In Daisy Johnson’s debut collection Fen, humans turn into animals. Her first novel. Everything Under, was a twisted story of doomed mother-daughter relationships. Aspects of both bubble up in Long Wave, a multigenerational story of the dark side of motherhood.
Divided into 14 parts, Johnson moves deftly between characters and locations. It opens with Ruth, alone with her young daughter Ori on the small island that has captured her imagination since she was a child on the nearby mainland. The island is wild and uninhabited, its only building the “white exclamation mark” of a dilapidated lighthouse. Years earlier, on a sweltering summer day when she was 10, Ruth saw a woman and her baby walk into a river and disappear. She was the only witness and, despite searches, no trace of them was found. When teenage Ruth becomes pregnant, her mother Edith locks her away to hide the shame, and Ruth dreams of escaping to the island.
Little Ori is found alone on the island, with no memories and no mother. A wildlife researcher called Min rescues her. When, years later, Ori has a baby of her own, the fears and exhaustion of new motherhood overwhelm her, cracking open past feelings and tantalising slivers of memory.
Johnson’s descriptions are imaginative and evocative, especially around motherhood; Ori’s postpartum exhaustion is “a great ship passing along the road outside, covering the windows”; pregnant teenager Ruth feels the tautened skin on her stomach “like clingfilm over a bowl”. She manipulates language so deftly that the occasional lines that don’t quite land stand out; “the pavements are sticky with Calippo and crushed cigarettes”.
READ MORE
This is a novel of emotional truth with a deliberate elision of the logistics of life (locations remain unnamed; we never learn how Min gets to keep an abandoned child). Men, whether kindly Min, selfish Marvin or caring yet immature Dylan, play a minor role. Rather than just pushing forward or broadcasting outward, Long Wave feels powered by the pulse of endlessly expanding and contracting circles.
Johnson’s strength lies in writing the myriad ways in which women project versions of our imagined selves simultaneously into past and future. Memories, she is telling us, have much in common with babies: to survive, they must be cared for.
Henrietta McKervey’s latest novel is The Woman in the Water
