Doing the devil’s work

Azrael’s name in Hebrew translates as “help from God”, an indication of his importance not just in Christian tradition, but in Islamic and Jewish scripture too. He plays the role of the psychopomp, collector of souls; his job is to transport them from the dying and carry them safely into the afterlife, whether to Heaven or Hell. Contemplative, compassionate and somewhat put-upon, this Angel of Death at the centre of Joy Williams’s latest book is the willing, though not uncritical, servant of two masters.

“The Devil was once called son of the morning. He was the Morning Star”, Azrael reminds us. “Now he was a sop, a concession, an afterthought.” Williams’s Devil is vain, self-obsessed, forever fulminating on the injustice of his fall from grace. It is said that the devil has all the best tunes, and so it is here: he commands our attention because he is funny, the dark emperor of putdowns, the lord chief ironist. God seems nebulous by comparison, defined by his absence. “Despite the rumours”, Azrael reflects, “he never enters into dialogue with anyone.”

Can we call Concerning the Future of Souls a novel? Its subtitle suggests otherwise, and the ninety-nine vignettes of which it is comprised – some a page or two in length, many just a few lines – are less stories than episodes, conversations overheard and recorded as evidence, a stack of candid snapshots, randomly arranged. Each snapshot acts as an illustration of a given word or phrase – “kitsch”, “the fan”, “map your route” – and many are freighted with further observations from secondary sources: Friedrich Hölderlin, Elizabeth Hardwick, the Book of Common Prayer. Less fiction than secret history, Williams’s work exerts the fascination and sense of illicitness we might experience on finding and reading someone’s private notebook.

If this notebook has a secret geometry, it is the cone, referenced initially through the philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson believed in the self as continually evolving, a concept he sought to clarify through the “Cone of Memory”, a diagrammatic conceit that describes a continuing, dynamic relationship between memory, perception and the passage of time. Cones, like hidden clues, crop up repeatedly here – pulsing behind Azrael’s multitudinous eyes, as crash barriers in a driving school, as a conduit through which a soul hovering between life and death might be forcibly funnelled back towards the light. Our beliefs are challenged, even changed by these tales as we experience them, one word at a time. And it is time, specifically, that Azrael is concerned about, the way it seems lately to have sped up:

More and more, Azrael was arriving too late for the world. The logging had taken place months ago and the great trees had long since gone through – what was it called? – the processing sequence. The forest had been a living being and now it was not.

“Perhaps their concept of time has changed”, he speculates. Trees, dolphins, cattle, songbirds – all are exploited and maltreated by humans with no thought for the future. Many of these ninety-nine stories are horror stories, quietly spoken yet potent, images of human destructiveness and wanton cruelty. This desecration of the natural world is observed by Azrael as a perplexing conundrum, a symptom of malfunction on a universal scale. “The Devil had little to occupy his time … Everything he stood for was running along on its own, requiring very little involvement on his part.”

Azrael seeks refuge in desert landscapes, which he likes for their “mystique … their harbouring of prophets, their solemnity and stern disdainful beauty”. He has begun to wonder if souls have started to leave their human hosts before the body dies. The Devil offers him scant comfort. “It was inevitable … The soul wants out. Not being fed what’s necessary … Why stick around?” He compares this spiritual exodus to “mice leaving a sinking ship”.

Concerning the Future of Souls lays bare our predicament in a ruinously accelerating twenty-first century. The author is unsparing in her condemnation of humanity for climate change, environmental degradation, its smaller and larger wars. Yet this intricate, perfectly articulated work of art is as concerned with spiritual malaise as it is with the social contract. When time itself is knocked out of joint, our souls begin to sicken. Our physical survival, Joy Williams suggests, depends not just on our recognition of each other as human beings, but on the web of interconnected realities of which we are – for all we seek to deny it – inalienably a part.

Nina Allan is a writer and critic. Her most recent novel is Conquest, 2023

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