Jo Baker's last two impressive novels stemmed from literary sources. "Longbourn" (2013) saw the English author tapping into the trend of updating or repurposing the work of Jane Austen, but opening up a fresh new front by reimagining "Pride and Prejudice" from the viewpoint of the servants in the Bennet household. In "A Country Road, a Tree" (2016) she channeled the singular mind of Samuel Beckett during his time in Nazi-occupied France.
Baker's seventh novel, "The Body Lies," is more literary-themed than literary-sourced. On this occasion she turns from past masters and masterpieces and instead devises an ingenious and electrifying setup that explores the boundary between fact and fiction.
The book's nameless narrator is a young writer with one unremarkable novel under her belt. Emotionally scarred by a violent assault, she agrees to a long-distance relationship with her husband and escapes London with her son for the safety and solitude of the remote, rural north. There she takes up a position at a university as a professor of creative writing. After some initial doubt about her aptitude for the job ("It felt rather like asking someone who'd once crash-landed a light aircraft to train people as commercial airline pilots"), she throws herself into her work.
One student in her class stands out: Nicholas, who tells his teacher that the radical fiction he is writing describes real events in his life. The raw, edgy and intense material he submits deals with a dysfunctional family, drink and drugs, and a lost girl, which leads the woman to surmise that he is writing to confront his demons: "To sound out the depths, to map this darkness."
She is fascinated by him — "By the tangle that he was" — until one drunken night his desperate actions expose a dangerous side to him. Soon afterward he goes missing but continues to send her his writing — which now features her as his main character heading toward a grim conclusion.
Baker may deny her narrator a name, but she ensures she is so well delineated in every other respect as to be believable and sympathetic. First she is overburdened; then, when Nicholas veers from volatile to violent, she is overwhelmed. We assume she will adopt her usual disaster-management strategy and walk away. But as her world caves in she decides to pick up the pieces and fight back.
What begins as an engaging tale about a new start in a new environment among budding new writers ramifies into a gripping psychological thriller that combines fiendish mind games and riveting drama with a timely examination of male entitlement and female struggle.
"I was done with the truth and all its lies," our heroine says at one point. "I wanted fiction, I wanted to be beguiled, to be transported." Baker's novel does just that: beguiling us, transporting us and terrifying us for good measure.
