2019/12: Everything Under -- Daisy Johnson

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. [p. 14]

I read this on a friend's recommendation, and had managed to forget what she had told me about the embedded myth(s): which was a good thing, as I could better appreciate the gradual revelation of the themes, and the way the story was constructed -- gender-bent, seen aslant, in negative space.

Gretel has not seen her mother for years, and has only vague and conflicting memories of the time when they lived together on a riverboat. There was, Gretel remembers, a strange boy named Marcus. There was a creature called the Bonak, the name of which meant 'the thing we are afraid of'. There were other invented words in the secret language they shared: Gretel did not realise until later that those words were private. Now Gretel has a pleasing, ordinary job as a checker of dictionary definitions. And then she receives a phone call from her mother.

Everything Under is primarily Gretel's gradual recollection of the events of the long-ago winter when Marcus arrived, when a river-thief preyed on the communities of the river-bank, when Gretel and her mother left behind the mooring where they'd lived since Gretel's birth. Gretel's narrative is interrupted by her mother's memories and by Marcus's story: between the three of them, a story builds up. Or built up.

I found this book extremely unsettling -- I think it gave me nightmares -- and compulsively readable. There's an immediacy to Johnson's prose style (the omission of speech marks, the flickering of past and present tense, the unanswered riddles) that drew me in. The landscape of that half-remembered winter is post-industrial, strewn with rubbish and discarded fridges: the river runs through it like a timeless mythic thing. Gretel and her mother have little interaction with 'the modern world'. They don't listen to the radio; books aren't mentioned; there's no fast food, youth culture, money... In some ways the river is an island and they are castaways. They are utterly reliant upon one another, until the appearance of Marcus. (Does Gretel understand what happened with Marcus, as the reader eventually does?)

There are primal themes here. Feast and famine; journeys towards and away from family; gender ambiguity (at least two trans characters); the monster beneath the water, coming closer. There are fathers absent and otherwise, and twice-given names, and prophecies that twist themselves into tragedy. It's not an easy read but it is a gorgeous, transcendent transformation.