Long Wave by Daisy Johnson review: 'portraits of motherhood'
Daisy Johnson’s new novel has a pleasingly fragmented plot, but it might have benefitted from being either much longer or much shorter, writes Stuart Kelly
On finishing this novel I could not decide if it should have been half the length or twice the length – as it is, it clocks in at an Industry Standard for “literary fiction” of just shy of 300 pages. At half the length it might have had the eerie, askance intensity of a writer like Jean Rhys or Anna Kavan; at double it might have the multigenerational scope and span of Zadie Smith or Amy Tan. As it is, it falls between two stools, as it does in terms of genre. Is this Symbolist? Naturalist? Realist? Even Surrealist?
The plot is pleasingly fragmented, so we are given the narrative in a non-chronological fashion. It allows for secrets to be very gradually unveiled and causes to become evident (or it should). The opening section introduces four characters. We have Edith, the widow of a vicar, packing up her house and unsettled by an old encyclopaedia with the entry of “island” folded down. We are told that the only person who might have done this is Ruth – “not out of interest but out of malice towards her mother, who despises folded pages”. Then we get Ruth, who is on an island and is heading back to collect her daughter Ori. This section ends with an abrupt dash which the rest of the novel will circle around. Then we have the child Ori, waiting for the return of her mother, knocking stones together and seeing “a ghost dancing. It is a hare. She screams for Ruth and the hare does not run but freezes, flattened on its belly, waiting”. Finally we meet Min, a hare researcher, who discovers the infant Ori on the island.
The novel takes this kernel of interlinked stories and expands on it. The sketch above, I hope, shows there is a degree of contrivance in all this, which is exacerbated as the plot spirals outwards. It becomes a series of portraits of different kinds of motherhood, again, in a mannered way. Edith is overprotective to the extent that she imprisons Ruth when Ruth becomes pregnant by the boy next door. (An aside, but most vicarages have to be detached, not semis). Nonetheless Ruth maintains some contact by knocking on the wall – although is it her beau knocking back? – in an obvious parallel with Ori knocking stones together. On escaping Ruth does not do anything sensible like speak to the police, but falls into a kind of communal living with Jupjaapun: “We need some funding, right? Like some funding we could apply for, like arts council funding but the project is raising some children and not doing it wrong and not going completely insane and killing everyone.” There are fights and evictions but Ruth is fixated on the island her child’s father used to go to, and projects onto it a kind of idyll far away from cold baked beans and threadbare swimsuits. Nor can Ruth get over a vision or hallucination or witnessing of a woman with a baby going into the river or culvert, never to be found.
Ori, now an adult, is in a relationship with Eva and they are contemplating becoming parents, though when they do, post-partum depression and low level, persistent stress complicate things. Ori has Convenient Amnesia after being found on the island and has become – I groaned – a writer. But is she a writer if she isn’t writing because of Cyril Connolly’s perambulator in the hall? But she has enough success to do a reading it Italy: in a clunky metafictional moment her editor says “the first time she read the book she thought it would end with the character finding her mother and she was so surprised she did not”. But at least Ori meets Eva, whom she had actually met when they were children in another pointless convenience. As for Min – well, I really don’t think you get to adopt children who have clearly suffered trauma just by being first on the scene. I would have though that social workers and lawyers and the police might just have had some involvement. If this were half the length, you could occlude or smudge such details. If it were twice the length, you could go into the details, probably harrowing, of the bureaucracy.
All of this is not helped by a style which, to me, might be summarised as “not AI”, in that verbs and adjectives are needlessly awry. There is prose like “The sight of it makes her mouth hurt” and “A brace of nettles”. Johnson has a propensity for onomatopoeia which doesn’t work: “There are dirtied playing cards fixed to the spokes of their bikes, rattling in the breeze. The cards rattle kerching kerching and the blackbirds nesting among the chimney stacks chuck to one another”.
Blackbirds don’t chuck – pigeons perhaps – nor do they nest in chimneys. Playing cards in your spoke flutter and whirr, they do not make a sound like Arkwright’s till in Open All Hours. There are numerous repetitions and reiterated clauses – the initial Ruth chapter intones “There is the…”.
Of course on the island there is a derelict lighthouse. There couldn’t be a more blatant nod at Virginia Woolf. But Woolf’s style was subtle, whereas Johnson’s seems like flaunting.
Long Wave, by Daisy Johnson, Jonathan Cape, £18.99. Daisy Johnson is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 15 August.
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