Jo Baker’s recent books have been metafictions: Longbourn, the story of the servants who are barely mentioned in Pride and Prejudice; and A Country Road, a Tree, following Samuel Beckett’s life in wartime France. Both are brave and clever novels finding new worlds in the shadows of the literary canon. The Body Lies has no obvious specific intertext, but it sits in uneasy, challenging relation to contemporary popular fiction.
We begin, conventionally enough, with an invitation to take aesthetic pleasure in the death of a pretty young woman, lying dusted by snow under a beech tree on a moonlit night. Then we turn the page to meet the unnamed narrator, who is heavily pregnant, being assaulted by a strange man outside her London flat. Afterwards, the baby is OK, she says, so she’s OK, and though the midwife doesn’t believe her, her partner thinks she should “let it go” and move on. And then, 10 pages in, we skip three years and begin again – disturbed, waiting for some explanation – as the narrator starts a new job teaching creative writing in a northern university and caring for her toddler while her partner continues his school-teaching career in London.
There is some good campus satire: since one of the writing professors is on research leave and the other off sick with stress, our heroine finds that she is the creative writing department. She must teach students who have requested accommodation for special circumstances while declining to share the nature of the circumstances to be accommodated. She is required to attend induction sessions delivered at the end of the year’s teaching, to carry chairs from one decrepit room to another for meetings and to work all night in a hopeless gesture towards increasingly bizarre bureaucratic demands. Meanwhile, back at the remote rural cottage where the narrator and her son are living, three-year-old Sam sees a man watching them in the dusk and the neighbours warn her to get a dog. There is no phone reception. A grieving and confused old woman wanders the lanes and the farmer at the end of the road is hostile: something is wrong, but neither we nor she know what.
As writers become – to quote a former university colleague of mine – “the grey squirrels of English departments”, it’s not surprising that the distinctive dynamics of the writing workshop should find their way into fiction. Baker’s version is more direct and plot-driven than Rachel Cusk’s in Outline, but both are interested in the drama of fictions and egos performed in weekly ritual. Baker’s students include a lawyer writing generic misogynist crime fiction, possibly related to that dead body, with disturbing relish; a young woman mining her own not very interesting past; and a troubled posh boy upsetting everyone by writing rather brilliantly about the workshop. Presenting these pieces in the novel is a loop of metafiction that would floor a less assured writer. The students are all competitive, worried that their tutor is underqualified, that her judgment is unreliable, that she is too old or too young, too posh or too poor, too sexy or not sexy enough, to understand them as deeply as they have paid to be understood. The dynamics of self-revelation, attention‑seeking and self-righteousness swirl dangerously, with attractions and repulsions from outside the classroom seeping into the students’ writing and reading of each other’s work. Several of the male characters think a lot about sexual violence but are also obvious fabulists, so who knows what is true, what is self-delusion, what is said to impress and what is legitimately fictional? Every so often the narrative revisits that dead body, which may be rather close to the narrator’s house.
When the denouement comes, it is well timed to feel both shocking and inevitable: early enough for satisfying resolution afterwards and late enough to keep the reader up long into the night. There is violence, but there is also a very modern interrogation of violent fiction. What were you staying up late for, exactly?
The Body Lies sets itself large challenges: that fragmentary narrative, including an official complaint and some bureaucratic emails; the difficulty of using violence as a narrative device while questioning the politics of using violence as a narrative device; the task of combining the satire of the campus novel with the high drama of the thriller. Baker is a writer who can make it all work. Beyond the dubious fun of the chase, the pleasure of reading this novel is seeing writerly ambition fulfilled.
• Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall is published by Granta. The Body Lies by Jo Baker is published by Doubleday (RRP £12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
