Daisy Johnson...pulls off several marvels at once in Everything Under (her debut novel, no less). She coins words, channels outlier voices, and fractures chronology. The result is an uncanny update of ancient storytelling on a primal theme: Are our fates 'coded into us from the moment we are born'? ...
Is escape possible? The question keeps breaking the surface of these mesmerizing pages. Steeped in the Oedipus myth and dark fairy-tale enchantment, Johnson’s world is also indelibly her own.
...[an] entrancing debut novel ... Johnson’s waterways—muddy, unpredictable, treacherous, full of half-submerged souvenirs and elusive creatures—evoke the fluidity of memory, as well as of language, gender, and sexuality ... Johnson’s own writing summons the just-off-ness of the uncanny; she is capable of passages of exquisite creepiness, a mood partially achieved via slight syntactical perturbations ... Her sentences have an aqueous quality, an undertow that drags you on and down.
So skillful and imaginative is [Johnson’s] tale of time and fate that it earned her the distinction of being named the youngest Man Booker Prize finalist ... Sometimes it’s hard not to wish sometimes Johnson had let metaphor do its own patient work ... For every section that feels overly serpentine, however, there are several so neatly dammed they feel as contained and beautiful as prose poems ... It takes a bold mind to steer so many elements through one tale, and an even stronger stylist to render them in a narrative that heeds, but seems not to, the laws of nature. Johnson has done all this in a book that will probably be read, like Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, for years to come as a part of the reclaiming of narrative territory...
Everything Under is a transgender retelling of the Oedipus myth, but it is also a convergence for myth ... There are elements of various fairytales and legends, combined in an entirely novel way. And this imaginative and innovative use of myth leads to the creation of a new myth ... there is a spellbinding tension. As the threads move towards a common end, you’re a child who wants to know the magic.
The stories in Fen showed an unerring ability to evoke the uncanny, and there’s more of this in Everything Under ... Johnson excels at the slow, inexorable build-up of menace ... But for all the atmosphere of menace, Johnson’s handling of her Sophoclean themes can be remarkably clumsy ... despite the book’s modish cross-dressing, it is also not as radical a reimagining of Sophocles as it might be ... But it is still a deeply involving, unsettling novel that pulls the reader into a uniquely eerie yet recognisable world.
A less trusting writer – or more impatient editor – might have name-tagged or date-stamped the alternating segments. Supporting characters seldom come clearly into view even when they’re vital to the plot ... the story still spins you round ... Johnson excels at making psychic phenomena feel visceral ... for all the rhetoric, tragedy here feels fated by nothing so much as Johnson’s fidelity to the source material ... The result is an eerie melodrama in which the bloodshed seems more mimed than motivated – and which tosses, almost in passing, a grenade into debates over self-determination.
... a deeply haunted novel about the layers of family ... a seductive book. It’s dark, poetic in language and image, and drives toward a monolithic tragedy. To know the myth is to see the ending coming, and it’s perhaps better not to read too much into the classical influences. The characters’ half-knowledge, and Gretel’s inability to hold too much grief at once, break the story into manageable pieces. The pieces are beautiful and haunting. The whole, like most Greek tragedies, is entirely too much. Johnson’s adaptation is faithful, even when she might do better to step away from millennia-old fated endings. She has the opportunity here to alter an ancient wrong, but veers away from that opportunity. The book’s central tragedy overwhelms the characters, and ultimately the characterization. There is something unexplained, maybe unexplainable, at the story’s heart. The result is frustrating, incomplete, and still lovely.
Johnson attacks the Oedipus myth with a taste for gothic horror and a radical vision based on gender fluidity that perhaps only a millennial writer could muster. Her clever layering of ancient and modern makes for a disturbing take on the illusion of free will and the horrible things that women sometimes think and do.
Everything Under surprises and beguiles ... Throughout the novel people are lost and found, rediscovered and reinvented. Again and again Johnson plays with words, examines gender, grapples with memory and inquires into where our choices spring from ... [The book] is, in places, a challenging read, its waters constantly and purposefully muddied, but Johnson makes it worthwhile to those readers happy to make the effort and go with her flow.
Johnson’s book, set in the murky riverlands of central England, makes heady demands on the reader: stark shifts in voice and sometimes unsettling dislocations of time and place. Evocative and haunting, her writing is vividly imagistic in ways its classical model could only attempt along its choral borders ... Everything Under is capital-B Brilliant, capital-V Virtuoso. It’s supremely worthy of its Man Booker honors and heralds the emergence of a significantly talented British writer ... For this reviewer, Everything Under has triggered a kind of modernist catharsis more persistent than that of any novel I’ve read this year. It brings a newly wrenching relevance that recovers the dormant power of its original and, in many ways, amplifies and transcends it 25 centuries later.
Johnson’s first novel, longlisted for the Man Booker prize, builds on that achievement [of her first book] by blending a deep understanding of character and storytelling sophistication to examine a troubled mother-daughter relationship ... the novel’s sense of place is so organic and detailed. As in Fen, Johnson’s affinity for the natural world is extraordinary, even when dark and ominous ... a unique, strange mythology ... time becomes blurred, as if all moments occur at once and in the same place, dominated by the flow of the river. It’s an ambitious gambit, but what could be muddled and tangled is in fact rendered with astonishing clarity.
A feast of language. It’s almost a torment—all to Daisy Johnson’s credit, of course—that Everything Under whisks you through the book by virtue of its stunning, clawing plot. You cannot put it down ... Anyone who’s ever lived on or near an English river will appreciate how meticulous Johnson captures its essence ... Johnson’s clever working of the English language is marvellous: she creates visceral affect by deftly playing with syntax ... a howl of female violence and rage.
The best retellings of myths and legends create an atmosphere like a dreamscape, faintly familiar in a way you can’t quite place... Everything Under, Daisy Johnson’s spellbinding debut novel, is a magical book in exactly that way ... Everything Under is, first and foremost, a novel of exquisite, heartbreakingly beautiful prose. Johnson leaps confidently and nimbly between present and past, switching narrative perspectives like a master and weaving gorgeous, spooky imagery ... This brief, artful novel announces Johnson as a gifted storyteller who’s here to stay, and you’ll be craving the next book by the time you’re done.
Johnson's (Fen, 2017) debut novel explores the determinism of its characters’ choices even as it asserts the fluidity of their genders and their relationships with each other, in prose that harmonizes with the haunting wasteland of its setting—a place where what is discarded takes on new identity if not new life ... A tense, startling book of true beauty and insight. Proof that the oldest of stories contain within them the seeds of our future selves.
...[a] harrowing, singular first novel ... a modern spin on a familiar tale ... This story about motherhood and self-determination is a stunning fever dream of a novel.
