A review by tonythep
The Changeling by Joy Williams
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.
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.