Reproduction by Ian Williams
Review by Lucy Kent
Reproduction could only have been written by a writer with their roots in poetry. Following Personals, a collection of “almost love-poems,” Ian Williams continues exploring human relationships, missed connections, and everything in between life and death. Beginning in the palliative ward of a hospital, and ending in a cancer ward, Reproduction is Williams’ experiment into what happens when a book “grows itself.”
When Felicia, 19, poor, from an immigrant family, meets Edgar, middle-aged, entitled and German, on the palliative floor of a flooded Toronto hospital, their differences seem to draw an unmovable line between them. However, grief creates a murky grey-area state, where things that seem in deep contrast can be moved together. Despite their similar ages, income, background and motivations, in the shared room of their mothers’ sickbeds the two come together, sharing a common identity in grief — the only stasis that would join them.
As Part 1 describes, ‘Edgar was no more man than Felicia was woman, they were benched teammates. They were children considering the hornet's nest whilst waiting for their mothers,’ and what blooms between these ‘teammates’ and the fallout is what the rest of Reproduction concerns itself with. Whether the ‘hornet’s nest’ hanging overhead is the shaky nature of their sexual relationship, the trauma of grief, or the sheer precariousness of illness, it becomes an apt metaphor for living as Williams’ describes it. Moving from the oddity that is Felicia and Edgar’s relationship, the novel shifts focus to the future, where Felicia raises Edgar’s son Armistice and closes in on the complex arrangements of raising children, keeping secrets and moving on in life.
Reproduction’s structure echoes itself, following the ticking biological clock in the background, as unconventional families come together. It reproduces itself: Part 1 concerns itself with the biological as twenty-three paired chromosomal chapters, whilst Part 2 reproduces again, and Part 3 grows up to 256 small sections. With inserted “Sex Talks” that dismiss conventional dialogue, following a free-form conversation without time or place markers, there are sporadic and emotional interruptions into the novel. This growth climaxes in Part 4 as the book itself becomes cancerous, old narratives write themselves into present conversations, forming growths that mimic tumours. In forming a conceptual narrative, where conventions such as typical dialogue, sentence structure and linear timelines fall away, Williams tracks the impact of the events of birth and death. Where Felicia and Egdar reconnect, estranged but still familiar, their past conversations grow in tumours within the present. No life event exists in a vacuum — future emotional responses are shaped by our experiences, and Reproduction captures this through its structure and prose.
Where it opens and closes with illness, Reproduction is mainly preoccupied with living. The raw emotional knots are mapped onto the narrative through diary entries, flow charts, and annotated lyrics — all documenting and reviewing memories of life, death, birth, and personal history. Where Felicity’s neighbour Heather recognises that ‘All ages of men were occupied by her memory of men’, it reflects how memories are in a constant stage of revision, moulding to new events and changing judgement.
At times, Reproduction feels too large for its 550 pages; it cycles through life and death simultaneously. It is as if we are in a poem, with lines constantly running over. Where the structure of the novel takes over, we lose clarity of the narrative somewhat in the middle, at times questioning whether conversations are happening to suit the conceptual form itself. But where structure and prose meet, is imaginative and detailed. Williams’ poetic technique embraces a natural oddity, conversations feel stuck in an arrhythmic state, and it feels like romance has been left behind in the conflation of something else bigger entirely — reproduction itself.
Reproduction is published by Dialogue Books, 24th September 2020