Meet the Author: Jo Baker
Jo Baker is a novelist who will be well known to Suffolk readers through books such as Longbourn and A Country Road, A Tree. Jo's latest book The Midnight News is set in London during the Blitz. You can find The Midnight News and the rest of Jo's books on our catalogue.
Who were your influences as you were growing up and did you have books around you as a child?
I grew up in an amazing time for children’s writing; looking back I realise how lucky I was to get my grubby little mitts on the work of Susan Cooper, Joan Aitken, Alan Garner and Rosemary Sutcliff in particular. There were always books at home, and I was brought regularly to the Children’s Library in Lancaster as well as to the local bookshops to choose what I wanted next. I was very lucky.
I've read about your 3am writing sessions in your early days. Is your writing routine a bit more relaxed nowadays?
Yes, thankfully. I’m not currently having to juggle a full-time job, small children and a writing career. The children are bigger, I gave up the day job, so now it’s just me and my laptop once the younger one’s in school.
Longbourn firmly established your name in the literary world. Was this a good thing or are you still endlessly answering questions about Jane Austen and her influence on your work?
It’s complicated. I never mind talking about Austen – I love Austen. But Longbourn – or perhaps more accurately, the success of Longbourn – never really felt like mine. It was a good 80% Austen, 20% me. So I don’t know that I ever really came to terms with the whole thing – I certainly don’t feel established.
Your work has covered everything from below stairs in Pride and Prejudice through Samuel Beckett's life in the French Resistance and now WWII. How do you settle on a topic that interests you?
Usually it’s because there’s a question niggling at me that I can’t answer any other way. I have to write a novel to work out what I think…. With Longbourn it was to do with my relationship with Austen – loving her work, loving losing myself in that world, but knowing I didn’t quite belong there, because of my working class roots. I couldn’t imagine myself in Elizabeth Bennet’s shoes, but I could imagine myself cleaning them. Longbourn was an attempt to negotiate a complicated relationship with her work.
With A Country Road, A Tree I was picking away at something that had intrigued me ever since I’d first encountered Samuel Beckett’s work as a student… His early writing is so rich, so linguistically playful, so heavily influenced by James Joyce; his later work is so stripped back and spare and absurdist and, well, ‘Beckettian’. He transformed himself as a writer, he became himself as a writer, with very little work (one novel, Watt) through which to track the changes. I really wanted to explore what was going on in the gap between the early work and that later phase. And what was going on was the war, and a series of extraordinary moral decisions.
Can you tell us a little about The Midnight News and how it was to write?
The Midnight News is set at the start of the Blitz. My protagonist, Charlotte, is a troubled young woman trying to make sense of the violence that’s exploding around her – some of which feels very personal indeed. She finds the spirit of communality and joining-in jarring, even though it seems to offer comfort to many others. She meets Tom, whose disability places him, too, on the edge of things... what plays out between them a mystery, and a love story – between two people who have assumed that, because of who they are, love is out of the question.
I wrote The Midnight News in lockdown. It did offer an escape from the boredom and frustration of those times; I could disappear into a different world. But over time I began to find the two worlds were leaching into each other. The frustrations, the confusion, the pettiness and sanctimony, the grief in The Midnight News all were informed by life under Covid. And when politicians conjured up the ‘Blitz spirit’ and insisted ‘we are all in it together’, I knew that this had never been true – not then, not now. There was no unifying Blitz Spirit. People were terrified and isolated and confused and angry and badly behaved, then as now. And we were only ever in it together in the way that ships are in a storm at sea. A very different experience in a luxury yacht, than in a leaky dinghy.
When you were researching for The Midnight News did you discover anything that surprised you?
Oh my days, yes. I spent quite some time researching mental health treatments in, and leading up to, this period. I wasn’t just shocked at the therapies themselves, but also at their murky origins. There’s a whole raft of treatments based on the idea that a jolt delivered to the body – a ‘somatic shock’ – can restore sanity. This was attempted by various means, including infection with malaria, the induction of a diabetic coma, and then the use of electricity.
But the whole approach was based on a misunderstanding. Doctors were treating patients infected with tertiary syphilis – which affects the brain – alongside people with mental health issues. Unwittingly, one of the treatments – malaria – triggered an immune response which also cleared syphilitic infections. So some patients did improve, radically, but not for the reasons their doctors supposed. But the procedures became established, new therapies extrapolated from them – and that’s where ECT emerged from.
Is there anything you can share with us about your latest project?
It’s a sequel to The Midnight News. Although the original mystery is resolved, I didn’t think that Tom and Charlotte’s story was quite finished. I wanted to know what happened next.
One book, piece of music or work of art that everyone should experience?
Oh I wouldn’t want to dictate; also timing is important. But I am so glad that I read The Dark Is Rising when I was eleven. Bought Astral Weeks at seventeen. I saw my first Caravaggio – The Beheading of St John the Baptist – when I was thirty; somehow they were all exactly the right thing at the right moment.
What is the strangest or funniest thing that your readers have shared with you?
When I was on book tour with Longbourn in the US, one young woman took my hand, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright, and said with great intensity, ‘Thank you for James.’