Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018:

So I finished this book today and to sum up my feeling in one word it would be relieved! this book was a total slog for me!!, I found it tedious and repetitive and dreaded picking it up!

From the blurb:
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.

A phone call from the hospital interrupts Gretel’s isolation and throws up questions from long ago. She begins to remember the private vocabulary of her childhood. She remembers other things, too: the wild years spent on the river; the strange, lonely boy who came to stay on the boat one winter; and the creature in the water – a canal thief? – swimming upstream, getting ever closer. In the end there will be nothing for Gretel to do but go back.

Now this book explores a lot of themes such as identity and mother/daughter relationships, it is very well written but it just didn't do it for me, I felt like I was reading the same thing over and over again, I didn't really like any of the characters and nothing actually happened! we have sections that take place on the river and I found myself skim reading these parts as I just was bored, the sections with Gretel looking for her mother were better but again we had lots of repetition in these sections too.

My views aside lots of people seem to love this book and I can see this making the shortlist, however this will not be one of my personal favourites from the long list.

Everything Under is an unnerving story of fate, family, and waterways, a transformed version of the Oedipus myth that plays with language and narrative. Gretel and her mother lived on a boat, had their own language, and their own fears. Years later, it has been a long time since Gretel has seen her mother, but she's always tried to keep looking, and eventually the past comes gushing back.

Told non-chronologically through different strands of narrative running concurrently, it goes through the motions of the revelations and recovered memories itself. The writing is stylistic and eerie, reminiscent of books like Fiona Mozley's Elmet (also like Elmet, it is a modern day story that feels completely out of time). The narrative is tangled and confusing at first, but as the strands all unfold they start to make sense together.

It is clear why Everything Under is being considered for the Man Booker Prize: it is strange and at times experimental, creating a strong sense of water and managing to twist a classical myth in to add to its unnerving edge. Due to this, it won't be for everyone, and is likely to be a book that some people will love and others won't get along with, but it is impressive how Johnson brings it all together and makes it pack a weird punch.

Everything Under is a modern day retelling of a classic Greek myth. It just didn’t work for me. I found it a bit too dark and unnerving but that is more about me than the book itself. The writing is compelling and beautiful and I suspect it will be a real contender to win the Man Booker Prize.

“It is hard, even now, to know where to start. For your memory is not a line but a series of baffling circles, drawing in and then receding”

Daisy Johnson’s debut novel, is described on the Penguin website thus:

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.
A phone call from the hospital interrupts Gretel’s isolation and throws up questions from long ago. She begins to remember the private vocabulary of her childhood. She remembers other things, too: the wild years spent on the river; the strange, lonely boy who came to stay on the boat one winter; and the creature in the water – a canal thief? – swimming upstream, getting ever closer. In the end there will be nothing for Gretel to do but go back.

It almost sounds like this is a thriller. It’s not. But you do – rightly – get the impression that there is a mystery to solve/uncover.

There is that as we and Gretel try to follow the breadcrumbs of her past to make sense of her estrangement from her mother, and understand who Marcus was and why he has been forgotten.
The book divides into four strands written in a mix of first, second and third person which interweave to tell the tale – a loose reimagining of a classical myth (one which many reviews of the books seem happy to identify, though that seems too much of a spoiler for me):-

The Cottage: – Gretel and Sarah re-united and trying to piece together the past through the additional haze of Alzheimer’s/ dementia or similar.
Sarah: – The mother’s story.
The Hunt: – Gretel’s search for Marcus and her mother.
The River: –Marcus/Margo’s story

This divide allows the story to be revealed slowly, like a leisurely meander down a waterway in a canal boat. I can see how this might frustrate some readers but for me it was addictively teasing and reigned me in more and more as each compartment in the story was opened just a crack further. I really found this book hard to put down (read in 2 days). Whilst there is some signposting of what’s to come, it mostly plays its card close to its chest and keeps the tension going whilst holding back on some of its surprises.

I loved Johnson’s use of classical myth, fairytale and folklore and the spectre of “the Bonak” – a kind of riverside bogeyman that haunted Gretel and her mother on the river and still haunts them. For me it encapsulated the unknown and the fear of facing your own history. And then there is the love. I was touched by Gretel’s enduring love for a mother who had abandoned her, and her desire to be loved again.

Everything Under is a book about loss and leaving, about fate, about longing and sexual identity, about the flow of words and water, about the fact “There are more beginnings than there are ends to contain them”.

These are things it is about. What it is, as a novel, is a thing of beauty.

I would be happy for this to win, now. The gauntlet has been thrown.

“I want to shout that you chose to leave me, no one made you do it, you cannot lie down behind your badly made decisions and call them fate or determinism or god. But sometimes I wonder if you are right and if all our choices are remnants of all the choices we made before. As if decisions were shards from the bombs of previous actions.”

Wonderfully written novel that I really enjoyed reading; it is to Johnson's credit that she makes the story so engaging and poetic despite disturbing subject matter. My reservations were to do with the plausibility of the plot in a modern-day setting - I struggled to believe that Marcus's decision to run away, and his attraction to Sarah, were really things that would happen in real situations. Nevertheless I think Johnson is a really exciting writer and I'm glad to see this novel on this year's Booker Prize longlist.

This book will win the Man Booker prize. I know it.

I am in shock, and awe. I am disgusted by some parts of this book but I am also equally blown away. I have never read something like this before.

I dived into this book after reading the truly vague blurb, and thought `oh boy, this will be either a favourite or a disaster!`. I am Turkish, not a native English speaker and of some heavily metaphorical books that is aimed to crack the reader's skull just doesn't work for me. So I had my doubts about this one but I am extremely pleased to say that it's turned out to be an absolute reading joy. So guys, first thing first: If I get this book with my second hand English, you have no right to say, "Oh I just don't get it" -I think I am making it pretty clear that I am officially a fan of this book-

The blurb is vague and it is for a reason. This book puzzled me for a long time, until 40% of the book I was a bit confused about who was who, and what was really going on. Once the pieces get connected I was transfixed, it was like seeing an avalanche coming on to me but I was so paralysed I couldn't move, I couldn't stop reading. I knew it'd hit me. I knew it was going to be a slap to my face. And it was but I enjoyed every moment of it. What happens in this book can be told in a paragraph and if I was told, I would have said 'Ewww' and refuse to read the book. The way it is told is so otherworldly, so dreamy, so damn good. It is in a way like Jeanette Winterson and Angela Carter- but better storytelling then Winterson and less bizarre than Carter.

This is a re-telling or re-imagining of something (not gonna say, not gonna spoil) but I am taken away with this writing.

Daisy Johnson could be our new Angela Carter dear readers. From now on I will read everything she writes. Even a shopping list.

5 full, bold stars. Just amazing.

"This is your story – some lies, some fabrications – and this is the story of the man who could have been my father and of Marcus, who was, to begin with, Margot – again, hearsay, guesswork – and this story, finally, is – worst of all – mine. This beginning I lay claim to. This is how, a month ago, I found you."

In a year when the Man Booker jury has seen fit to broaden the definition of the prize in several troubling directions - low quality genre fiction, graphic novels, poetry and above all accessible books that prize the message over pure literary merits - it is great to see at least one book that perhaps extends the prize more in the other direction, towards literary innovation and quality prose, and yet still speaks to the issue of borders which seems to be a key theme in 2018 for the Prize, and indeed the world more generally.

In a post prize listing Guardian q&a author Daisy Johnson responded to one question:

"The book that changed my mind:

Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, a retelling of King Lear, made me realise that old texts can be torn down and rebuilt in a different way."

Two of the best books of last year were such reteĺlings of old texts in a modern context: Preti Taneja's We That Are Young, shortlisted for the Republic of Consciouness Prize and winner of the Desmond Elliott prize, another retelling of King Lear and the best of a plethora of Shakespeare rewrites; and Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire, shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker and winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction, a retelling of Sophocles's Antigone.

Those two books, as typical for their type, chose to try to work within the real-life constraints of their settings. Shamsie's novel did have a Muslim Home Secretary which struck some as far fetched, only to come true. Her literally explosive ending attracted some criticism but was dictated by the story (the criticism mostly coming from readers who hasn't seen this as a retelling of a myth, since it's origins as such weren't overtly flagged). And Shamsie dropped the father murder/incest part of the Oedipus backstory altogether, replacing it with a neat solution involving Jihadis.

Freud has rather distorted our perspective of Oedipus's story: Oedipus didn't suffer from an Oedipus complex at all. Instead the tale is more around the (in)ability to avoid a predetermined fate and, often forgotten, the abandonment of a child by its parents, which is how Oedipus's story starts, and the later fleeing from his (unknown to him adopted) parents by a child, each in response to a prophecy. And, in modern terms, transgender fluidity plays a role: the blind prophet Tiresias, who alerts Oedipus to his guilt, earlier spent 7 years as a woman.

Everything Under is at heart a modern retelling of the Oedipus myth, in this widest sense, but actually it is so much more than that. Set in the communities of those living on boats on the River Isis around Oxford, the novel also speaks to language (a key theme and particular highlight of the novel) and even includes a moving portrayal of dementia/Alzheimer's in an elderly parent, first seen in the loss of language:

"You are not yourself. You are not the person who did any of those things . You do not remember the language that made you that person.
...
The word you were looking for is egaratise and it means to disappear yourself, to step out of your past. I tell you there is no such word and show you the place in the dictionary to prove it.
...
Small words bother you. Tap, screw, step, handle. You pronounce them wrong or speak as if they mean something else.
...
You are saying the word parasitic over and over again. Now para-SIT-ic. Now PARA-sit-ic. Your left foot knocks out the beat on the floor. At first I do not understand what you are doing but after a moment I realise you are examining your use of the word for flaws, testing yourself for further loss."

Gretel is now a lexicographer and is working on a dictionary entry for 'break' when the present day story opens and when she receives a report consistent with her missing mother from a hospital mortician:

"I tried to work. Break. To separate into pieces. To make or become inoperative. I would finally see you again at the morgue in the morning. Dread was a word that could be used also to describe flocks of birds taking off into the sky. The mass of birds rose up my throat, flooded out through my cracked jaw.
...
There was a tag attached to one of the toes and, on another, a bell. What’s that for? I asked.

He palmed a hand across his scalp. His hands were very clean but there was some food at the corner of his thin mouth. It’s unnecessary, he said, a foible really. Before heart monitors it was to make sure the dead were really dead. I retain a sense of tradition.

That must be where dead ringer comes from, I said, and he looked at me the way people sometimes did when I talked like a dictionary. I wanted to tell him about all the beautiful words I’d thought of during the drive for the places we keep our dead: charnel house, ossuary, sepulchre.

Do you want a countdown? Three, two, one? he asked. Some people do.

No."

And as a child Gretel and her mother had words they used all of their own, as Marcus observes when he encounters them:

"The more he listened the more he understood that the words were instinctual, formed from the sounds things made or words Gretel had come up with as a baby which had stuck . Watching them he realised that it had been just them for so long it did not matter if no one understood . They had cut themselves off from the world linguistically as well as physically."

Johnson doesn't adhere too slavishly to her source. Indeed it is rather like a dramatic production where one actor plays more than one part: in Johnson's Oedipus Rex, Laius goes blind (like Tiresias and later Oedipus in the original) and also speaks in "riddles, in codes and secrets" asking Oedipus the Sphinx's 2nd riddle. And another character seems to stand in for both Tiresias and the Oracle of Delphi.

Instead Johnson mixes in elements of various other fairy tales and myths, most notably Hansel and Gretel ("
a pattern laid out behind you like a reversed breadcrumb trail"), leaving the reader with lots of clues and allusions to follow, and also adds a memorable supernatural element of her own in the Bonak, the most weird and haunting aspect of the novel, a word initially invented as part of Gretel and Sarah's private language:

One of those words being Bonak (see below) as Gretel reflects towards the novel'end:

"Again and again I go back to the idea that our thoughts and actions are determined by the language that lives in our minds. That perhaps nothing could have happened except that which did. Effing along, sheesh time, harpiedoodle, sprung, messin, Bonak. Bonak, Bonak, Bonak. Words like breadcrumbs. As if all along Bonak didn’t mean what we were afraid of, what was in the water, but watch out; this is what is coming down the river."
...
"What’s a Bonak? Marcus watched her heaving the mechanism back down, snapping it into place.

It’s anything, she said , gritting her teeth.

What do you mean?

Last summer it was this stupid dog that was so hungry Sarah said it would bite. But ages ago it was a storm that nearly wrecked the boat and another time it was a fire that burned a lot of the forest and that we thought would burn us too. This winter it’s something else. Sarah says maybe it’s the worst Bonak there has ever been but we don’t know yet.

It’s what you’re afraid of?

It’s the Bonak, she said simply and wouldn’t talk about it any more."

The book is expertly constructed from four interlacing stories frpm both present and different times in the past, with the narrator, Gretel, using the 1st, 2nd (as she tells her dementia-suffering mother her own story) and 3rd (as she imagines that of Marcus/Margot.) This could have been confusing but part of the journey is orientating oneself in the story, and the different threads are clearly signposted by chapter headings:

"There are more beginnings than there are ends to contain them. Somewhere you and the father who is not my father are in a narrow bed, as yet unafraid, long limb to long limb, mouth to mouth as if one of you was dying already. Somewhere I am standing in the dictionary office listening to the phone ring in an empty morgue. Somewhere I am opening the door to the cottage on the hill and you are pushing past me, commenting on the beige wallpaper that has been here as long as I have, the mouldy cornices and lack of ashtrays. Couldn’t you even buy a bloody car? And somewhere Margot is walking. Here I fall back on imagination, possibility. I fit her words into my cheek and hope she will not mind if I make allowances, embellish. Somewhere she is walking and perhaps she hears me, the echo of repetition and thinks, That’s not right. Listen. Listen, this is how it went."

With that background then, the one rather disappointing part of the novel was how ultimately the plot of the book (and to be fair this book is so much more than just plot) depends on a delayed revelation of "the things Fiona had said just before she’d told [Margot] to go" away from her parents. This quote comes from is the first quarter of the novel, but we are then drip-fed various hints (almost thriller style) throughout, but with the final big reveal deferred to the last 10% (yes, I read this on a Kindle) of the book. The problem is that since it has been directly lifted from the most famous element of the source, it is rather obvious to the reader all along, albeit Johnson does have a final twist of her own.

"What had been said was not a truth only a suggestion of one way it might go. And if she knew what was coming she was certain she could avoid it. Like a car crash."

And the novel also fails (unlike say We That Are Young and Home Fire) to make the developments particularly credible in a modern setting albeit Johnson does neatly link in the rather secretive nature of the canal community:

"She pointed down towards the water. I spent some time on the canals when I was starting out. Not an easy job. They have their own communities down there, their own rules. They don’t call the police or child services when something goes wrong. They have their own authority. It’s a different world."

5 stars as a literary novel but only 3 judged purely as a retelling of a myth, making 4.5 overall. Rounded down to 4 for now.

But a book I strongly hope makes the Booker shortlist and (particularly this year) a potential winner.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

From the beginning it was clear that this book was booker worthy. It came as a complete surprise. Johnson's writing is just beautiful, metaphorical and impactful.
It's again involving retellings of Greek myths. But, it's done really well. It has a surreal style, and full of twists. When you think you know what's going on, you get another surprise.

I really enjoyed reading it, and looking forward to seeing if she will get the award.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for granting a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Everything Under is a transposition of an ancient Greek legend into modern-day England. I did not know which legend when I read the novel which allowed a slow dawning to take place. Other reviewers have named the legend and I cannot help feeling that knowing where things are heading would make the reading both simpler and less satisfying, Therefore, I will skirt around much of the plot.

Having said that knowing the direction of travel would make the reading simpler, it must be said that without this knowledge, the reading is far from straightforward. There are 8 main sections, each broken into subsections headed "The River", "The Hunt", "The Cottage", etc. These are in fact parallel narratives that continue through the novel. They are opaque in terms of who is narrating and when they take place.

This is further complicated by some characters having more than one name and more than one role; and the general absence of names through much of the work. Timelines seem to clarify and then blur again. It is not easy to see how the narratives inter-relate and for the first quarter (at least) of the text, there is a fog of confusion. There are river boats, a senile woman, a lexicographer, a cast of people who live on the canals and in the woods...

With time, little chinks of light are let into the narrative. Piece by piece, things start to fall into place. By three quarters, most pieces are in place and by the end, it is mostly transparent. It is as if the fog has lifted and some of the things that happened in the fog don't look too well in the clear light of day. Everything Under is actually a really dark and menacing work.

That doesn't make it unlovely, though The description of the houseboat community is brilliant. I took this to be set in Oxford - where our lexicographer works - but perhaps that is adding two and two and getting five. The descriptions of unconventional childhoods, of fluid gender identity, of ambiguous sexuality are all fabulous. There are abandonments - walking away from children, walking away from families. There is the kindness of strangers mixed in with the threat of monsters - the canal thief and the Bonak.

Everything Under feels perfectly balanced. The gradual reveal makes the book progressively easier to read and makes the reader feel smart as the penny drops, time after time, just before a significant detail is revealed. There is delicacy, there is complexity. I loved Everything Under.

My only reservation is that the parallels to the Greek legend slightly diminish the experience and make something bizarre and quirky feel a bit contrived. As some novels grow in power after they have been put down, this one feels a little as though it is losing its edge. But that's just me; I am sure others will feel differently. It's still a bit of a masterpiece.

Once upon a time, it was rare to find literary re-workings of classical myth and fairy tales: now they’re everywhere. This book uses a skeleton of both upon which to hang a story of broken families and searches for home. The problem for me, and I’m putting this in spoiler tags for anyone who hasn’t yet read this book, is that the premise of the myth just doesn’t stand up in a modern context.

The writing is of that dreamy, lyrical prose style that we can find in many books that inhabit this fictional space – it veers into the opaque at times and can become imprecise under cover of being ‘poetic’. There are repeated images – oranges, for example – but I can’t see what they’re doing here (the golden apples of the Hesperides? Eve’s apple? Neither of these fit). Similarly, the concern with language: the narrator and her mother used made-up words between them, the narrator in the present is a lexicographer on the OED, the mother in the present is forgetting words due to her Alzheimer’s (and the loss of brain capacity is likened to the size of an orange) but the significance of all this – is there one? – is left unclear to me. I can see from other reviews that these repetitions delighted other readers but personally I can’t read their hermeneutic significance – and images without interpretational weight are empty of meaning. That words create bonds between people is hardly revelatory, surely?

For me, this is a kind of sub-Angela Carter/Jeanette Winterson and the slew of mostly female authors who have followed them in their attention to archetypal stories and ‘dreamy’ (in all that word’s connotations) stylistics.

Gretel does not grow up like other kids do. Her mother is different, they live on a boat, stop here and there and they even invent their own language. After the mother’s sudden disappearance, Gretel is left on her own devices and has to find a place in the world. The early fascination for words quite naturally makes her a lexicographer, a very lonesome job in which she updates dictionary entries. Even though she hadn’t been in contact with her mother for more than sixteen years, she hasn’t forgotten her and always feared that she might be the person behind a newspaper article about a fatal accident. When they are re-united, also the long lost memories of their former time together come back.

Daisy Johnson’s debut novel is nominated on the Man Booker Prize 2018 longlist, itself already an honour, but even more so for an author at the age of only 28. It only takes a few pages into the novel to see why it easily could persuade the judges: it is wonderfully written, poetic and shows a masterly use of language:

“I’d always felt that our lives could have gone in multiple directions, that the choices you made forced them into turning out the way they did. But maybe there were no choices; maybe there were no other outcomes.”

Gretel’s has never been easily and having found her mother, seriously marked by her illness, doesn’t make it easier since she will never get answers but has to live with how her life turned out.

What I found most striking was how Daisy Johnson easily transgresses boundaries in her novel: being female or male – does it actually matter? If you call a person Marcus or Margot, it’s just the same, you immediately recognize the person behind the label. Sarah and Gretel live on the water and on land, they blend in nature and don’t see a line between man and animal or plants, it’s just all there. The language itself also doesn’t know any limits; if need be, create new words to express what you want to say. And there is this creature, a fantastic being that can also exist either in Sarah’s mind or in this novel where so much is possible.

Just like Gretel and her brother Hansel who were left in the woods but managed to find a way out, Gretel follows the crumbs to her mother, retraces the journey they did when she was young and with the help of the people she meets, tries to make sense of her own and especially her mother’s life.

The structure is demanding since it springs backwards and forwards which I found difficult to follow at times. But the language’s smoothness and virtuosity compensate for this exceedingly.

A modern reimagining of the Classical Greek Oedipus myth. Very reliant on coincidence and so rather unbelievable.

Brimming with wonderfully evocative language, totally in keeping with the linguistic storyline. This novel reads like a classic and undoubtedly this verg talented young author is one to watch. Unfortunately, for me, the storyline got lost within the threads of the beautiful language and was difficult to follow. I so wanted to love this book but struggled to finish.

A literary novel of the liminal, language, leaving and legend, longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker prize.

“The river cut into the land. It was no good. She walked and walked until she slept. She saw the people on passing or moored boats looking at her and understood she did not look like a boy. She looked like something in between, uncertain, only half made”

This is firstly a book of the liminal.

Transitions and fluidity of gender, of family relationships and family status recur frequently, with the author herself switching between first, second and third person narrative, all in Gretel’s voice.

And reminding me of the fellow longlisted Warlight) boundaries are vital to this book. The boundary between land and water: the author’s previous and debut book (a short story collection) Fen was set in that eponymous district where water becomes land and land can lie below water; this book is set on a river and in the world of canals (again the parallels with Warlight are strong) and on the strips of land alongside them. The boundary between the surface and the deep and the dangers that lie under the water. Boundaries between communities - the canal and river folk have their own sense of community and self-sufficiency and clearly are carefully maintain their distance from the world, in a recurring theme we are told “they don’t call the police or child services”. And even the boundary that Sarah creates for her and Gretel through their shared childhood language,

“I understood suddenly what you had done by creating your own language and teaching it to me. We were aliens. We were like the last people on earth. If, in any sense, language determined how we thought then I could never have been any other way than the way I am. And the language I grew up speaking was one no one else spoke. So I was always going to be isolated, lonely, uncomfortable in the presence of others. It was in my language. It was in the language you gave me”

Language is then the second theme.

Marcus is first attracted to Sarah and Gretel by their shared language: “They had cut themselves off from the world linguistically as well as physically. They were a species all their own. He wanted to be like them, he wanted to be them.”

Margot as a child finds words difficult “Those words on the page, swimming in and out of one another. She would not read, told them the words were ants which crawled, would not hold still”. By contrast Gretel loved words as a child, tries to teach Marcus Scrabble and later she becomes a Lexiographer.

In Sarah’s early dementia we are told that her inventiveness with language begins to leave her “a word becomes trapped in your mouth and you hack at it, trying and failing to spit it out” and later “The next day I watch the words leaving you. The pronouns are slippery and won’t stay still; objects go first so that you only point or shout until I bring what you want. Names are long gone.”

Leaving is another themes which dominates the story.

Sarah leaves Gretel and the older Gretel is ever concerned she will leave again and wants to understand Marcus’s leaving. Fiona leaves her family and then Margot’s family, after influencing Margot to leave. It also features as as a euphemism for another underlying threat: “When Gretel was a child, she said, she wouldn’t talk about death so we called it leaving”. And I think it is no accident the word Gretel is occupied with as the book begins:

“For a living I updated dictionary entries. I had been working on break all week. There were index cards spread across the table and some on the floor. The word was tricky and defied simple definition. These were the ones I liked best. They were the same as an earworm, a song that became stuck in your head.”

And of course this is a book of legend.

Primarily it is a fantastic reworking of a Greek myth, but rather than say “Circe” or Pat Barker’s upcoming “The Silence of the Girls”, both of which renarrate a myth from the viewpoint of a female character, or Shamsie’s “Home Fire” which uses the very detailed narrative of the myth but set in today’s world, here the myth is a starting point for a complex tale.

The Greek myth is and overlaid with Biblical allusion (Margot contemplates, unknowingly accurately, Moses as a name), fairy tale (Gretel and the recurring mentions of breadcrumbs) and even a familiar modern children’s tale, with a one word but I think very relevant mention of Julia Donaldson’s classic Gruffalo.

But added to all of this is invented legend. The character of the Canal Thief reminded me somewhat of The Essex Serpent, and in Sarah and Gretel’s language becomes or expands into the Bonak “There were more Bonak in the water than could be counted: bodies whose ghosts might catch on the anchor and decide to stay, trunks of trees big enough to sweep the boat away, the canal thief who rose out of the rip-tide tunnels and hesitated.”

The Bonak increasingly dominates their lives and its true meaning and significance becomes, at least to me, more obscure at the same time the parallels with the Greek Myth become clearer to the reader (at the same time the truth about the different characters emerges to Gretel). “As if all along Bonak didn’t mean what we were afraid of, what was in the water, but watch out; this is what is coming down the river”

Really a wonderful book and one which I can only congratulate the the Booker judges for longlisting. My review only scratches the surface of the novel (I could write more for example about the mythological parallels or the concept of destiny and whether one can avoid it).

”There are more beginnings than there are ends to contain them.”

This arresting phrase caught my eye as I read this novel. It seems to say something about memory, which is discussed often during the course of the story (“Even the history I thought I’d kept was wrong”), but also about a a dominating theme of destiny:

“But sometimes I wonder if you are right and if all of our choices are remnants of all the choices we made before. As if decisions were shards from the bombs of our previous actions.”

The story is a re-working of a Greek tragedy. This isn’t immediately obvious as the text is slippery. We jump around between several time lines, characters shift (including their gender), there are monsters that may or may not be mythical. You have to read carefully to keep your bearings.

But the good news is that Johnson’s narrative deserves as well as requires slow and careful reading. The text is filled with arresting phrases: this is a book where it is worth shutting yourself away and losing yourself in the writing as well as the story.

Once you have worked out which Greek tragedy is being re-told, some of the pieces start to fall into place and the text becomes a bit easier to read. I am not going to say which tragedy that is, though, because working that out (unless you have seen it in other reviews) is part of the fun.

Gretel is our main protagonist (an obvious nod to Hansel & Gretel, which is not a Greek tragedy, but makes phrases like “Words like breadcrumbs” more fun when you come across them). A lexicographer by trade, she is often reminded of her childhood on a houseboat when she and her mother invented words to form their own language. But Gretel has not seen her mother for 16 years, half of her lifetime and, for reasons explained in the story, she sets out to find her. This throws up other memories (for example, who was the strange boy who lived with them on the houseboat for a while one winter?). Gradually, we learn the answers.

All of this is set on and around the river. Clearly, the river is important in many myths and legends. Here it is often dark and threatening, mysterious. As is the community that makes the rivers their home, itinerant and apparently a law unto themselves. (For some background, non-fiction reading about life on the water, Helen Babbs’ Adrift is an excellent read, although set in the middle of London rather than Oxfordshire). And, thinking of dark and mysterious, there is a dog that accompanies Gretel on part of her journey: given we realise quickly that this is a re-working of a very old story, what part does that dog play? This is just one of the areas where the novel gives food for thought.

This is a novel to make your head spin, but in a good way. The structure keeps you on your toes (but is not unmanageable). The language is a delight to read. The ideas thrown into the story set your brain buzzing.

I loved this and I’m grateful to the Man Booker judging panel for bringing to my attention.

A remarkable, shape-shifting, challenging novel. In my mission to get through this year’s Man Booker longlist Daisy Johnson’s re-working of the Oedipus myth is my first of this year’s crop, and it’s a very promising start.

This is not an easy novel, let’s be clear. It challenges you to make connections, to understand the time-shifts as the narrative flows back and forward through time. Indeed, the metaphor of flowing is apt, as water – the river, the canal – is central to this story. The Oedipus myth – in which he is doomed to murder his father and have sex with his mother, despite attempting to outrun the prophecy – is given a gender-shifting twist and the reader has to tease out the connections. Who is Margot/Marcus? Why is Gretel searching for her mother Sarah? Who, or what, is the Bonak? There are riddles aplenty.

Johnson’s novel is full of the elusiveness - the creativity - of language: Sarah has developed dementia and struggles at times to find the right words; the mother and daughter have a language of their own, into which they retreat from the outside world. Language makes us as much as we are defined by environment, our family, our genes. And stories make us – the myth of Oedipus overshadows the characters as the old-new story is played out. Fate, destiny, family: ‘The places we are born come back to us. They disguise themselves as words, memory loss, nightmares.’ As I said, a challenging book, but deeply moving, superbly written, and it will leave you thinking long after you finish it. I suspect a very strong contender for the Man Booker. Four stars for now, though I may come back to bump it up to 5!

(Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher for an ARC of this book).