This was my third book from this year’s Man Booker shortlist and the one I have enjoyed the least so far. At just 277 pages it’s the shortest novel on the shortlist, but, I’m afraid to say, for me, the end could not come soon enough. At just 28, Daisy Johnson is apparently the youngest author ever to grace the shortlist, and her achievement is remarkable considering this is her debut novel (she has had a short story collection published previously). There is no doubting her talent: the concept of the book is ingenious (a modern re-telling of the Oedipus myth) and her prose is as fluid and alive as the river that dominates the book. However, for me, there was something in the execution that was missing.
Gretel is a 32 year old woman living alone in Oxford. She works as a lexicographer, a natural career for her as her life has been dominated by words – their invention, their use, and, perhaps also, their lack. She had an unconventional upbringing with an eccentric mother on a canal boat. In her early years, Gretel and her mother developed their own language, a succession of private words for things for which a single expressive term did not exist, for example “sheesh time” refers to a desire to spend time alone, and “Bonak” will come to mean something to be afraid of, something threatening.
Gretel has been estranged from her mother since she was 16 years old. It is remarkable that this young woman has managed to make any sort of life for herself at all, given the background which we come to learn about. But Gretel has always known that she would be reunited with her mother, either dead or alive. For years she has occasionally contacted morgues and hospitals to ask if any unclaimed, unidentified older women have been admitted. One day, a morgue assistant says that, in fact, yes, a middle-aged woman fitting Gretel’s description had been admitted. Gretel believes this is it, and she goes off fully expecting to find the body of her mother. She is disappointed to find that it is not, but it sets her off on a quest in search of her mother.
This is where it gets confusing, because each of the eight chapters is divided into sections headed “The Cottage”, “The Hunt” and “The River”. The novel jumps back and forth between different times – the ‘cottage’ sub-chapters refer to Gretel caring for her mother at her home (she found her). Sarah, the mother, either has dementia or a serious mental illness so the circumstances are challenging to say the least. The ‘hunt’ sections refer to Gretel’s search for her mother, and the ‘river’ sections look back on the past, to Gretel’s past, her childhood, and Sarah’s life before Gretel was born.
None of it proceeds in a linear fashion, which is fine, and normal for modern novels, but within the sub-stories (ie, cottage, river and hunt) there is jumping back and forth in time, so you need to be on your toes…which I was not, so I found it difficult to follow. Threaded through the ‘hunt’ and ‘river’ stories is the story of Margot/Marcus, a transgender child/adolescent who was the child of Roger and Laura, a couple Gretel meets in her search for her mother. Marcus was born Margot, and grew up as part of Roger and Laura’s family until one day he/she disappeared without explanation or further trace, a fact the couple have never come to terms with. There is a connection with Sarah that only becomes apparent much later.
I knew before I read the book that this novel is a re-telling of the Oedipus myth – in Greek mythology, Oedipus, you may know, inadvertently killed his own father and married his birth-mother, Jocasta, who then hanged herself when she discovered the truth. Even when you know the ending to the Oedipus story, it is difficult to see how Everything Under is going to end. It wasn’t until about three-quarters of the way through that I had the a-ha moment. In that sense it’s an extremely clever novel, brilliantly conceived, and I felt that perhaps I wasn’t paying enough attention, but, in a way, that’s the point: I wasn’t paying enough attention because the book rather lost me as a reader. I found the narrative voice confused and confusing, the handling of past and present was not done as well as it might have been, in my view, and this was frustrating. There have been some comments from the Man Booker judges this year about editing, and how some of the books on the longlist could have been much the better for being shorter. This is clearly not the case with a shortish novel like this one, but I did feel that it needed a jolly good edit, a reordering, and I’m afraid I did think there was quite a bit of chaff (I still don’t understand the significance of the dog that Gretel finds!)
If you are interested in the Man Booker and in literature generally, I think this is an interesting read, to see how the modern novel is evolving, and to see how an ancient story might be handled in a modern setting. (I think a lot of popular soaps handle some of the same themes pretty successfully!) I found this novel somewhat laboured in its adherence to the myth and it sometimes got itself in knots. For me.
What has been your favourite/least favourite of the books shortlisted for the Man Booker?
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The central character is Walker, a man from rural Nova Scotia, who fought with the Allied forces in the D-Day landings. He has seen and experienced terrible events, death and injury that most of us can barely even imagine, and he survived. After the end of the war, he goes back to the United States and finds himself living among the homeless in New York City. The book is divided into four sections: 1946, 1948, 1951 and 1953 each set in a different US city (though Los Angeles is the setting for both 1948 and 1953). As he reflects on his experiences, it becomes clear that it was impossible for him to return home to Canada. He reminisces about the quiet, gentle life he led there, where the rhythms of the seasons, the dependence on the harvests of the seas, and community events (such as village hall dances) dominate everyone’s existence. It’s as if the contrast between that life and the brutality he witnessed in the war means he fears contaminating the innocence of those he has left behind. He can never go back, never unsee what he has seen, and those he once loved will never be able to understand how he has been changed.
Milkman is set in Belfast during the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the central character and narrator is a young Catholic woman who finds herself drawn unwillingly into a relationship with a local paramilitary leader. It is not clear when the book is set, but I am guessing around the late 1970s, early ‘80s. Northern Ireland is known to be socially conservative, but the general sense of the place of women in society suggests to me that it dates back quite some time. Our central character (not named, I’ll come onto this) is from a large family. Her father is dead and she has several siblings, both older and younger. She is in a “maybe-relationship” with a local young man, who she has been seeing for about a year, though they have not made a commitment to one another. She is keen on running as a hobby and shares this with “third brother-in-law”. Whilst out running one day in a local park she finds that she is observed by a man in a white van. Over subsequent weeks he infiltrates her life by stealth, indicating that he expects her to have a relationship with him. He is known only as “Milkman”. It becomes clear to her that he is quite a powerful local figure in the paramilitary world, so not only does she have little choice about whether to become involved with him or not, it is made quite clear to her that as long as she goes along with him no harm will come to her “Maybe-boyfriend”.
One thing that is so impressive about Chevalier is how beautifully she creates the historical setting: the two novels I have read so far have been set in 17th century Holland and 15th century Paris and Brussels and I can only begin to imagine the amount of research she has to undertake. The Last Runaway is set in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century when parts of the country were only just being settled. Honor Bright, our main character is a young Quaker woman from Dorset in England. She has led a modest and sheltered life, but her world was turned upside down when her fiancé left her and their close-knit Quaker community for another woman. This was not only a scandal but it left Honor distraught and in a very difficult position. When her sister, Grace, is persuaded by her fiancé that they should move to America, Honor decides she must go with her, not only to support her sister, but to escape the oppression of her situation and have some chance of making a life for herself.
In some ways, there is not a great deal to say about Death on the Nile that you couldn’t say about any other Christie novel, I suspect: there is a situation, in this case, a Nile cruise, being undertaken by 10-15 characters, all for different reasons. Conflicts and tensions are set up amongst the different characters, mysterious aspects of their personality or behaviour are noted, one of their number dies and then there is a process of detection to work out whodunnit. I did largely guess the correct outcome in the case of this novel, although I didn’t with Orient Express. 
The plot is not complicated: ‘Swede’ Levov is a third generation Jewish immigrant whose grandfather came to America from Europe. He was a glovemaker and set up a business in Newark, New Jersey which became highly successful. Swede’s father continued the business, which peaked in the 1950s and 1960s when glove-wearing for respectable women was the norm and most would have several pairs. (There is more information on gloves in this book than you will ever need to know, but it’s fascinating!) Swede inherited the business from his father, while his more wayward brother became a cardiac surgeon.
Tom Hazard has an extremely rare condition called anageria which means he ages extremely slowly. He is one of a tiny group of people who live for many hundreds of years. Tom was born in London in 1581 and mixed with the likes of Shakespeare and Marlowe in his youth, worked for Captain Cook in the 1700s and was a jazz pianist in Paris in the 1920s where he met, among others, F Scott Fitzgerald and watched Josephine Baker dance. What an incredibly lucky guy, you might think, but his condition is a curse and does not go unnoticed. He is haunted by the fact that his mother was condemned as a witch in the small village in which they lived, because the locals suspected dark forces at play when her teenage son appeared never to age. In his ‘late teens’ he meets and falls in love with Rose, and they have a child, Marion. Rose is the love of Tom’s life and although they move around, trying to avoid staying in one place too long and attracting attention, he realises that his existence presents a danger to Rose and the child. He has no choice but to leave her. The last time Tom sees Rose is when she is in her 50s, on her death bed with the plague, while he still looks like the young man she fell in love with many years earlier.
This book is magnificent and I urge you to read it. It was my book club read this month and we all loved it. It concerns a period in hsitory that is seldom openly discussed – the brutality of the Russian advance into Germany at the end of the WW2. One of the earliest books I reviewed on this blog was 
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