Back in 2013 I read and hugely enjoyed Jo Baker's Longbourn, which retold the story of Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of the servants. I hadn't spotted anything else by Baker since then, though I'm now rather tempted by the sound of her A Country Road, A Tree, about Samuel Beckett in wartime France. But as soon as I saw this one I knew I had to read it and have just finished. It is indeed a superb novel.
When we first meet the narrator, whose name we never discover, she is a young married woman, several months pregnant, living in south-east London and working in a bookshop while spending her spare time writing a novel. The story begins dramatically as, on the way home from work, she is randomly attacked by a man in the street. She manages to make her escape but is extremely traumatised by the event, and her husband Matt's advice to 'put it behind you' is no help.
Fast forward three years and she is now a published author with a three year old son, Sam. The London flat is small and cramped, and she decides to apply for a job teaching creative writing in a university in the north west of England. Rather to her surprise she gets the job, but Matt decides he doesn't want to move. So as the new term begins she and Sam are living in a remote cottage, a bus ride away from campus and with no phone or mobile signal. Not surprisingly this will ring alarm bells for readers, but at first mother and child are happy enough with their life in the cottage, making do with Matt's brief weekend visits. At the university, however, things are far from easy. There are supposed to be three people in the creative writing department, but one of them is on extended sick leave and another is on an exchange at a Canadian university. So, completely new to teaching, she finds herself in charge not just of the MA course but also the undergraduate degree, plus all kinds of admin which is increasingly piled onto her by her unsympathetic head of department.
Exhausted and overworked, she struggles with the small cohort of MA students. Among them there's the local solicitor, who is writing a generic crime novel replete with dead female bodies, the American girl whose work is all about werewolves, and most notably there is Nicholas, a young man whose wealthy parents live in the neighbourhood. Nicholas is scathing about the solicitor's work ('Does it have to start with a dead woman? I don’t know this woman. She could be anybody. Literally. Any. Body. She has no agency, she’s not a character, she’s a device. She’s not real, so we don’t care'), and, though his own writing also contains the dead body of a young woman, he insists that everything he writes is the absolute truth. He dominates the class and clearly is developing an obsession with the narrator, who struggles to keep things on an even keel, even as his later writings become focussed on herself. Then a dramatic event turns everything upside down and the narrator's life becomes increasingly terrifying.
This, then, is essentially a psychological thriller, but it's one that is profoundly self-questioning. Alarming and threatening though the narrator's experiences become, it's equally alarming to witness how easily such situations can be misread by outsiders. The novel questions the role of creative writing and in particular its focus on the female body, and we are treated from time to time to extracts from the students' writing so we can make up our own minds about its value and accuracy. It's also a brilliantly satirical campus novel, which is painfully funny and desperately accurate about life in a small northern university, as I know to my cost having spent many years teaching in one such myself. I loved every minute of this novel and was really sorry when it came to an end. Our Shiny New Books reviewer Gill Davies loved it too - you can read her review here.
