Sisters by Daisy Johnson
I would have finished Daisy Johnson’s first novel, Everything Under, in quicker time had I not been reading it with the expectation of interviewing the author. As widely noted in reviews, the Oedipus story provides the main armature for Everything Under, but the novel is also rich in allusions to many other myths, fables and fairy tales. With the concocting of questions in mind I found myself frequently stopping to research the references.
Ultimately, the interview didn’t happen. I did, however, reap the benefit of a self-administered refresher course in Western mythology.
I’ve made shorter work of Johnson’s latest, Sisters. This is, in part, not having to prepare questions and in part that this one is a good deal simpler and more straightforward in its structure.
That it is a hundred pages shorter than Everything Under could, perhaps, be another factor.
Sisters, is less mythic, more Gothic. The main influence here is Shirley Jackson, specifically her last novel, We Have Always Lived in The Castle, published 1962, although I suspect Jackson’s 1954 novel, The Bird’s Nest, also gets a look in. Johnson makes use of many standard ploys of the genre to ratchet up the psychological tension- an adolescent protagonist who is odd and estranged; an unreliable first-person narrator; a semi-derelict house in an isolated remote location and an awful event kept hidden from the reader.
The implicit ambiguities in the transformative process that is adolescence, lends itself to a troubled sense of self. Social anxiety and self-consciousness, alternating feelings of power and helplessness, the sense of childhood innocence lost that sexual awakening brings are all aspects of adolescence that can cause a damaged or overly sensitive child to fracture.
The ‘horror’ that is adolescence is easily translated into a ‘horror story’.
The other important requirement of the Gothic featured here is the house. Houses in the Gothic are almost always more than prosaic shelters or mere stage setting. They are characters in their right, full of secrets, often cursed in some way, haunted by the previous lives lived there and often again, inimical to their present occupants.
And, of course, the house can function as a metaphor for the human psyche.
Sisters September and July are in their teens and quite close in age. Their father had left when they were quite little and has since died. With their mother, Sheela, they have relocated to the North Yorkshire coast from Oxford, where something terrible has occurred. They have fled to isolated and neglected Settle House, which belongs to their late father’s family. Their residency there is rather grudgingly arranged by their aunt, Ursa. Sheela is seriously depressed and takes to her bed almost immediately, leaving the girls to their own devices.
The story unfolds in three parts. Most of it is seen through the eyes of the younger sister, July with some short but very key passages from the author’s and Sheela’s perspective.
Daisy Johnson delivers a well written, gripping and satisfying Gothic novel. It lacks the multi-layered denseness of Everything Under and is more conventional in its premise and plot. Which should bring its author a wider audience. And likely as not, a film adaptation.
Published by Penguin, Sisters is available now in hardcover for £14.99
Related ‘if you liked this, you’ll like these’ reads:
As mentioned above, Shirley Jackson’s The Bird’s Nest 1954 and We Have Always Lived in The Castle, 1962
The Magic Toyshop, 1967 by Angela Carter
The Other, 1971 by Thomas Tyron
The Cement Garden 1978 by Ian McEwan
Flowers in the Attic, 1979 by V C Andrews
Bellefleur, 1980 Joyce Carol Oates
The Thirteenth Tale, 2006 by Diane Setterfield
The Loney, 2015, by Andrew Michael Hurley