Daisy Johnson's latest novel, Long Wave, is a story of three generations of mothers, exploring themes of abandonment, care, and the haunting echoes of early relationships. It might be her strongest work yet.
A Tangled Web of Mothers and Secrets
As a small child, Ori was found after being abandoned by her mother on a wild, uninhabited island off the coast of England. What happened to Ori's mother, and why they fled to the island together, only for Ori to be later found and adopted by a scientist specializing in hares, is a question that returns to her in adulthood when she finds herself newly postpartum and struggling to cope.
Ori's mother is Ruth, whose witnessing at age 10 of an apparent suicide of a mother with her baby in a nearby river provides another mystery, as the police found no trace of either. Ruth's mother is Edith, who locked Ruth away because she couldn't bear the shame of a pregnancy out of wedlock. These tangled relationships can be confusing at first, but a reader willing to sit with the uncertainty will be richly rewarded.
Vivid Imagery Grounded in Truth
Johnson's talent lies in combining vivid, poetic imagery that could come from a myth or fairytale with writing grounded in an almost mundane truthfulness. Here we find mountain hares with thick white coats that have never seen a human, a semi-derelict lighthouse behind a forest of thorns, and a child bashing stones together to guide her mother back. Johnson juxtaposes such imagery with pavements sticky with Calippo and crushed cigarettes, and blue NHS hospital curtains, the rattle of the trolley on linoleum. The effect is sublime.
Striking Language on Early Motherhood
The specificity of her language around early motherhood is particularly striking. "The tiredness is like a suffocating, papery snow," she writes, capturing the exact feeling. She pinpoints nebulous early impressions, from the fontanelle with its "immediacy of aliveness," to a baby's mouth moving as it dreams of milk, to nipple pain and breastfeeding ("she has the enormous sense that he is drinking all of him").
That our earliest relationships can come back to haunt us is a prominent theme. Here, Ori's "ghostly, forgotten family [are] like intruders somewhere in the back of the house," but the emotional scaffolding of her characters' inner lives feels more robust, with less need for supernatural elements.
Marginal Lives and Communal Care
Johnson has always been interested in those living on the margins. Here she is as concerned with surrogate and adoptive family as with the three central mothers. Ruth and her former colleague JP attempt to form a communal household where women share childcare: "We need some funding, right? Like some funding we could apply for, like arts council funding but the project is raising some children and not doing it wrong and not going completely insane and killing everyone."
Stunning Command of Language
Johnson's command of language is stunning. Her description of being on a swing left me agog at how accurately it conjures long-ago childhood experience: "In the space between the top and the bottom of the swing there is elastic time, slowed to a drip." She conveys noise sensitivity from the perspective of a neurodivergent boy with fresh inventiveness, the flow of sentences mimicking sensory overload: "The blasting burp of traffic surging and jamming and beeping lights and beeping reversing and the clack and click and stamp of shoes and doors slamming dogs yap yap yapping at cars cats yowling at dawn jangle of chains on the playground swings moving whump of heavy bags thrown onto the floor the derisive call of the birds and everywhere everywhere everywhere the yammer and hassle and blunt object of human chatter."
A Deep Sadness and Enduring Resonance
How the plot resolves is almost beside the point. Though never mentioned, Gaza, and the tragic separation of mothers and babies through death or disappearance, feels like a spectre. This is a novel with deep sadness, written at a time when the news was full of people searching through rubble for their families. The cause of the mysterious drowning Ruth saw—a premonition, a collective maternal unconscious, a glitch in time—is never wholly explained. Johnson goes deeper than before in examining love, fear, and separation, creating a work that will endure with readers long after they close its pages.
Long Wave is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99).
