Words are important to Gretel, always have been. As a child, she lived on a canal boat with her mother, and together they invented a language that was just their own. She hasn’t seen her mother since the age of sixteen, though – almost a lifetime ago – and those memories have faded. Now Gretel works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries, which suits her solitary nature. A phone call from the hospital interrupts Gretel’s isolation and throws up questions from long ago. She begins to remember the private vocabulary of her childhood. She remembers other things, too: the wild years spent on the river; the strange, lonely boy who came to stay on the boat one winter; and the creature in the water – a canal thief? – swimming upstream, getting ever closer.…
"Here, the writing is very distinctive, too. Most extraordinary is its evocation of a world that’s in a way contemporary, but pretty unfamiliar to most of us. It’s a world of people at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy of British society (it’s set in England), living on canals, often eating fish they’ve caught themselves or rabbits they’ve hunted. It’s also retelling of an Oedipus narrative. The main character is a trans person. If you think about the structure of the Oedipus story, you have to have someone who doesn’t know who their parents are causing the death of the father, and having sex with the mother. You might think that’s awfully difficult to pull off with a trans character, but somehow it works. It’s obviously recognisable at some points that you’re in an Oedipus story, but it somehow doesn’t feel at all that that’s an unnatural structure. It doesn’t feel like you’re being forced to go through the structure of an existing archetypical narrative. Many surprising things happen, but they don’t seem forced. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . We’re living in a time when trans issues are front and centre in our social and political lives, but Everything Under is telling a story with an age-old structure—a structure of the child who doesn’t know who he or she is. The child who the Fates, as it were, have determined will do the very thing that everybody was trying to avoid. Johnson’s language, too, is beautiful. It evokes a world that’s extremely unfamiliar, but makes it feel like a natural world. It’s incredibly well done. You said she was the youngest person on the list. When putting it together, we didn’t really think about anything except the book. We didn’t think about how old or young anybody was; we didn’t think about whether anybody had ever been on the shortlist before. We didn’t think about whether they were white or not. We just ended up with six favourites. Though it was a quite diverse list in respect to things like age, first novels versus people who’ve been at it a while, that wasn’t really the point. It’s a sign of the vigour of the novel in English. An incredible range of people are doing an incredible range of things. Some of it is done by people who’ve been at it a long time, and some of it is by people who are just starting."
