Wasn't able to read and review before book was removed from e=reader



Words are important to Gretel, always have been. As a child, she lived on a canal boat with her mother, and together they invented a language that was just their own. She hasn’t seen her mother since the age of sixteen, though – almost a lifetime ago – and those memories have faded. Now Gretel works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries, which suits her solitary nature.

Took a very long while to get going, did find the ending powerful but it was long old drag to get there. Can't recommend.

While I cannot truthfully disagree with the positive reviews of this novel - the writing IS beautiful, the themes ARE powerful, it IS, without doubt, literary fiction of a very high standard, if I am to review it honestly I have to say that I didn't like it much and find this type of fiction tedious. It reminded me of Elmet which I also disliked. It initially had me nicely hooked but then it just lost me. The intelligent use of myth, the queering of the narrative, the evocation of place, of legend, of relationships - all so beautifully done, I can fully appreciate it ... unfortunately it just left me cold. It just went on and on and on and was so unrelenting grim and a bit repetitive and ultimately, for me, a little bit ... boring. I felt thoroughly miserable by the time I finished it - and not in a good way. To conclude, you're probably better off taking note of the reviewers in frothing raptures over this book. It IS very good but I, crabby and of dubious tastes, disliked it. I'll give my English degrees back stat, sorry.

In the beginning I was captivated by this book.

Even before I started to read I loved the sound of it, I loved the cover, I loved that the author shared her name with my grandmother ….

The first chapter spoke to my heart and my head, as a woman wrote of the joy and the pain of finding a mother who had been lost to her for many years, and of living with somebody she both knew and felt was a stranger, because the passage of time, things that had happened to her, and the coming of old age had left her mentally damaged.

It was profound, and it was richly, beautifully and distinctively written.

<i>“I’d always understood that the past did not die just because we wanted it to. The past signed to us: clicks and cracks in the night, misspelled words, the jargon of adverts, the bodies that attracted us or did not, the sounds that reminded us of this or that. The past was not a thread trailing behind us but an anchor. That was why I looked for you all these years. Not for answers, condolences; not to ply you with guilt or set you up for a fall. But because – a long time ago – you were my mother and you left.” </i>

I realised that I was reading one of those books that remind you that every single person you might pass in the street, however unremarkable they might look, however eccentric they may look, has a whole life story of their own, their own world view, and maybe a story to tell.

The story that this book has to tell moves backwards and forwards in time, held together by a thread that follows the daughter as she searches for her mother and tries to understand what shaped her life and what made her leave her life – and her daughter – behind. She meets people who had roles to play in her mother’s life story, and ultimately she learns some of her mother’s deepest and darkest secrets.

This isn’t an easy story to explain, there is a great deal that is open to different interpretations, and what happens in the story isn’t as important as what the story has to say and how it says it.

It speaks of the complexity of the bond between mother and daughter; a bond that can be twisted out of shape by actions or circumstances, that allows roles to shift or even be reversed, but that can never be broken.

It speaks of the importance of language, of how it can be a joy, of how words can mean so much, of how they can make things clear but they can also make things opaque; and about how a child who shared an invented language with her mother might grow up to be a lexicographer.

There is a reversal, a reaction there, and this book is full of reversals and reactions.

There is folklore too, and a wealth of symbolism.

I loved the telling of the tale, the way pictures of lives were gradually built up from different pieces, and the way that some things came into the light while others remained in the shadows. The way that Daisy Johnson wrote, the way that she created this book, makes me want to describe her as an alchemist.

I wish I didn’t have to write anything negative, but I must.

One of the threads that runs through this book is the retelling of a very old story. It wasn’t wrong, but it was too literal and in the latter part of the book I couldn’t help thinking that it had compromised some of the characters and their stories and that a less literal retelling might have been much more effective.

Some of the ambiguity and opacity of this book is by design; but some of it is because rather too much had been crammed into it. And I think that is why I found so much to love but I couldn’t love the book as a whole in the same way.

I understand why this book has been lauded, and I might have found its failings easier to forgive if I had been a younger reader who hadn’t read many of the authors who must have infuenced her.

That said, I will rush to read whatever Daisy Johnson write next; because when she finds right balance between language and ideas and story the results should be sublime.

Utterly compelling - Johnson's writing is absolutely beautiful, eerie, both atmospheric and lyrical, with such depth. Highly evocative; depicting the landscape, the river, the wildness of Sarah and Gretel and their tumultuous relationship. An amazing re-telling of Odysseu's myth.

The brilliance of this book is that it's brilliance creeps up on you. It is an unusual set up but the way it's told is subtle and beautiful. I recommend it. Take your time and enjoy! Deserves its Booker shortlisting. A writer to admire and watch.

I'd been wanting to read Daisy Johnson since hearing praise for Fen, and I can't believe it took me this long to get round to her - her writing is amazing! She has a wonderful way of evoking atmosphere through her use of language and setting, This novel which offers a reinterpretation of the Oedipus myth, contains a relentless sense of unease and foreboding, and conjures up a nightmarish quality to explore themes of memory and belonging. Brilliant.

Daisy Johnson's debut book of short stories 'Fen' was a bewitching example of how modern-day real-world issues could be given a darkly imaginative fairy tale spin. So I've been greatly anticipating her debut novel which references both 'Hansel and Gretel' and the myth of Oedipus. Before reading it I went to see Johnson speak at a Waterstones event focused on modern reimaginings of myths (since it's a literary trope so in vogue at the moment given recent novels from writers such as Kamila Shamsie, Madeline Miller and Colm Toibin.) It was a relief to hear Johnson explain that she wrote “Everything Under” in such a way that no knowledge of the Oedipus myth is necessary to understand this new novel since my only familiarity with Sophocles' tragedy is mainly through the complex made famous by Freud. Nor have I read the original fairy tale of 'Hansel and Gretel' since I was very young.

So I went into reading this novel focusing purely on the story itself rather than how it relates to these classic tales. I wasn't disappointed because I'm so drawn to the universal themes she writes about, her characters who are outsiders on the margins of society and her strikingly distinct writing style. The beginning is so powerful in how it beautifully describes the sense of how we are tied to a sense of home which has forgotten us. However, I was quite confused throughout sections of this novel which jump through large periods of time and between characters. The story involves adoptions, gender fluidity, the disorientating effects of dementia and an elusive mysterious river monster named 'The Bonak'. But, by the end of the novel, I was fully engrossed and moved by how the pieces of the story slid together to form an impactful conclusion. It's the sort of book which I know will benefit from a rereading now that I understand its characters/plot better and the classic myths which were reworked into its structure.

A character named Gretel is at the centre of the story which primarily focuses on her quest to understand the past she's consciously forgot and find her mother Sarah who she's been estranged from for many years. The reason for Johnson's jigsaw style of storytelling seems to be rooted in a belief of how memories are necessarily distorted and also on a philosophy of life which is asserted by a character named Charlie. He claims that “life is sort of a spinning thing. Like a planet or a moon going round a planet… Sometimes it’s facing one direction but only for a second and then it’s spinning and spinning, revolving on its base so fast it’s impossible to really see. Except sometimes you catch a glimpse and you sit there and you know that’s what it would have been like if things had gone differently, that is the way it could have been.” Her characters can clearly envision different paths for their lives but find themselves curiously fated to follow trajectories that lead to dissolution and loneliness because of the bodies, families and circumstances they are born into. They are fettered by the past rather than liberated by a deeper understanding of it: “The past was not a thread trailing behind us but an anchor.”

It's interesting how Gretel's profession as a lexicographer seems to be a reaction against the instability of her upbringing where she and Sarah were so isolated they created a language for themselves: “They cut themselves off from the world linguistically as well as physically. They were a species of their own.” It's a compelling example of the way groups of people continuously splinter off from society, form cultures of their own and fold back into larger civilization to better inform and transform it. Just like time and language, gender and sexuality are never constant things in this novel. I really appreciated the complex way Johnson shows how her characters feel their way into inhabiting their bodies and expressing who they really are. Unlike most coming of age stories, there's a dark-edged violence to the anticipation of sex for Gretel when her mother Sarah gives a condom demonstration using a knife which tears through the material. Johnson excels at creating disturbing and tantalizing imagery which shakes the reader out of a complacent understanding of the world and this novel is a wondrous black gem of a book.

Well, wow. I think this might be the best book I've read on the Man Booker longlist so far—as much as I enjoyed Sally Rooney's Normal People, Everything Under is just so ballsy—it doesn't care at all if the reader is able to follow the plot, it just ploughs on, pinging around its own timeline, without stoppping for breath. I will admit that shortly before the story all came together at the end, [and I finally realised it was based on the Oedipus myth (hide spoiler)], I had absolutely no idea what was going on—but Daisy Johnson's writing is just so readable. Similarly to her fellow longlistee Rooney, her prose is very unpretentious and clean-cut, but Johnson's slightly dreamier and a little more macabre, willing to get the reader's hands dirty.

My first thought on finishing this book was pretty much "what the hell did I just read?" In my mind, that is a good thing, though I imagine this is going to be a very divisive, Marmite book. But no-one can deny it's blisteringly original.

I've been somewhat delaying writing this review because I wanted to wait and see if there were any own voices trans reviews out there, but I haven't managed to find any (if you spy one let me know and I'll link it here). So all this should be prefaced with the fact that I, a cisgender woman, can't comment on the representation of the trans experience that this book does delve into.

I can't claim to have read a huge number of Man Booker prize listed books, in fact there's only one that I know for sure I have read (Work Like Any Other) but you do get a feel for the kind of stories they tend to be. I mean, if you don't know the story of Oedipus then you should probably look that up first, but you don't go into the retelling of a Greek tragedy expecting laughs, this certainly isn't a story to read if you're feeling a little emotionally fragile. That being said, it's not just a misery-fest, the things that befall these characters are entirely realistic (though this isn't an ordinary tale of everyday folk). It doesn't have that feeling of being smacked over the head by someone shouting 'ISN'T THIS SAD' at you that some books have.

What I liked about this book was the way the author chose to tell the story through a multitude of perspectives. Not only is the narrative multiple POV but you gradually encounter more characters within the story who help to fill in some of the blanks and confusion, picking apart the words of previous characters. By the end of the story, and it isn't until quite close to the end, you finally unravel what may have actually happened. This is one of my favourite storytelling techniques, I've also found it used to huge success in The Fifth Season. It's a little like reading a mystery novel at times.

I'm not sure what it would be like reading this story without knowing (at least a little bit) the original Oedipus story, because a lot of the things I found clever or interesting were because it was seeing how they did x, y, or z in this context. I'd be interested to read the perspective of someone who 'went in cold' as it were, would this still seem as clever of a story if you didn't have that nuance?

Overall, I was fascinated by the way all of the disparate ideas, characters and settings fit together in this book. Yes, it does get a little heavy at times as books like this are wont to do, but if you struggle through some of the more 'worthy' passages there is a very powerful story underpinning everything with some very heartwarming and, at times, heartbreaking passages.

My rating: 3.5/5 stars

I received a digital advanced review copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Everything Under is a beautiful and fascinating and slightly impenetrable retelling of the Oedipus story. I felt I was under the reeds with the Bonak, puzzling my way through the narrative, as it slithered backwards and forwards in time. Living on the river feels mysterious and dangerous and ruinous all at once.

I’d not recommend starting this unless you can devote time to reading a sizeable chunk in one sitting. After reading in short bursts over a couple of days, at a third of the way through I had to go back to the beginning to get characters and timeframes straight enough to continue. At about that point it dawned on me where the story was going, not that I am overly familiar with Greek mythology, the publisher’s blurb mentioned it. To an extent, it was a relief to no longer have to figure out what was going on. I wonder, though, whether some aspects of the myth translated well into a late 20th century English setting - I am thinking here of Fiona’s role and influence.

Putting the plot to the back of my mind, I simply became engaged with the writing. In particular, the atmosphere she creates of living close to water, its hidden power, the superstitions surrounding it and what might be lurking under it. I loved all of this and would have liked more - more of Sarah and Gretel’s experiences on the houseboat, more of Charlie’s. I should find myself a copy of Daisy Johnson’s earlier collection of short stories (set on and around water, too, I believe) and see what else she has to offer on the theme. She is a talent to watch out for.

I am so glad this book was longlisted for the Man Booker because I don’t think I would have read it otherwise and that would have been such a shame. This is for sure my favourite of the list so far and I really hope it’ll make the shortlist so that more people will read this stunning little book.

The plot is difficult to summarize and I find it even more difficult because I was spoiled in a pretty major way before even starting the book. It did not change my enjoyment of the story per se but I do think I would have liked to have been able to read it with less knowledge. This is loose re-telling of a Greek myth; if you don’t know which one yet I would urge you to go in blind. At its heart this is a book about family, lost and found. We follow different narrative strands that converged and inform each other: we follow Gretel in her cottage with her mother who she has just found again and who is struggling with dementia, we follow Gretel during the fateful winter her mother left her, Gretel also tells Marcus’ story, the boy who spent a few weeks with them before her mother disappeared. The story is told exquisitely in different perspectives, including my personal favourite: a really well-done second person narrative. These different perspectives and the wonderful way Daisy Johnson weaves her story were by far the strongest part of this book. Gretel’s voice is brilliantly done and I love the musings on identity and memory.

Daisy Johnson’s language is just stunning, she creates an atmosphere so mesmerizing it felt like coming up air whenever I needed to stop reading. Her sentences are stunning, both linguistically and with the imagery employed.

“Whatever is was that pressed through the calm, cold waters that winter, that wrapped itself around or dreams and left its clawed footprints in our heads. I want to tell you that it might never have been there if we hadn’t thought it up.“

Johnson draws on riddles and fairy-tale, of subcultures and gender studies, in a way that felt super satisfying to read. The juxtaposition of the fluidity of both the prose and Gretel’s memories with the rigidity of fate worked incredibly well for me.

While I think this is an absolutely stunning work of fiction which did many new and exciting things while being stylistically brilliant, I do think the last 20% were not quite as strong. Here Johnson makes quite a lot of the subtext text and it did detract from the brilliance a bit. Mind, I still will read whatever else she has written because this was just so exciting.

Everything Under is beautifully written. At times, the prose strayed into feeling slightly overworked to me, but I think this is a case of personal preference rather than anything technical. I read it breathlessly, propelled downstream as inexorably and digressively as Gretel herself is, but the impression I was left with at the end was one of slight dissatisfaction - perhaps that's the point of Johnson's silty, elusive narrative. The overarching structure of the Oedipus rewrite felt, by the end, more constricting than anything else, and I'd have been interested to see what would have happened if Johnson had been less wedded to it, more happy to really tear it up for scrap material. (I very badly don't want this to seem like an unequivocal statement because it's based entirely on how I felt emotionally while reading, but I have reservations about the handling of trans narratives as a way of coding alterity and tragic fate for a cis audience. Anyway.)

But, still, the writing. Everything Under didn't really come together for me, but when it's good it's really good, and its inclusion on the Booker longlist - I am not entirely sure I'd shortlist it - is a wholly encouraging sign about how the prize is imagining itself in 2018.

I'll be reviewing this book on RTE as part of my Man Booker roundup. This is genuinely unsettling, really atmospheric and a worthy longlistee

Wow, this is a read and a half from an incredible talent! The story slithers and bubbles, sometimes with prolonged periods of calm and then the sluice gates are opened. Water is at the heart of this story. The canal where the plot is set is viscerally physical, muddied water, and then the plot slips and slides away. As a reader, it is easiest to let it wash over you!

At one level this is a retelling of the Odysseus story but it sprawls out to draw in lives lived on the margins of civilisation, gender issues and dementia as well as the odd fairytale. It's more of a palimpsest really overwriting the myth, playing with the characters and taking its own liberties.

I'm not convinced by the canal folk with their own ways of living and running their lives or by the slummy side of the canal network which might offend British Waterways! I can't help but think that any canal within fifteen miles of Oxford will be colonised by old hippies and millennials by now and will have had the odd makeover courtesy of lottery funding!

The characters in the parallel stories need a bit of sorting out as well and a sympathetic read early on but it's hard not to be sucked into their world and drawn down into the primaeval ooze at its heart.

There is a lot about language pulled out in the early isolated lives of the mother and daughter, their private language, the daughter working on dictionaries and the confusion caused by dementia. Words are slippery, they run through our hands like water as we try to attribute meanings, they run off into different channels and tributaries of meaning.

That's why it is sometimes hard to hold on but it's worth it. This is a most impressive novel and a read that will stay with you.

Very very clever, although a bit hard work, as you attempt to piece together what's going on.

Essentially, a re-telling of the Oedipus myth, the story centres on Gretel - brought up on the river by her disturbed mother Sarah, and living in fear of the "Bonak", a mysterious river creature. In parallel, we read the story of Margot, who leaves home after a prophecy from a strange lady. Gradually Gretel uncovers Sarah's story and the pieces fit together.

Although I did find this a bit hard work, when everything started to click it was immensely satisfying. I loved the imagery of the river, which flowed throughout the narrative, linking everything together.

Everything Under tells us the story of Gretel as she revisits a childhood almost forgotten. On an isolated canal boat with her mother Gretel grew up speaking a language peppered with invented words and strange uncertainties. When Gretel was sixteen her mother disappeared without a word and after years of fruitless searching they have been reunited and Gretel tries to unravel the truth of their hazy shared past, including Marcus, a young runaway who spent a winter with them on the water.

Gretel’s battles with her own imperfect understanding of this past and with her mother’s intransigence and encroaching dementia provides some powerful and moving moments but unfortunately, the Oedipal current that’s runs through the narrative felt forced and unwieldy so that I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough to believe Marcus’s part of the story.

The structure is fragmented as we drift from character to character, decoding the narrators from the style and context of each chapter. This kind of puzzle-solving is one of my favourite styles, you can learn so much about a character if you have to engage with them on this kind of level. The problem was the voice. A change in voice can be a powerful tool in a narrative, but only if it has a constructive effect on the reader. I couldn’t grasp the significance in the constant shifts from first to second person and it seemed a largely meaningless affectation, particularly when there seemed to be little that really distinguished the internal voices of the characters.

The dreamy, slightly eerie tone was pretty at times but this misty sort of narrative, particularly when coupled with the mythological themes and uncertain memory of the characters felt like something I have read a hundred times before. The characters themselves were of that liminal, vaguely esoteric type so common in stories like this but they just lacked an edge and a plausibility that might have given the story a depth and potency that was lacking.

Everything Under is a beautiful book. Sentences twist and burble with an elegance that nonetheless feels etched in stone. That old stories can turn so neatly within a modern world brings a sense of connection to myth, to the land, to the fallibility of supposed progress.
Gretel is a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries. A call from a morgue tugs at her forgotten past and sets her on a quest to find her mother and uncover what happened all those seasons ago.
They lived on the river once and shared a language of words forged to suit only themselves. They spoke of what frightened them as the Bonak.
As Gretel wanders closer and closer to the land of her childhood, she finds another missing person whose story is curled tightly within her own.
It feels wrong to tell out the plot because once you know it, there is an inevitability to it that cannot be unlearnt, and yet in the reading there is mystery and discovery. Many reviews name the ancient tragedy Everything Under retells, but I don’t want to do that either. There is more than one story working within the novel and even then, you can read the book without hearing them churning underneath this story. There is no intellectual snobbery, no forced connection, but an unfolding that suggests the way all narrative weaves, all stories wash up sea changed but ready to be heard again, at their root a fear of chaos and death, the monster that shows the way, the Bonak that is every child’s worst bogeyman hiding in the dark.
The world of the river, that can flush its secrets out into the ocean, feels far removed from the civilised world of roads and houses, of police, hospitals, libraries and supermarkets. It is an enticing, feral world that subsists in ancient rhythms. Laced over this world are cancer, dementia, linguistic sophistication, the power of narrative, alongside transgender, transvestism and fortune telling.
Everything Under is a novel rich with story and thought, a gingerbread house fit for hordes to gorge on. It would be hard not to love this book. On the longlist for this year’s Man Booker, Everything Under is a book that cries out to be read.

A wonderfully poetic novel about mothers and daughters, searching and how fate - Greek myth style - always gets us in the end.
It’s not for those who like their novels linear in time and place. The stories weave together through the novel. But it’s beautiful - like a work of art that grows, the more angles you see it from.
Highly recommended.