Linda's Reviews > A Country Road, A Tree

“There’s a wide verge, which rises to become a bank, and at the top of the bank a fence runs; the tree forms part of this fence, like a post that’s taken root and grown. Bleached roots claw down into the earth; above, the trunk is slender, and two slim boughs stretch up to form a Y. A few blunt twigs, a handful of leaves. It is by no means impressive, but it is distinctive. It is the kind of tree of which to make a landmark. Of which one might readily say, You can’t miss it….
“ He said to wait by the willow tree and that fellow would meet us and bring us along”….
“’Is that you?’ he calls out into the darkness. ‘Hello there! Is that you, Monsieur?’
“The figure stands against the pre-dawn sky. He’s just a boy. His socks are crumpled down and his jacket is too big for him. He glances off along the lane. ‘Come with me.’”
Pat Baker never read Samuel Beckett’s work until graduate school. She was a bit puzzled because she felt that the later works didn’t really grow from the earlier ones. Until a professor mentioned that WWII had had a profound effect on Beckett.
This is the slightly fictionalized story of that effect and Baker’s interpretation of it. Baker has taken ideas, stories, words, phrases from the later works and set them into wartime experiences to show how they might have come about: the preference to go and live in war-time France rather than stay in Ireland where he could not write; the choice to help his friends in Paris with the Resistance so that he could do “something for someone”; his inability to write, the scribbles in many notebooks; his hero-worship of James Joyce, who thinks that a superb present from himself to Beckett would be a used coat.
Baker admits to being so in awe of Beckett that she couldn’t write his name in her manuscript. The words wouldn’t wind around his name. So here he becomes “he.”
Baker’s prose is smooth and well-done. The book is a delightful read where, even if you know Beckett’s biography, you eagerly look for instances where an episode or a thrown-away sentence will come out later in a tremendously marvelous piece of writing. When I read the scene at the beginning of this review, I stopped stunned. Waiting for Godot. It really could have happened that way.
“You keep on going, don’t you, after all? The horrors build. You keep on doing what you do, out of spite.”
Samuel Beckett is my husband’s and my favorite playwright (yes, even above Willy). We even named one of our dogs after him. So I was a bit fearful of reading this book. But I needn’t have worried. It’s exactly what I wanted it to be.