The final story in Joy Williams’s slim latest collection, The Pelican Child, is a folk tale inspired by the Slavic Baba Iaga repository, superficially familiar, but transposed to a strange key. Baba Iaga’s home in the forest is the same rotating hut standing on chicken legs, but she has also beena given unique children: instead of the traditional three hags, a beautiful pelican, a cat and a dog. One day, John James Audubon – the naturalist who illustrated the 19th-century ornithology book The Birds of America – inveigles his way into the hut, imprisons Baba Iaga, the dog and the cat, kills the pelican, pierces her with rods and rearranges her wings and neck “in a position of life” to draw her, then leaves. From a living creature the pelican becomes a specimen. We are squarely in Wordsworthian territory:
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
But we are also in the presence of something larger: the total plundering of the planet to a husk – which has characterised most of the preceding stories. At the end of “Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child”, when Baba Iaga offers her children the choice of being turned into humans, using some of her unutilised magic, both the cat and the dog refuse (the pelican, although now restored to life, has become mute). The brutal seven-word paragraph that ends the story is like a slap to the face, a stark un-deluding.
Williams writes in the unredemptive, existential mode, with a keen eye for the hilarious-cum-absurdist in the face of death or nothingness, as well as for sudden swerves, gear-shifts, jump-cuts and leaps that destabilise our expectations from the narrative. I would call hers metaphysical, even spiritual, fiction, not to be confused with religious fiction, the kind Marilynne Robinson writes, rooted in Calvinism. Williams is a believer – her father and grandfather were church ministers – but there is none of Robinson’s doctrinaire God-bothering in Williams’s work. What she does is completely different.
The epigraph to her collected stories from a decade ago, The Visiting Privilege, is from St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians: “Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.” To read her late work is to experience bafflement often, and it is here, in the “mystery” alluded to by St Paul, that we would do well to look to make some sense of that confusion. Williams works in a realm adjacent to the kind of transformation that St Paul talks about – the raising of the dead on Judgement Day – but instead of St Paul’s vatic mode, she inhabits the threshold region of darkness, in-between dying and what for the faithful would be transfiguration and for atheists nothingness. Here, for example, are the last sentences from “Chicken Hill”, depicting the main character’s dying moment: “The corners of her poor veranda were dissolving into shadow. She didn’t see the child leave her. She didn’t even see herself leaving, having just, at last, gone.”
Religion has been in retreat from culture for decades now and our secularist times have necessitated the search for wonder and awe elsewhere. But spirituality, faith, belief are not exactly coincident with religion, and Williams’s work is more squarely in the territory of the essential mystery of faith than in any institutionally enshrined belief in a god. “One should not define God in human language nor anthropomorphise that which is ineffable and indescribable,” she writes in Ninety-Nine Stories of God (2013), a unique collection of tiny pieces spanning one and a half lines to one and a half pages. “We must push our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing.” Ineffable, indescribable, darkness, unknowing – it’s easy to see how her work shares genes with Samuel Beckett’s. She lifts the skin of reality to peer unflinchingly into something that lies beyond the territory of language and meaning, and uses a form made of language to bring us there.
Throwaway biblical allusions offer keys for unlocking meaning. In the first story, “Flour” – which is mysterious and baffling – an unnamed character is working on translating from the Coptic a story about a woman carrying flour to her home in a jar that is broken. This parable is to be found in the non-canonical Gospel of St Thomas. Towards the end of the story, the translator says, “What is important is the quality of the emptiness [of the jar] she eventually discovers… And that is what is so difficult to suggest.” In these late stories – as in The Visiting Privilege, Ninety-Nine Stories of God and its companion volume, Concerning the Future of Souls: Ninety-Nine Stories of Azrael, published last year – we witness Williams digging down into unknowability, into “what is difficult to suggest”.
This work brings to mind what Edward Said theorised about “late style”: Williams is writing fiction that has thrown away conciliation and harmony, and is now producing art that is, in Said’s memorable words, full of “intransigence, difficulty and contradiction”. This is “art… not abdicat[ing] its rights in favour of reality”. Given the identitarian-sentimental-therapy axes of the majority of American fiction and its current fetishisation of smooth storytelling, this is nothing short of revolutionary.
How death-haunted Williams’s work is. One of the most indelible stories in The Pelican Child, “Chaunt”, is about a woman who has lost her only son, Billy, and his best friend, Jerome, in a road accident as the boys were returning on their bikes from a ruined chapel 20 miles away in “a hamlet abandoned long ago, harbouring only a few collapsed structures in an exhausted valley”. What the boys discover in the scattered, broken pews is astounding: creatures that are at once animals and not exactly animals, all waiting soundlessly and motionlessly for something that they know the boys are not. Later, Billy’s mother thinks:
Something extraordinary was about to be known, yet at the same time it would never be known… That was its disturbing beauty, what made it irresistible. She thought, Soon the children will no longer realise what they understand. They will no longer be at ease with wonder. They will be unable to abide it.
It is in these hinge moments of experience, the gap between one thing and another for which we have no language, that Williams’s stories take place: waiting and “a correspondence that might never occur”; realisation and understanding; life and death; death and the unknowable beyond (or nothing). “Death is not an event in life,” Wittgenstein observed; eternity, he wrote, is “timelessness”, “not infinite temporal duration”.
What is the eternal present these animals are locked in? The ending of the story delivers that Williamsian slap again: “In time, she would suffer death, as had her child and every mother’s child, but those to whom man has awarded extinction surely suffer more than death.” This is an intractable observation and takes us straight to the heart of one of the cohering threads of the book: the depredation of the planet and the destruction of our fellow creatures. Eco-consciousness is too on-the-nose, even crass, a term to bring to a discussion of this bleak, metaphysical, elusive book, but there is no getting away here from the endgame of climate change, nor the singularly aslant and unimaginable ways Williams comes to it. The world in these stories is a desert depleted of timber and ore, of water; of an Earth extracted of its resources; of the Great Barrier Reef dying; of all days being unbearably hot.
Animals have long been Williams’s touchstone for moral behaviour. The philosopher Peter Singer has argued that because animals are entirely in our power, it is our moral duty to extend kindness and compassion to them. Alongside JM Coetzee’s work, Williams’s is the shining example of fiction’s responsibility to rise to this call. Animals show up in The Pelican Child everywhere: a dying man intends to leave his prime beachfront property to a care home for German shepherds; a dying woman finds solace in thinking about the five dogs she had when she was a child and her horse, Abdiel (named after the faithful angel in Paradise Lost), “so real, such a living force, [her] determinant… the last real thing”; a pair of 60-something twins, Camilla and Candida, mount a foredoomed terrorist attack on their father’s industrial abattoir.
Thinking back to the epigraph to The Pelican Child after one reaches the end, it is impossible not to detect a bitter anguish. From a hymn by Isaac Watts, the 18th-century Congregational minister known as the “godfather of English hymnody”, it reads:
Let every creature rise and bring
peculiar honours to our King
The word “peculiar” then meant distinguished, unique, remarkable, not “strange” or “odd” as it does now. The human race has failed spectacularly in the stewardship of the world – our offerings will not be the gift of kings to a king, nor will there be many creatures left. The offerings will be peculiar in both senses – late and current – of the word, but the uniqueness and remarkableness will be firmly in the domain of horror.
The Pelican Child
Joy Williams
Profile Books, 176pp, £12.99
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[Further reading: Books of the year 2025]
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This article appears in the 12 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, All Alone: Christmas Special 2025
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