In the Booker-Prize-nominated Everything Under, Daisy Johnson exchanges one vivid mythology for another by transplanting the Oedipus myth into a remote canal boat community in modern England. The book is mesmerising, unconventional and pleasantly challenging, placing unusual trust in the reader and successfully overturning a number of literary conventions.
The protagonist of Everything Under is a lexicographer called Gretel. The child of an odious and (mercifully) deceased mother who abandoned her when she was a teenager, Gretel is drowning in memories of her childhood on a canal boat on the river Isis; a closed-off world where myths and legends are still as real as the day they came into being. Mist, reeds, fens and swampland still conceal primal, old world fears, and water is not a symbol of purity or transparency, but of darkness, chaos and danger. Out of the depths of these murky waters emerges the Bonak, a serpent-like creature that is just as adept on land as it is in the water and that comes to represent everything that Gretel and her mother fear. Even when Gretel is abandoned and grows up in the modern world, drifting despite being rooted to her job, the Bonak continues to follow her and to be present in every one of her fears. Despite this – or perhaps because of it – adult Gretel decides to face the past, and to search for the mother, alive or dead, that she doesn’t quite want to find. The search begins with Gretel’s childhood on the river, and her mother’s sheltering of Marcus; a boy running from a prophecy so horrible that he abandoned his parents and his gender to prevents its coming true. And all the while the Bonak is watching, and appearing when and where it is least wanted.
Johnson brings a folk-horror-like vividness to rivers and fens in such a way that the landscapes themselves become characters. Johnson presents the canals as old, folkloric England in all its ‘blanket of the dark’ terror, and if Gretel’s horrible, waterlogged nightmares prove anything, it’s that leaving the landscape does not mean that the landscape will ever leave you. The fens shape inhabitants so in touch with the old world (and so mistrustful of the new one) that they will not even approach the police with their fears about the presence of something evil in the water beneath them. They know that they will not be believed, or even taken seriously. One of Johnson’s greatest skills as a writer is showing us this world in such a way that we never quite become part of it. We can experience it, but it is not ours. One must live in it to truly know it.
Johnson has a rich, baroque style that is reminiscent of Angela Carter’s self-declared “purple, overblown, self-indulgent prose” and interest in the primal feminine in dark fairy tales. Three different narratives – Marcus lost, Mother lost, Mother found – interweave with pleasingly little respect for conventional chronology, and though it can take a while to work out where one is and when, the experience is never exasperating. Like A Clockwork Orange, Everything Under is a book that must be settled into.
When dealing with books with this kind of chronology, it is best to just sit back, relax and wait for the author to take you where you need to be. In Everything Under, this is actually advantageous to the plot itself, as it enables us to focus more on the novel’s stunning portrayal of folkloric landscapes and Gretel’s fear of being plunged into the past without warning. As if Everything Under were not already unconventional enough, a significant portion of the novel – that in which Gretel recounts her experience with her mother after finding her – is also written in that pariah of the creative writing world, second person narrative, to great effect and brilliance. I sincerely hope that Johnson’s mastery of this kind of narrative will lead more writers to attempt it, and stop all this bloody nonsense about ‘accusing the reader’ and doing the literary equivalent of ‘breaking the fourth wall’.
Everything Under remakes the Oedipus myth by abandoning traditional Daddy Issues in favour of serious reflection on the complexity of mother-daughter relationships. Its unsettling undercurrent of sensuality linked to the desire to possess a mother-like figure both builds on the original myth and renders it more complex. The book’s portrayal of gender identity through gender fluid and transgender characters is also resolutely Greek – “there are more than five sexes”, said Lawrence Durrell, “and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them” – and is a refreshing break from our world’s constant mood swings between “gender identity is in fashion – let’s do that” and “gender identity is a mental illness- lock ’em up”.
It amazes me that Everything Under has not been getting the kind of bad press that this year’s Booker Winner, Milkman, has had to put up with, i.e. “Milkman is difficult, therefore Milkman is elitist, blah blah blah blah”. The Idiot Police may come for this book someday. In the meantime, Everything Under‘s way of disquieting the reader and remaking the ordinary ensures that it remains one of the best books of 2018.
LADYGILRAEN 