Jo Baker on imagining the story beneath the story
English writer Jo Baker is fascinated by uncovering new angles on classic stories. She had a breakthrough hit with Longbourn, a re-imagining of the world of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the servants. Baker's latest novel, A Country Road, A Tree, takes a look at the life of Nobel Prize-winning Irish author Samuel Beckett, finding the roots of his groundbreaking play Waiting for Godot in the writer's experience in France during the Second World War.
Jo Baker spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from the CBC's London studio.
Why we're drawn to retellings of classic stories
In some cases, it's sympathy for the monsters. You read these extraordinary books and there's space in there for you to occupy these other characters. These characters have their own narratives — they appear in the originating novel for a while and then they disappear. And so we become fascinated by them. We want to see where they've been and where they're going. They're glimpsed for a while in one novel, but there is so much more story implicit there. It's so tempting and thrilling and engaging to be able to find out what might have been the case for those characters.
I'd always been conscious of the fact that there were footmen and butlers in Pride and Prejudice, and that services were being performed, but there weren't really characters performing them that we could see. My grandma was in service, and so I knew there were servants there. But we don't hear about them. A message is delivered, a carriage is brought around, a meal is served. The characters who are making these things happen are there in the room, but they're not there in the text.
I was reading the book once and I stumbled upon a line. It's before the Netherfield ball and it's been raining and the roads are deep in mud. And the line is "the very shoe-roses for Netherfield were got by proxy." Shoe-roses are little pom-poms that you affix to your dancing shoes. And I thought, who is Proxy? And how does she feel about being sent out for these adornments that are enabling somebody else to go to the ball? She's not Cinderella — she's never going to go to the ball. How does she feel about being in that situation? That was the germ of the whole novel, that one line. How this individual might be experiencing the world in serving this household, being present in this household but not really being part of this amazing story that's unfolding for the Bennet sisters.
Imagining Samuel Beckett's family life
I think Samuel Beckett was never able to succeed on his mother's terms. She came from a very conventional kind of background, and she wanted a conventional kind of success for her sons. Beckett's brother Frank achieved that by taking on the family business. He played golf and had a car and a family life. But Samuel Beckett couldn't fit himself into that mould, and when he tried to, he made a mess of it. His mom wanted him to write respectable articles for the Irish Times. Everything he wrote was not something she could put on the coffee table and show to her friends. His stuff got banned, and it was stuff that was really difficult for her to feel positive about.
Jo Baker's comments have been edited and condensed.