A very interesting book about France during the German occupation. A great portrayal of the character of Samuel Beckett and the French Resistance.

This review appeared in The Seattle Times:
“A Country Road, A Tree,” by Jo Baker. Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95 (304 pages) [pub date May 17].
By Melinda Bargreen
Special to The Seattle Times

Tucked away at the end of Jo Baker’s new novel, “A Country Road, A Tree,” is the Author’s Note – normally a fairly inconsequential nicety that can be safely ignored. Not this time. It is in Baker’s note that the reader discovers that the unnamed protagonist of the novel is Samuel Beckett, the famous Irish-born author of “Waiting for Godot.” Baker’s title is taken from “Godot”; the novel reimagines Beckett’s life from 1939, when his disapproving mother urges him to stay in Ireland at the outbreak of World War II, through his heroic work in the French Resistance, and finally to his full emergence as a writer at the war’s end.

Why not use Beckett’s name in the novel about him? Baker told one interviewer, “In early drafts I used his name, and really felt shy around him: the writing was timid. I felt outfaced by his brilliance and erudition . . . But once his name was gone, the writing became freer, more intimate. I could get past the genius, and into the compassionate and funny and generous man.”

Readers who loved Baker’s previous novel “Longbourn,” which sneaks behind the scenes of Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” to see the Bennets through their servants’ eyes, should know that this new novel is definitely not “Longbourn Redux.” It shares some of the gritty realities of its predecessor, but the war – with its dangers and privations – is a palpable presence that places the newer novel squarely in the 20th century.

In Paris during 1939-40, hobnobbing with James Joyce (who is already preparing to move to neutral Switzerland) and Marcel Duchamp, Beckett muses that their civilized artsy evenings with books and paintings and little dishes of olives almost conceal the fact that “the axis of the world had already tipped and was sliding toward disaster.” But Beckett and his girlfriend Suzanne (later his wife) soon discover that occupied France is a horrific and unsafe place to be.

Worst of all, Suzanne takes a look at the notebook in which Beckett has been busily writing. It’s three-fourths full, but almost everything has been scratched out. The unhappy Suzanne muses, “… all that has been achieved here is the consumption of paper, ink and time.”

The privations of wartime – no food, no money, no heat, inadequate clothing, horrendous tooth decay – are described in vivid and very extensive detail: “Hunched at the table, the little crocheted blanket over his shoulders, mitts on his paws, his empty stomach whines and pops; his feet are a torment of chilblains, his nose is ice.”

(At this point, and elsewhere, readers may find themselves sneaking out to the kitchen for a nice restorative cup of hot tea, and maybe a snack.)

Beckett is drawn into the Resistance, passing information about German troop movements, translating, fleeing with Suzanne when the network is compromised. Splitting logs and cutting firewood with blistered hands, alert for the alarming advance of a diesel engine in the distance, Beckett somehow starts to write: “With a curve and loop and dip and stroke. The words keep happening, and he will not think too much about their coming but just let them come.”

At points, Baker’s narrative feels a bit too self-consciously arty: “The quayside, when they reach it, is a lunatic forced into a straitjacket: chaos twitches beneath the surface and wriggles out around the edges.” But she brings vividly to life Beckett’s own terrible struggle with words and his emergence as a writer, as he manages “to try again at this impossible thing that nobody cares whether he does or doesn’t do, and for which no payment is to be anticipated.”


Melinda Bargreen is the former classical-music critic for The Seattle Times and the author of two books, “Classical Seattle” and “50 Years of Seattle Opera.” She’s a freelance contributor to the Times and also writes for 98.1Classical KING FM (www.king.org).