In 2018 Daisy Johnson was the youngest author to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize for her debut novel Everything Under, a gender-fluid reimagining of the Oedipus myth involving canal boat communities and their complex family dynamics, as well as a strange monster hidden in the depths. Earlier, his short story collection Fen was critically acclaimed for its blend of the supernatural and the workaday. She has since written Sisters, a psychological horror story that uses supernatural elements to explore sibling bonds and traumas, and The Hotel, a series of seriously hair-raising interconnected ghost stories. Now comes Long Wave, which, although sharing some of these characteristics, is in many ways better and more subtle: perhaps his strongest work to date.
The Long Wave is the story of three generations of mothers. As a young child Orry was found after being “abandoned” by his mother on a wild, uninhabited island off the coast of England. What happened to Ori’s mother, and why they ran away to the island together, with Ori later found and adopted by a scientist specializing in rabbits, is a question that returns to her with full force in adulthood as she finds herself in a new postpartum situation and struggles to deal with it.
Orie’s mother is Ruth, whose witnessing of a mother’s apparent suicide with her child in a nearby river when he was 10 provides another mystery, as the police find no trace of either of them. And there’s Ruth’s mother, Edith, who locked Ruth in the house because she couldn’t bear the embarrassment of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy.
These complicated relationships do not always seem coherent; Figuring out who is who at the beginning of a novel can be confusing. However, a reader who is willing to sit with the uncertainty will be richly rewarded.
Johnson’s genius has always lay in his ability to combine vivid, poetic imagination, which could have been plucked from a myth or fairy tale, with writing that is based in almost mundane verisimilitude. Here we find “mountain hares with thick white coats who have never seen a human being even in their dreams”, a semi-abandoned lighthouse sitting behind a forest of thorns, and a child breaking stones to get back to his mother. In the hands of a lesser writer this might have been whimsical or laborious, but Johnson associates such imagery with sidewalks that are “sticky with calypso and crushed cigarettes” and blue NHS hospital curtains, “the rattle of trolleys on linoleum”. The effect is excellent.
The specificity of her language around early motherhood is particularly impressive. “Fatigue is like a suffocating, papery mess” – yes, that’s exactly what it feels like. She has such a talent for registering those vague early impressions, from the fontanel with its “immediacy of aliveness”, to the movements of the baby’s mouth as he dreams of milk, to nipple pain and breastfeeding (“She has an overwhelming feeling that he is drinking all her milk”). It has long been a prominent theme that our early relationships can come back to haunt us. Here too, Orie’s “ghostly, forgotten family are like intruders from somewhere behind the house”, but in this novel the emotional framework of her characters’ inner lives seems stronger, with less need for supernatural elements.
Johnson has always been interested in marginalized people, living in various states of precarity, and here she is as concerned about the surrogate and adoptive family as she is about the three central mothers. Ruth and her former colleague JP attempt to build a communal home where the women share the care of the children: “We need some funding, don’t we? Like some funding we can apply for, like Arts Council funding but the project is raising some kids and not doing it wrong and not going completely crazy and killing everyone.”
Johnson’s command of language is amazing. Many moments, such as the description of her being on the swing, amazed me at how accurately they reflected the complexities of the long childhood experience. She writes, “The space between the top and bottom of the swing contains elastic time, slowing to a trickle.” “Her feet touch the trees opposite, her head when she rests on the top of her spine she draws a line from the purple sky to the ground. She is in the ground. She is in the air, rising from the seat.”
Meanwhile, the way she expresses noise sensitivity from the perspective of a neurodivergent boy feels really fresh and inventive, the flow of her sentences mimicking the feeling of sensory overload: “Traffic surging and jams and beeping lights and beeping reversing and shoes and doors rattling and clicking and stamping dogs yelling at yap yap cars at dawn and chain jangles swinging on the playground. There are piles of heavy bags thrown on the floor, the mocking sounds of birds and the chirping and rattling and blunt object of human chatter everywhere.
How The Long Wave’s plot resolves is almost beside the point – and what a joy it is to read a writer who so confidently prioritizes character and language above gimmicks or twists. Although it is never mentioned, the tragic isolation through Gaza and the death or disappearance of mothers and babies seems to me like a ghost here. It is a novel full of deep sadness, perhaps because it was written at a time when the news was full of people searching for their families in the debris; Some of that frustration and loss is expressed in its prose. The reason for the mysterious “drowning” that Ruth witnessed – is it a foreboding? An expression of some collective maternal unconscious? A glitch in time, whose linearity is an illusion? – Never fully explained, although we have an inkling of it. Johnson goes much deeper than ever before in his investigation of love, fear, and isolation, and as a result creates a work that readers will remember long after they close its pages.
The Long Wave is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy here guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
