Fen by Daisy Johnson review – an impressive first collection

Johnson’s surreal and atmospheric stories are set in a liminal landscape where girls become eels

There was a time when East Anglia’s fenland was nothing more than a silty mix of fresh- and saltwater marshes into which people rarely ventured, an unstable place with one foot on solid ground and one in the sea. Attempts were made to drain it as far back as Roman times, but it wasn’t until the 19th century that technology advanced to the point where its freedom from flooding could be guaranteed. Today it is heavily cultivated, its fertile soil providing some of the country’s richest farmland. But for all that, it remains conditional: a tricksy, liminal landscape lying below sea level whose web of fields and schools and houses is wholly dependent on the system of pumps and embankments that has been constructed to protect it. There is an uncanniness to the fens that derives both from their singular geography (the lack of firm perimeters; the edgeless, overlit swaths of sky-filled water) and their essential provisionality; the ever-deepening sense, in this age of global warming, that their inhabitants are living on borrowed time, in a borrowed place.

Daisy Johnson’s debut short story collection is set entirely in this flat, saturated country. Through her tales, she taps into that uncanniness and makes it original and gripping. Boundaries shift and slide and myth and folklore seep up from the sodden ground and insinuate their way into her characters’ solid-seeming lives.The physical fluidity of the fens wells up and washes over everything, so that the barriers between past and present, fact and fiction and even humans and animals become liquid and unreliable, too. An albatross bursts in through the kitchen window of a reluctantly pregnant woman, ready to relieve her of the baby. A dead boy is reincarnated – perhaps – in the body of a fox. In the opening story, what begins as an unexceptional tale of an unexceptional teenage girl – party-going, netball-playing, makeup-wearing – abruptly shifts into something remarkable. When she states her intention of “stopping eating”, we brace ourselves for the inevitable slide into anorexia – but in this fenland setting, the act of self-deprivation effects not a reduction, but an astonishing transformation. The girl turns into an eel, and the story concludes with the narrator (her sister) carrying her in a wet towel to the canal at the bottom of the school field. “I lay her on the ground, jerked her free from the towel, pushed her sideways into the water. She did not roll her white belly to message me goodbye or send a final ripple,” she says, unexcitedly. “Only ducked deep and was gone.”

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