By C. D. Rose.
Missouri Williams, The Doloriad (Dead Ink Books, 2022)
It’s a strange, murky book, this one, which drops you right into its menacing rot from the first line and doesn’t let up for another 211 pages, or rather, when it does let up, it’s only to push you into stranger, murkier, even more menacingly rotten territories. Missouri Williams’ first novel, The Doloriad is a book of worms, incest, decay and extreme violence with interludes of queasy comedy and thwarted transcendence.
The Doloriad has all the elements of post-apocalyptic fiction (an undefined cataclysm at an undated point in the past; survivors thereof; a toxic, predatory natural environment; vague references to improvised agriculture and the raiding of abandoned supermarkets for food; an unexplained power source for intermittent electric current; inevitable breathless critical comparison to Cormac McCarthy) but — bear with me — this one’s different, honestly. This is postapocalyptica via Kafka, Švankmajer, and the Brothers Grimm.
It is grotesque in every sense. An extended incestuous family battle for control of their meagre lives. Many of the characters (the immense titular Dolores, the Matriarch, the Schoolmaster) are Beckettian, evidencing the post-apocalyptic suggestions of Endgame or Happy Days. A lot of crawling goes on: legs are often absent, not working properly, or mutilated. There are visionary seizures, blindness, and the constant wearing of unexplained sunglasses. The book gets early-Shakespearian, Greek tragic, Old Testament Biblical in its toll of violence and growing body count. Williams has listed Lispector, Lessing, Schulz, Krasznahorkai and Bernhard among her favourites, and if you imagine a mash of these writers left to stew and rot in a garbage can for a good while, it might give you some idea.
I had to stop and come up for air several times. Its claustrophobically long sentences, blocky paragraphs and dense thickets of language summon the world of the book, one narrowly circumscribed and surrounded by a dead yet growing forest thick with its own menaces. The effect is often that of reading a slightly-off translation, or one which we cannot quite trust, one whose source text may be very different to the version presented here. This was not a book I enjoyed reading, though once I had read it, I found it fascinating.
There is currently a surfeit of postapocalyptica, especially coming from the US. The reasons for this may be obvious; the question of what to make of it all, less so.
One answer might lie in the ‘light relief’ sections of this novel. These come in the form of a few interpolated stories (one from the Decameron), and mostly via a TV sitcom featuring St Thomas Aquinas (sic), videocassettes of which are repeatedly watched by the family. The show Get Aquinas in Here is the theology of the bleak world of this book, where a constant (even if often blind) grasping for some kind of redemption or hope is continually rebuffed. Life goes on but has no meaning other than its own senseless self. Aquinas roams the book in vain. The inserted stories do not divert from or complement the main frame, but rather cause it to rot, as though woodworm, or sit in its stomach like indigestible tapeworms. (Worms feature heavily here, both literally and in the simile-rich, adjective-laden prose.)
‘Brace yourself for some wild shit,’ says one Twitter reviewer of this book, and there is certainly wild shit in this book, wild shit the wild-shitness of which I have not read before. The problem is that when you keep on piling up the wild shit it stops being quite as wild. The nightmare doesn’t stop, though its effects abate. The book itself seems to recognise this and five pages from the end stops and (almost, via Aquinas) explains itself, giving the reader a precis of what has just happened. Having held the reader in its clammy embrace for over 200 pages, the book does — finally — let us go on its very last line. However, quite where it lets us go, I’m not at all sure.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
C. D. Rose‘s three books The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else and The Blind Accordionist form a loose parafictional trilogy about lost books and forgotten writers, about who is forgotten and who remembered, and how, and why. He is currently working on a book which will be a mixture of fiction and nonfiction about art and artists, entitled We Live Here Now. You can read an interview with him here. Twitter: @cdrose_write
