Reviews

This is unlike anything I have ever read. Not fully surrealist or even magic realism, but an almost Lynchian Americana folklore tragedy with the disintegration of the self. Utterly beautiful, discombobulating, nauseatingly unsettling with little to really say why. There is a magic infused in writing that absorbs and warps the reader as they read it.

While The Changeling is not plot heavy, the story follows Pearl, a new mother, leaving her husband and the family island they have been living on. He comes to bring her back and tragedy strikes in the way home, leaving Pearl back on the island, lost, adrift, and a focus for the various children of her in laws. She loses herself in alcoholism and things get very weird, leaving us unsure as to what has actually happened in the closing of the novel.

What truly sets this story apart for me is the hypnotic, lyrical incisive nonsense of the prose. It truly is spellbinding in its poetry and denaturing of grammar as Pearl's self begins to come apart. The opening third of this book is written so majestically that I actually found it hard to read as the prose was so evocative and effecting that I was constantly finding myself inspired, making notes and working on my own writing, as Williams' words just unlocked my brain.

I would remiss to not acknowledge that there was a section on the middle in which Pearl's alcoholism and abdication of life and reality are being established that I actually found tough going because the prose suffered and the section felt particularly drawn out. This may well be purposeful, but going from being enraptured to uncomfortable less engaged in the writing was a little off putting. But as things truly start to spiral the text gets really weird and wonderful again.

There are a couple of full, unpunctuated streams of consciousness that appear to be the children's odd sayings, vying for Pearl's attention, and the thought to speech children (and myself) are so prone to, that are incredibly effective. I truly can't quite pin down why exactly, but one of them all but reduced me to tears, it was so powerful. Towards the end there is also the description of an old woman and likening her to a bird, and again I can't put my finger on exactly why, but it is one of the most unsettling and creepy things I've ever read, especially for something not writing anything extreme or explicitly discomforting. Williams just has an absolute mastery of tone and vibe from the fairy tale, both modern sanitised and traditional, to hallucinatory and disassociative, and the uncanny and disturbing.

You'll see clearly from other reviews that it's almost impossible to say what is or isn't real in this story. Who or what is/ are the Changeling/s, and exactly what they represent. Are all the characters separate entities or aspects of certain other characters. Pearl is an unreliable narrator and her world is unreliable, which is extremely appropriate with this being written in the late 70s that was still very much dealing with the fallout and reckoning with what women were and should be. Following the increased freedoms that came during the second world war and the subsequent brutal banishment to home and baby makers that took an unbelievable toll on many's psyche, as did the chauvinist gender politics that dominated the following decades.

Pearl is a person purposely shown without agency. We see her swept off her feet and whisked away, unable to get away when she wants, and ultimately trapped on the island, surrounded by children, and lost in a depressive, alcoholic haze. Through Pearl we really see what tragedy on top of the utterly controlling patriarchy does to a motherfucker. This is her own private Twin Peaks.

There's infinitely more to say about this book that I still can barely wrap my head around. The animal motifs and echoes of family history that burrow and vibrate through the narrative. How much of anything, especially the ending, is real? Does that even matter? What are all the goodness knows how many other elements and allusions I'm missing? I'm truly fascinated and besotted with this bizarre book.

Truly one of the most singular and mentally, emotionally stimulating books I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Please and thank you!

***

Initial Thoughts:

OK. I really needed a book that absolutely knocked my socks off as I've been in a slump of disappointments and this delivered! It has just taken me a relative age to read as I struggle with text somewhat, but thus is one of the weirdest, most beautiful and hauntingly bleak books I've ever read. Just breathtaking!

More thoughts when I've had time to process and it's not 0515.

tonythep's review against another edition

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4.0

I keep referring to this book as a fever dream. Perhaps it took me so long to finish it because it was like a recurring dream that I fell into only sporadically. Waking up in a cold sweat, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to return every night.

It’s difficult to describe what actually happens in the book. I don’t know if I would even call it a plot. A young woman named Pearl sits in a bar drinking and holding her infant son. She has run away from her husband, but calmly awaits for him to find her, which he does. It doesn’t really seem to be the husband she has run from, but his strange family and their private island.

She is brought back to the island where she isolates herself from the other adults only to sit idly amongst the large colony of odd and oddly named children. She drinks a great deal, seemingly trying to numb herself. Her son, Sam, has changed in some profound way, and is perhaps the trigger for the transformation of the other children. Pearl catches brief flashes of the children turning into animals. A horse. A deer.

My takeaway is that the children possess, are possessed by, an elemental magic, while the ignorant, gluttonous adults are doomed to perish, to be consumed by nature itself.

It’s not a straightforward or fast-moving narrative read. But the writing is beautiful, the language visceral. The overall feeling is one of unease. But also one of justice. It’s as if nature has finally overcome the world of man.

gabesteller's review against another edition

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5.0

Advertised by Paddy as having as having an “Unclassifiable tone” a Nice young Lady and her son get sorta kidnapped by her boyfriend to come live on his island off the coast of Florida with his brother and friends and their many communally raised/increasingly feral children.

And woohoo! Checked all my boxes! , super funny, grotesque, unsettling, regular gross, with a sense of steadily deepening dread, scary growth/life stuff, and playing around with fairy tales/religion in general.
Especially liked all the blurrings, inversions and transfigurations, Child adult, human animal, high/low culture etc and how Williams likes to take archetypes and themes to such extremes that they begin to subvert themselves.

I feel a little bad handing out so may high ratings recently but I just been picking some good stuff for me recently. Ya know gotta Know thyself.

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