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Summary
Summary
From the best-selling author of Longbourn, a haunting new novel of spies and artists, passion and danger, hope in the face of despair
Paris, 1939. The pavement rumbles with the footfall of Nazi soldiers marching along the Champs- lys es. A young, unknown writer--Samuel Beckett--recently arrived from Ireland to make his mark, smokes one last cigarette with his lover before the city they know is torn apart. Soon he will put them both in mortal danger by joining the Resistance . . .
Through it all we are witness to the workings of a uniquely brilliant mind struggling to create a language that will express this shattered world. Here is a remarkable story of survival and determination, and a portrait of the extremes of human experience alchemized into one man's timeless art.
From the Hardcover edition.
Author Notes
Jo Baker was born and raised in the village of Arkholme, Lancashire, England. She attended Kirby Lonsdale and Somerville College, Oxford. She later moved to Belfast in 1995 to study for an MA in Irish literature at Queen's University, where she also completed a PhD on the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen. She is now the author of six novels, including the bestseller, Longbourn.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Booklist Review
In her latest novel, Baker, the author of Longbourn (2013), reimagines Irish writer Samuel Beckett's involvement with the French Resistance during WWII. Over his mother's objections, Beckett left the relative safety of his family home in Ireland in 1939 to return to Paris in the days just before France declared war on Germany. When the Nazis reach Paris, Beckett and his love, Suzanne, flee alongside Beckett's mentor, James Joyce, and his wife, Nora. While the Joyces seek a safe haven in Switzerland, Beckett and Suzanne ultimately return to Paris, where a friend of Beckett's draws them into the resistance effort. Though the tasks are small keeping track of German troops in Paris and relaying that information to contacts the danger is great, and the couple is soon forced out of the city once again, setting out on a harrowing journey to the countryside, where Beckett agrees to even more perilous missions. Taking its title from Beckett's most famous play, Waiting for Godot, Baker's historical drama deftly explores the psyche of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE BEGUILING TITLE of Jo Baker's new novel comes from the opening stage direction of Samuel Beckett's 1952 play "Waiting for Godot." "A country road, a tree. Evening." Once notorious, now canonical, "Godot" is famously the play in which nothing happens: two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait for a mysterious stranger, Godot, who never appears. They divert themselves with conversation, encounter some bizarre strangers, struggle to fill the passing time, decide to hang themselves, decide not to hang themselves, resolve to move on, move nowhere, and then the curtain falls. What saves the play from being a pretentious Gallic snore-fest is that it owes as much to Charlie Chaplin as Schopenhauer: It's full of physical humor, funny bickering, trousers falling down and pungent verbal inventiveness. Like Beckett's other works, "Godot" is baffling and nonlinear on principle. There is no sense of change and development. The action sometimes seems shapeless, sometimes static, sometimes obsessively spiral. But the world is not like a Beckett play. The unexpected success of "Godot" was a genuine turning point in Beckett's life. It set in motion an unmistakably linear pattern of events that culminated in the Nobel Prize in Literature and Beckett's enthronement as one of the craggy writer-prophets of the 20 th century. He didn't appear to enjoy either fame or wealth, and gave away the money he received when he won the Nobel. From James Knowlson's 1996 biography, "Damned to Fame," we also learn that in later life Beckett liked to pass the time reading pulp crime fiction, which is both charming and disconcerting, like hearing that a great patisserie chef binges in secret on Twinkies. "A Country Road, a Tree" is a biographical novel that dramatizes Beckett's life pre-"Godot." This was his career's long penurious antechamber, lit up by encounters with prominent figures like Peggy Guggenheim, Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce. The book does a good Joyce - weary, entitled, disappointed, patronizing - who is both an inspiration to Beckett and a creative obstacle, preventing him from finding his own voice. The novel focuses in particular on the years of World War II, which Beckett spent in France. Infantilized and carped at by his mother in Ireland, he chose to return at the outbreak of the war to Paris, where he became involved with the French Resistance. In later life, Beckett would disparage his activities as "Boy Scout stuff." But he came close to being arrested by the Gestapo and was forced to flee Paris with his lover and future wife, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil. Suzanne and Samuel's experiences on the run in occupied France form the core of "A Country Road, a Tree." The novel's controlling idea is that this period was the artistic crucible in which the mature Beckett and "Waiting for Godot" were formed. The world the characters inhabit is a present-tense space of hunger, purposeless waiting, cigarette smoke and ticking clocks. Dotted throughout their journey are the elements that will cohere in "Waiting for Godot" : the blasted landscape, the tedium of life as a near vagrant, the mundane conversations about boots and carrots between a footsore, starving couple. During a key scene, Suzanne and Samuel wait beneath a willow for a contact in the Resistance who never shows up. Jo Baker's previous novel, the best-selling "Longbourn," was another literary homage: Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" viewed from the perspective of the servants. But it's one thing to riff on such a familiar cast and plot, another to dramatize the penniless war years of a challenging modernist. And "A Country Road, a Tree" doesn't offer its reader many footholds. It sticks very faithfully to the facts of Beckett's biography, but often doesn't tell you exactly what they are. For example, the text refers at several points to Beckett's bandaged chest and the "scar" from his injury, but never explains that it was the result of a near-fatal knife attack by a Parisian pimp called Prudent. One reason for this reticence is that the book is locked into a present-tense style that reproduces landscapes vividly but admits little exposition. "The prose creeps. Notebooks fill. A soft evening in Ireland, a redbrick villa, and the elderly and lame and syphilitic. An unseen man upstairs, dishing out pabulum, approval and approbrium, entirely arbitrarily." Here Beckett is working on the manuscript of his novel "Watt," but the reader is never told. Is it too prosaic simply to explain? Why bother playing themes and variations on a melody few readers can be expected to know? Of course, it's a modernist trait: Joyce and Eliot didn't do exposition either. Like travelers who were too grand to carry their own luggage, they expected to be followed by a retinue of explainers carrying copies of "The Odyssey" and books on the myth of the Grail. And yet for all its deliberate obscurities, "A Country Road, a Tree" is much less radical in style and conception than the man Baker has chosen to honor. The purpose of the book is to show how a directionless expatriate writer ripened into the Samuel Beckett of literary history. But it's impossible to imagine Beckett writing a bildungsroman where the difficulties of World War II bear heroic fruit in the artistic triumph of "Waiting for Godot." Beckett's view of human lives is too withering and austere to have any truck with such a conventional kind of uplift. And the novel's writing lacks the vinegar and ingenuity that gives Beckett's characters their strange liveliness. What the sentences achieve most often is a kind of Beckett-lite: "Time ticks. The light fades. The air is full of cigarette smoke and body smells. Nothing happens." "Spool" is a favorite Beckett word, but its overuse in Baker's book seems careless: "The smoke spools up to the ceiling," "a long low spool of talk," "The day stretches and spools," "Smoke spools upward." The atmosphere of ennui eventually leaves the reader wondering if a more engaging tale could have been told with the resourceful and practical Suzanne as its protagonist. The suggestion that "Waiting for Godot" was inspired by Beckett's adventures in wartime France is not a new one. It seems very plausible. Still, knowing this, or that Eleanor Rigby was a name on a tomb in a Liverpool graveyard, or that Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet, doesn't take us any closer to understanding how a work of art is made or enjoyed. And to insist too much on the relevance of biography to "Godot" does both the play and the war an injustice. If Vladimir and Estragon are fleeing the Gestapo or waiting for a contact in the Resistance, it gives them a purposefulness that makes a mockery of the play. "Godot" takes place in the absence of any meaningful stories. In its world, life holds nothing beyond the present moment - a moment redeemed, if at all, by humor and companionship, not art. And though World War II might have had its quietist, Beckettian moments, it was mainly six years of indefatigable tyrannies, energetically abetted by ordinary people. Notably, "A Country Road, a Tree" has only an uncredited bit part for Robert Alesch, the philandering Roman Catholic priest who betrayed Beckett's comrades in the Resistance. But a character this dynamic or malign would upset the design of a novel that wants to ape Beckett by turning history into powerlessness, longueurs and absences. MARCEL THEROUX'S most recent novel is "Strange Bodies." In later life, Beckett dismissed his activities in the French Resistance as ?Boy Scout stuff.'
Excerpts
Excerpts
COOLDRINAGH Spring 1919 The tree stirred and sound of the needles was sshh, sshh, sshh. The boy swung a knee over the branch, heaved himself up, and shifted round so that his legs dangled. The scent of the larch cleared his head, so that everything seemed sharp and clear as glass. He could still hear the faint sound of piano practice, but he could also see out across the fields from here; he could see for miles and miles, and the sky was wide open as a cat's yawn. He heard the side door of the house go, and then her voice calling out for him, sing-song: "It's ti-ime." He chewed his lip and stayed put. The door popped open, he could hear more distinctly the bright ripple of music, a stumble, and the phrase caught and begun again. Frank was trying hard to get it right. He, though, would not oblige. With her watching, he couldn't lose himself while playing; and if he couldn't lose himself, then what was the point of playing at all? "I'm wai-ting." He didn't move. She gave out a sigh and the door clacked shut behind her, and she came down the step, out into the garden, looking for him. He dug at a scale of bark with a thumbnail. "Where have you dot to now, you wee skitter?" But it was herself that she was talking to as she marched through the garden, searching him out. He shuffled in against the trunk, wrapped an arm tight around it. He watched her pass under his dangling tennis shoes--the white dividing line of the parting in her hair, her skirt snapping out with her stride. Her feet moved like darting arrows, pointing the way. The wrong way, but she wasn't going to give up on it. If she were to stop, and plant her feet and crane her head back, that would be that. But it didn't cross her mind: he simply couldn't be where he was not allowed to be. Up there, he had climbed out of her imagining. The music ended. Frank had finished the piece. He was waiting to be excused. She was out across the lawns now, and there was just the spiral stair of larch branches down towards the brown earth, the mat of fallen needles, and the sound of her voice, calling again and fading round the far side of the house. He waited until he heard her footsteps return, and then the click and clack as she opened the side door and shut it again behind her. A moment later and the music started up again. Poor old Frank, he'd been lumbered with it; Frank was paying for his little brother's escape. He too would pay for it, he knew, and in spades, when she found him; his mother had a strong arm. But for now, he had disappeared, and it was a miracle. He shuffled forward on the bough, tweaking the legs of his shorts down, one and then the other, between the rough bark and the tender backs-of-knees. Gravity tugged at him now, teased at his core, making it lurch and swoop. A bird was singing somewhere--a blackbird, pouring its song up and out into the Easter air. He sucked in a 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. The pause on the cusp, the brink. He dived out into the empty air. Gravity snatched him. Air stuffed his mouth and ballooned his shirt and his shorts and pummelled him, and it was stacked with branches and they smacked and scurried past; twigs whipped his cheeks and legs and arms and belly and tore at his shirt. The ground slammed up. It knocked the breath out of him, knocked the light out of him. Made him still. He lay, his cheek on hard earth. No breath: empty, red and pulsing, and no breath. Gaping, but no breath; then, in front of his eyes, the dust stirred and the fallen needles shifted: he dragged in a lump of air and heaved it down him, and then pushed it out again. It hurt. He felt too a hot pulse in his hand, a burn on his thigh: he noticed these particular discomforts, alongside the tenderness of bruised ribs and the hard weight of the earth pushing up against him. He creaked up onto hands and knees as his breath became normal again. Then he sat back on his heels and brushed the needles off his palms. After a moment, he twisted himself round to stretch out his legs. He considered the scratch across the ball of his thumb, which was not so bad after all, and another on his thigh, which wasn't bleeding much, and the pink bald patch where an old scab had come off a knee. He licked the ooze off his hand, tasting not just blood but the salt-sweetness of unwashed skin and medicinal pine. He brushed down his shins and tied a trailing lace. Then he eased himself upright, unfolding like a deckchair, all angles and joints. He tugged his shorts straight, and they more or less covered up the scratch on his leg, so she wouldn't notice that. His head swam, just a bit. But he was all right. He looked over to the house: the windows stared straight back at him. The music laboured on. No doors were flung open, no one came thundering out to grab him by the scruff and drag him in and thrash his backside blue for doing something so very dangerous indeed, for putting himself in harm's way, for risking life and limb, when it had been impressed upon him so soundly not to do such an idiotic thing again. She must be standing over the piano, her stare flicking from Frank's hands to the score, the score to his hands, making sure that Frank, at least, was going to get something right. And knowing the piece, he knew he had a good while yet before Frank would be done with it. He glanced up through the helix of branches to the sky, where clouds bundled and tore towards the mountains from the sea. On the lowest branch, near the trunk, the bark was polished smooth with the wear of his own hands. He reached for it, grasped it in his stinging palms, and heaved himself up till his elbows locked and his belly was pressed against the bough. Then he swung his right knee over the scaly bark, making the blood bead again. He stretched a hand up for the next branch, where it hung just above his head. He began, again, to climb. This time, this time, this time, he would skim up to join the clouds. This time, he would fly. Excerpted from A Country Road, a Tree by Jo Baker All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
