its narrator, Agathe, musing on how a story can be ‘disguised’ to evade easy interpretation. Counterintuitively, first-person narration is ‘the safest of all forms’ – the surest way to mask an author – because mixing up the narrator and the author is ‘the most cardinal of literary errors’. Is this a wry comment from Agathe, about to tell her life story? Or is it evidence of the playfulness of an author fascinated by processes of interpretation? Does it matter?

The novel’s plot is simple enough: Agathe works for a foreign academic who teaches city planning at the local university in an unnamed country. Like Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s recent book, Shibboleth, The Vivisectors is essentially a campus tale updated to encompass the themes de nos jours. Agathe watches as the faculty is divided by a crisis of free speech and political correctness. Adam, a student from her employer’s home city, takes offence at a comment from his tutor and offends the tutor in return. ‘Both interpretations had been ungenerous,’ Agathe’s employer laments, and symptomatic of a society that ‘liked to overanalyse’ – to vivisect. 

Agathe’s world spins around this kind of analysis. Sex is an opportunity to interpret another person, if one that Adam thinks largely futile since most women are ‘riddles that nobody could be bothered to solve’. Agathe and her employer spend hours analysing personalities and diagnosing people with neurological disorders. Even