A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker review – a skilful recreation of Beckett’s war years

The author of Longbourn illuminates Beckett’s work by dramatising the privation and adventures of his wartime experiences, from his work with the resistance to his long walk south

Amid all the Jane Austen reboots and ripoffs, Jo Baker’s 2013 debut Longbourn, which developed the events of Pride and Prejudice from the servants’ perspective, seemed restrained yet revelatory. Fresh, fascinating and beautifully achieved, it was that rare beast: a critical success with wide commercial appeal. What would one expect from the follow-up? Probably not a re-creation of Samuel Beckett’s war years, from his desperation to leave the Ireland that stifled him, through his time in occupied Paris working for the resistance and escape to the south after being betrayed to the Nazis, to his postwar job helping set up a French hospital. And always, through danger, penury and privation, the compulsion to continue with writing that doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere, that he is driven to produce, as a writer friend puts it, like snails make slime.

The book echoes Longbourn, though, in the way it takes a behind-the-scenes look at literature, animating the experiences that fed into Beckett’s later work. Baker’s close attention to physical experience, the deafening demands of the body during hard labour or hunger, is familiar from Longbourn, too, and pertinent to Beckett’s aesthetic as it was to her story of Georgian England’s less fortunate class. “The body’s barest needs make for a heavy load,” we are told, as, during the darkest days of the war, Beckett and his lover Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil struggle on foot towards what they hope will be the safe haven of Roussillon. As they throw themselves on the mercy of strangers, “human bodies share the almost nothing that they have, and go on living”.

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