A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker
Doubleday, 5 May 2016
331 pages, ARC paperback
*My copy sent to me for review by the publisher.
I liked Jo Baker's retelling of Pride and Prejudice, Longbourn, a great deal. It was a sweet and delightful book, a dreamy tactile romance that riffed on Austen without trying to echo her wit. I'm incredibly excited to hear it is being made into a film. Her new novel A Country Road, A Tree is not that book, and is both better and worse for it. It has the same spirit, but a new ambition: this time to tell the story of an author rather than their character, the enigmatic and determinedly unknowable Samuel Beckett.
We meet him first in 1919 as a nameless boy climbing a favourite tree, avoiding his insistent mother and the strictures of piano practice. The bark is smooth from the repeated knowledge of his hands, his feet certain on the ascent. Once perched up high he chooses to fall rather than climb down again.
He sucked in breath. It tasted of sap, and of spring, and of his rubbery tennis shoes. He let go of the branch; he let go of the trunk. He lifted his arms and spread them wide. He leaned out. The pause on the cusp, the brink. He dived out into the empty air. Gravity snatched him.
When he has his breath back, he climbs up and does it again, on the understanding that sooner or later he will catch the air and soar up in flight. This determination to do everything the hard way, which is also a gluttony for punishment, is a core pillar of his character and echoes throughout the book. The boy who throws himself out of trees in the hope that he will learn to fly becomes a man who will risk his life and the lives of the people who care for him in order to write.
Fast forward to 1939 and the declaration of war, which finds Beckett temporarily in Dublin with his mother after a long sojourn in Paris. Despite the new danger he is desperate to get back there: he can't think, can't sleep, can't write in her presence, as stifled as by the piano lessons of old. His need to be unfettered is physical, pathological. Once back in France and reunited with Suzanne, the woman who will become his lifelong partner, he embarks on a wartime of resistance, transience and deprivation. At first all is much as it was. He moves in a circle of Francophile artists, writers and thinkers that includes Joyce and Duchamp, playing the role of protégé and amanuensis to their fading brilliance. Suzanne gives him space to work, such as it is - vague unpromising scribbles she thinks - and they muddle along in spite of the shortages and worsening news from the east. Then, June 1940 and the fall of France to the Nazis. Beckett and his circle are unmoored, sent fleeing into the unknown countryside, running from the oncoming tide; Joyce heads towards Switzerland, where he will soon die, while Beckett and Suzanne go south. It is the beginning of a five year season of fragmentation, disorientation, fear, hunger and desperation.
Throughout Beckett - who is always 'he' and 'him', never named - experiences a complex frisson of duty, excitement and lethargy that lead him to join the French resistance, and to keep on resisting even when it threatens his life. He has a resistant sort of personality, which seeks friction to generate the state of mind needed for his writing. His pre-war novel Murphy has disappeared without a trace and his later success is in the unimagined future; he is just a penniless failure with a compulsion to put pen to paper and no clue what else he is good for. It is not even as if he enjoys it, gets satisfaction from it. A fellow writer suggests the crux of it: "If one is not writing, one is not quite oneself, don't you find? ... It's like snails make slime," she's saying, "One will never get along, much less be comfortable, if one doesn't write." It is that old idea, that for some people words are like air and writing is like breathing.
It is in his wartime experiences that Baker locates the grit that propels Beckett to later success. Throughout she seeds echoes of Beckett's work: the title is a reference to the apocalyptic scene at the beginning of Waiting for Godot, while a fixation on feet, on life going inexorably onwards foreshadows later works. His well known conflicted relationship with ideas of home and belonging, place and family are threaded through the book. In Dublin in 1939 he is given a small stone by a cousin, a pebble from a local beach, and he carries it throughout the war like a talisman, popping it in his mouth to suck when he is hungry or thirsty. It is necessary to him, "the precious one a child's clean eye had selected from all the stones at Greystones". By the end of the war it has ground down and damaged his teeth, causing him physical pain even while it gives him emotional comfort.
Baker paints a complex picture of a contrary personality, a man who is strangely distant and emotionless on the one hand - Suzanne accuses him of being cold to his and her suffering, of being unnaturally calm - and who on the other is overwhelmed by subterranean currents of feeling so enormous and desperate that he would rather starve in a war torn city than live in the comfort of his mother's house. He connects both easily and not at all, his broad intelligence making it simple to adapt and fit in while his prickling discomfort with himself puts a barrier and distance against ordinary relationships.
Sentence by sentence A Country Road, A Tree was pure pleasure, precisely to my reading taste. Like it's subject the book is dual and janiform, clean lines of plot and dialogue on the one hand and elliptical philosophy on the other. It has the playfulness of Longbourn (it can even be quite funny) but with a new discipline, a seriousness that suits Baker's style very well. She manages to walk the tightrope of pretentiousness without wobbling over much. There was a great difficulty though, niggling me throughout my reading. Beckett is an ambitious proposition, whose output is notoriously challenging, and what I have read of him doesn't resonate with the man Jo Baker has created. She has captured someone in their complexity very well, but perhaps not that specific someone. So it's a good thing that she has built in an escape hatch by making him anonymous with baited hints to his identity. It means there are two ways of reading the book: as if it's about Beckett, an insight into his life, his process as a writer, his self-hood; or ignoring that altogether and choosing to see only a nameless writer, occupied France, the resistance, the hunger of it. I much prefer the latter, which means that the power of Jo Baker's prose, the beauty of what she has created, is not overshadowed by the enormity of her subject.
~~Victoria~~