Review of Long Wave By Daisy Johnson – the best book about motherhood and loss | Fiction

Men 2018 Daisy Johnson was the youngest writer nominated for the Booker prize, for her first novel. All Downa retelling of the Oedipus myth about male and female sexuality, involving canal boats and the adventures of their families, including a strange monster lurking beneath. Before that, its short notes Fenwith its mix of magic and workaday, it was widely praised. You have already posted Sistersfear of emotions that use spiritual things to explore relationships and grief, and The Hotela series of highly connected ghost stories. Now comes Long Wave, which, although it shares some of these hallmarks, is much better and more visual: perhaps his strongest work yet.

Long Wave is the story of three generations of women. As a young child Ori was found after being “abandoned” by his mother on a wild, uninhabited island somewhere off the coast of England. What happened to Ori’s mother, and why they fled to the island together, when Ori was later found and adopted by a rabbit scientist, is a question that comes back to him with full force as he grows older as he finds himself newly born and struggling to cope.

Ori’s mother is Ruth, whose preaching at the age of 10 about a woman who killed herself with her child in a nearby river was a mystery, because the police did not find anything. And Ruth’s mother is Edith, who locked Ruth up because she could not bear the shame of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

These complex relationships are not always harmonious; figuring out who is who at the beginning of the book can be confusing. The reader who is willing to sit down with uncertainty will be sorely missed, however.

Johnson’s genius has always been in his ability to combine vivid, poetic images that could have come from a fairy tale or fairy tale with writing that remains grounded in simple truth. Here we find “mountain hares with thick white coats who have never seen anyone even in their dreams”, a lighted lighthouse that sits behind a forest of thorns, and a child fighting stones to try to lead his mother back to him. In the hands of a lesser writer this could have been funny or difficult, but Johnson paints such pictures with streets that are “studded with Calippo and crushed cigarettes” and NHS hospital blue curtains, “the jolt of a trolley on linoleum”. The results are high.

The language of his language during the first women is very interesting. “Fatigue is like a pile of snow” – yes, it sounds the same. He has such a talent for reducing the things he showed in the beginning, from the fontanelle and the “quickness of life”, to the movement of the child’s mouth when he dreams of milk, the pain of the breast and breastfeeding (“he realizes that he drinks everything”). That our early relationships can come back to haunt us has been a popular theme for a long time. Again, Ori’s “ghostly, forgotten family (are) like strangers somewhere in the back of the house”, but in this book the inner life of his people is very strong, not lacking in spiritual things.

Johnson has always been interested in those who live on the coast, in various vulnerable places, and now he is concerned with the birth and foster family as he is with three pregnant women. Ruth and her old friend JP try to create a united family where the women share childcare: “We need some money, don’t we? Like some money we can ask for, like money for an arts organization but the job is raising some kids who don’t make mistakes and don’t go crazy and kill everyone.”

Johnson’s language is amazing. Several times, as he described his shock, I was struck by how accurately he described the difficulties of early childhood. “In the space between the top and the bottom of the swing there is an elastic period, reduced to a drop,” he writes. “His feet brush the trees in front of his back, and when his head is bent over his back it curves a line from the purple sky to the ground. He is on the ground.”

Meanwhile, the way he describes the impact of noise from the perspective of a neurodivergent boy feels fresh and intelligent, the flow of his sentences mimicking the intensity of the emotions: “The loud bang of the cars and the hum and the whine of the lights and the squealing and the banging of the shoes and the doors shaking. The chain link on the playground moves the clatter of heavy bags being thrown down. the blasphemy of birds and everywhere the commotion and the difficult and unintelligible things of human speech.”

The way Long Wave’s plot resolves is close to the point – and what a pleasure it is to read an author who boldly prioritizes culture and language above gimmick or twist. Although never mentioned, Gaza, and the tragic separation, through death or absence, of mothers and babies feels strange to me here. This is a book that has a lot of sadness to it, perhaps because it would have been written at a time when the story was full of people searching through the remains of their families; some of that desperation and loss is channeled into his prose. Because of the mysterious “sinking” Ruth saw – am I showing it? The other women’s coma show? Time warp, its line is a trick? – is not fully explained, although we have an inkling. Johnson goes deeper than ever in his exploration of love and fear and separation, and as a result creates a work that will endure with readers long after they close its pages.

Long Wave is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Shipping fees may apply.