A Country Road, A Tree

He feels the press of his own thoughts, the swell of the dark space at the back of the head from where the images start to spill. He's lost: the broken boots, the stiffening limbs, the sun sinking, a country road, a tree. This is a waterfall that he is falling with, these are dream-thoughts on the edge of sleep; they slip away and turn to mist when he looks at them directly.

I knew that the title of A Country Road, A Tree came from the opening stage directions for Waiting for Godot, but it wasn't until I finished reading this novel, and then started reading Goodreads reviews, that I learned there had ever been any mystery that the unnamed protagonist in the book was meant to be Samuel Beckett (that can't be a spoiler at this point, right?) I also didn't realise – having never actually read any Beckett, and certainly no biographies of his life – was that this would be, essentially, a WWII novel, and that's a good thing; I've come to realise that I don't much care for fiction set in the world wars – they seem a lazy way for a modern day author to evoke unearned emotion (I'm looking at you, nightingales and potato peel societies) – and I may not have read this if I had known. But I have to admit that this book is an exception to my peevish rule – that a biographical novel that explores an author's influences, which happens to have involved a setting in Occupied France and Beckett's efforts with the Resistance, makes for a dramatic, informative, and wholly satisfying read. I also hadn't read Jo Baker before, and right from the dreamy prologue, I admired her voice and craft; I will definitely read her again. Bottom line is: I liked this far more than I expected to, and as I was then prompted to read Waiting for Godot and Google around for a few hours exploring the play and its reception and Beckett himself, I was drawn into a pleasurable interdisciplinary bubble of learning that leaves me richer for the experience. And it all started with a country road, a tree.

What alarms him is the time that it implies. The waiting. That the seasons will have slid along from winter through spring and summer and back to autumn once more, and they'll be stuck here, eating garden peas and tomatoes and cooking their own onions in a stew. That by then the worst will not have happened, but then neither will anything else.

I learned that Samuel Beckett was a part of the famed Paris literary scene in the 1930s – he even served as secretary for James Joyce and helped him to edit Finnegan's Wake, reading out every comma and period as Joyce's vision grew ever dimmer – and although Beckett could have waited out WWII in his comfortably safe Irish home country, when France declared war on Germany in 1939, Beckett hurried back to Paris from visiting his mother's house to continue his writing and to be with his friends (and especially his lover, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil). The narrative that follows – the danger and deprivations during the Occupation, working with the Resistance, narrow escapes, strained love, and moral quandaries – is the kind of story that might normally bounce off my jaded heart, but I did find it fascinating because it actually all happened to Beckett, and because Jo Baker uses a light hand to draw connections between what the man experienced and how he would later use those experiences in his art. With really lovely writing, I thought that Baker did a fantastic job of turning obviously deep research into a satisfying novel.

His handwriting shrinks too and becomes more careful. Everything is reduced, condensed. He commits just the essence of the thing to paper. Anything more than that would be a waste. And when he surfaces to a cramped hand, a crick in the neck, the sunlight shifted across the floor, a sore blink, he knows that even to have written this little is an excess, it is an overflowing, an excretion. Too many words. There are just too many words. Nobody wants them; nobody needs them. And still they keep on, keep on, keep on coming.

Although I had thoroughly enjoyed the reading of this novel on its own merits, I recommend following up A Country Road, A Tree with a reading of Waiting for Godot: Baker salts her novel with plenty of small details from the play (making for a fun Easter Egg hunt in either direction), and if her broad biographical information is all to be trusted, it makes sense of the play's Absurdist philosophy. Taken together, I feel gratifyingly enriched by the entire experience.