Everything Under by Daisy Johnson review – a stunning debut novel

Longlisted for the Man Booker prize, this complex story about a troubled mother-daughter relationship creates a strange new mythology

Jeef VanderMeer
Thu 26 Jul 2018

M

y introduction to Daisy Johnson was the instant classic Fen, a bold, take-no-prisoners collection situated somewhere between Angela Carter and Deborah Levy. The muscular style and blunt poetry of its stories about women often forced to contend with difficult men used the fantastical in brilliantly physical ways. Johnson’s first novel, longlisted for the Man Booker prize, builds on that achievement by blending a deep understanding of character and storytelling sophistication to examine a troubled mother-daughter relationship. The result reminds me of Iris Murdoch – that uncompromising interiority of character – and more recent works such as Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond.

‘I don’t think I would have wanted to write a book that everybody liked’ … Daisy Johnson.
Photograph: Pollyanna Johnson

The first book interview

Daisy Johnson: seeking 'intense strangeness in a world that feels like ours'

Fen’s author explains how short stories were the perfect form to ‘do really weird things and have really weird things happen’

Richard Lea
Thu 14 Jul 2016


“T

he starting point was the eels,” says Daisy Johnson. These strange creatures writhe in “headless masses in the last puddles” as the land is drained in the opening story of her debut collection, Fen, spinning us off into an uncanny world where an older sister can starve herself into becoming an eel, a dead brother can return as a fox, and a house can love a girl “darkly and greatly and with a huge, gut-swallowing want”.

Fen by Daisy Johnson review / An impressive first collection

Fen by Daisy Johnson review – an impressive first collection

Johnson’s surreal and atmospheric stories are set in a liminal landscape where girls become eels

Sarah Crown
Saturday 18 July 2016

T

here was a time when East Anglia’s fenland was nothing more than a silty mix of fresh- and saltwater marshes into which people rarely ventured, an unstable place with one foot on solid ground and one in the sea. Attempts were made to drain it as far back as Roman times, but it wasn’t until the 19th century that technology advanced to the point where its freedom from flooding could be guaranteed. Today it is heavily cultivated, its fertile soil providing some of the country’s richest farmland. But for all that, it remains conditional: a tricksy, liminal landscape lying below sea level whose web of fields and schools and houses is wholly dependent on the system of pumps and embankments that has been constructed to protect it. There is an uncanniness to the fens that derives both from their singular geography (the lack of firm perimeters; the edgeless, overlit swaths of sky-filled water) and their essential provisionality; the ever-deepening sense, in this age of global warming, that their inhabitants are living on borrowed time, in a borrowed place.