But forgetting cannot provide resolution, so present-day Gretel resolves to track down Marcus, only to discover a former friend, Fiona. (The novel also explores gender roles and gender fluidity.) “Forgetting is, I think, a form of protection,” Gretel writes. Gretel can’t remember much about “that final month” she spent on the river with her mother, only the arrival of Marcus, who stayed with them, and may once have been called Margot. They fall away and return in much the same way as the Bonak. Insects don’t just crawl instead, “the ground itched with wood lice, millipedes”.ĭoes the Bonak actually exist? Does Sarah still exist? The artfully eccentric mother-daughter relationship lies at the heart of the novel, surrounded by a thicket of men animated by their own cruelty, menace or uncertainty. She writes of “the mud from the edges of the riverbanks, the rabbits in their cavernous burrows, the moorhens that slept on the low branches”. As in Fen, Johnson’s affinity for the natural world is extraordinary, even when dark and ominous. Part of the reason the Bonak can remain ambiguous, and why Everything Under can shift between so many stories and remain coherent, is that the novel’s sense of place is so organic and detailed. Gretel has felt the presence of the Bonak her whole life, as well as its shifting identity in one breath, she says she thinks her mother has killed it, then snaps at a friend: “It’s anything … Last summer it was stupid dog.”

Sarah is as mercurial and shape-shifting in memory as another liminal creature: the being known as the Bonak, or “canal thief”, whose presence the grim fishermen on the river mean when they say “things go missing in the night”. She checks morgues compulsively and revisits a flat she once shared with her mother. She gets stuck on the word “break”, comparing her memories of Sarah to the task of defining awkward words.

It even affects her work in Oxford updating dictionary entries. But she hasn’t seen her for 16 years, and her search for her mother pulls everything else in with it: past, present, future. Until she was 13, Gretel lived on a canal boat with her mother, Sarah. The narrator, Gretel Whiting, writes early on that “there are more beginnings than there are endings to contain them”: a crucial lesson about life and memory that shows us how to read this complex, uncompromising novel.

Everything under johnson