The Body Lies

Just a couple bucks for this one at a recent library sale. I'd never heard of Jo Baker, but apparently she's a best selling writer in the UK. And, after reading THE BODY LIES (2019), I can see why. From page one I was caught up in the story of this young woman, a writer who remains unnamed, who is randomly attacked by a stranger as she walks home from her job at a London bookstore. She is pregnant at the time, but not badly hurt and the baby is born a few months later. But she no longer feels safe in London, or in the world in general. So she finds a job teaching creative writing at a small college in the north, but can't convince her teacher husband to move with her. So she takes her toddler son and relocates to a small isolated house show more on a dead end road and begins teaching at the college (also unnamed). In her class is a very disturbed young man who becomes obsessed with her, writing her into his assignments. Gradually she learns of his background and becomes afraid. I was sucked into this terrifying tale of stalking, sexual assault, a shattering home invasion and a night time flight across a frozen pasture that I stayed up til after 1am turning pages, both wanting and not wanting to know what would happen next. Jo Baker is a writer who knows her craft, creating characters you care about and a keen sense of place that you can almost feel and see. But this is more than just a chilling, page-turning thriller. It also manages to portray what it's like to be a woman in a the male-dominated world of today. Male readers may cringe a bit, perhaps recognizing a part of themselves in some of the male characters presented here - the husband, the department chair, and even a seemingly sympathetic colleague.

Riveting, stunning, timely - all of these apply. I may have to read more from this young writer. Those two bucks were well spent. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

While pregnant, a young woman is mugged by a stranger as she walks home from work late one winter afternoon. While the physical damage is minimal, she no longer feels safe. When her child is a toddler and it's time for her to return to work, she applies and gets a job teaching at a university in the north of England. Her husband is unwilling to follow her and so they begin a sort of half-relationship where he drives up on weekends and holidays, while she and her son settle in to an isolated cottage. She's quickly in over her head at the college, as the head of the department keeps adding to her workload. Her main class is a graduate course on creative writing, where she is shepherding a small group of aspiring writers, one of whom show more quickly begins to behave inappropriately.

This novel has such a sense of menace and foreboding about it that I often had to set it aside when reading it late at night. Yet, that sense of menace is so subtly created that I questioned, along with the main character, whether there was any reason for my sense of dread. Jo Baker does a fantastic job of writing a thriller. But there's more to it than the usual "woman in peril" trope. Baker examines misogyny from several directions, from the way women are written about, to how women are conditioned to downplay harassment and to not make a fuss. Her scenes set during the creative writing seminars were brilliant, as was her depiction of a woman growing ever more exhausted as she attempts to cope with all the challenges of an overloaded work schedule and the demands of raising a toddler. show less

I’ve been sitting here wondering what to say about Jo Baker’s The Body Lies. On the one hand, I adored the writing. She starts out each section with these pieces that are almost poetic in nature, no matter how brutal the scene they are describing. They are so beautiful in their descriptiveness and imagery. I found myself looking forward to each chapter break because I knew it would mean another one of those pieces. On the other hand, the story held no interest for me. Sure, I felt for the heroine and her struggles to be a single mother in a new environment with a new job. I don’t necessarily approve of the way she became so involved in her students’ lives, which is what directly leads to all the drama and suspense later in the show more story. I can recognize her growth as she learns to say no to an overbearing boss, but her initial inability to do so bothered me a lot. It never seemed to fit with her personality and what we know about her. So, there was a lot about the story that irked me and not a lot that made a positive impression. This reaction bothers me most of all because I like Jo Baker’s novels and wanted to like this one. Unfortunately, when the final reaction upon reading the last sentence is one of relief that the book is over, saying you like the novel is not an option, and that is where The Body Lies leaves me. show less

I first encountered Jo Baker's novels with "Longbourn", in which she went far, far beyond an homage to Jane Austen to force readers to rethink the whole issue of how and why Austen wrote as she did and focused on the characters she did, simply by re-telling the narrative through the eyes of the Bennet domestic staff. Oh, and she did it brilliantly.

So, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that Baker, taking on the broad issue of gender equity and violence against women in the #metoo era, should be equally effective and persuasive. She walks the line between creating a polemical work and a traditional "woman in peril novel" adroitly, and has created an eloquent tale of what can happen when women struggle with issues of agency and control show more and encounter push-back from the men in their world. While there is plenty of thoughtful stuff to ponder in this story of a young woman who (after an assault, and after giving birth to her first child) finally takes up a post as a lecturer in creative writing (agency!) discovers that she (a) must deal with some very difficult students who play with her sanity, (b) cope with a lecherous department head who loads ever more work on her shoulders and (c) an absent husband and unsupportive colleagues. In the hands of a lesser writer, Baker's "heroine" could have ended up sounding like a whiny ninny incapable of standing up for herself as her situation deteriorates. Instead, the writing and characterizations are so strong that it's impossible for a reader not to visualize and understand the kind of situation in which she finds herself trapped.

This is likely to end up on the list of my best/most memorable books of the year.

Full disclosure: I received an advance e-galley of this novel from the publisher via Edelweiss. show less

This was just the book I had been seeking at this time. From its opening, when a young woman is sexually assaulted by a stranger on the street, it has a subtle but growing sense of menace and dread. That one event starts a chain in which the woman, now a mother of a toddler, leaves London and moves to a small English town to teach a masters course in creative writing. Her husband stays behind to keep his job. The separation strains her marriage, of course, and one of her students, a well-off full-of-himself brooding type who only writes "the truth," has taken an unhealthy interest in her.

I very much empathized with this narrator (I don't think we get her name). A lot of women could relate to her experiences, I think. In the end, she show more insists on being the author and protagonist of her own story. Her refusal to conform to men's expectations of how she should behave as a supporting player in their stories has a lot of negative consequences for her, but in the end, she succeeds--in a very believable way, I think. I thought [The Body Lies] was compulsively readable, tautly written, and not only a compelling commentary on how men see women, but also a cutting critique of MFA programs and academia in general. show less

I've been thinking about writing this review and wondering how I can do justice to this complex novel. I'll give it a go.

Our main protagonist is a writer. We never learn her name. This is very much her story and hers alone. A terrifying and random assault leads her to take a job away from home, teaching an MA at a university. She takes her young son with her but her husband stays behind and they agree a long distance relationship. One of her new students gets too close to her and his submitted work appears to be about her. The more she reads the more she realises the threat to her safety.

This is a dangerous story of obsession and fear. It's incredibly current with the #MeToo movement. She cuts herself off from life with a cottage with show more no phone signal in a remote area. With a small child this seems rather foolhardy but it adds to the tension, and the openness of her surroundings seems more claustrophobic than reassuring.

The Body Lies is an intricate story. There is layer upon layer to uncover from the writer's private life, the lives of her students, her neighbours, her new colleagues. It's a taut and exciting read with many different elements to consider.

I read with a growing sense of doom for most of it, partly because I could see where some of it was going, and partly because of the way the writer is treated by men. Does acquiescing because you are unable to fight mean that you consent? No, and yet it says it all that she worries whether anyone will believe what she says.

This is a book that is addictive to read. It has an interesting device in that we are able to read some of the students' work. This kind of thing doesn't always work for me as I find it distracts me from the main story, but here it works brilliantly and adds that extra layer to the narrative.

So...no idea if I have managed to do it justice after all. It's such a difficult book to review really but know this: I found it difficult to put down, it gripped me from start to finish, for a rather short read it packs such a punch, and it's very current. I thought it was a fabulous read and the tone of the writing was perfect. show less

this is going to haunt me for a long time.

---

This review can also be found on my blog.

I was first drawn to The Body Lies after reading Rachel’s incredible review of it. I’m glad to have gotten her perspective, because I can see how going into this expecting a thriller would be disappointing. This is not a fast-paced crime novel; this is a quietly terrifying piece of literary fiction. Baker presents an examination of trauma as well as the objectification of women’s bodies that I will not be forgetting anytime soon.

The atmosphere is key here. An undercurrent of tension runs throughout this novel. As a reader I nearly always was on the edge of my seat waiting for things to go south even though, strictly speaking, not much was show more happening. Baker is masterful at making you truly feel the main character’s anxieties without even telling you what they are. I was incredulous at how certain events impacted me; events that objectively I wouldn’t have felt anything for become absolutely heart-wrenching when placed into context.

This is in part a tongue-in-cheek commentary about how women’s bodies are typically used in thrillers. Baker turns these tropes on their head, criticizing them while also demonstrating how to utilize them effectively. The setting really works here: a creative writing class allows us to see examples firsthand in an organic manner. The excerpts of her students’ writing don’t feel forced, and they add a great deal to the story.

What I found most impactful in this book was its portrayal (and analysis) of trauma. At the outset of the book, the narrator is attacked by a man on the street. The ways this impacts her life are both large and small, and I felt Baker did an incredible job of demonstrating that. Additionally, it quickly becomes clear that those outside a traumatic incident are not necessarily able to understand, or even notice, these impacts. My heart ached reading this; I felt like Baker was able to reach deep down inside me.

I honestly cannot recommend this book highly enough. As I said before, it will do you no good to go into this expecting a true thriller with a twisty plot. But if you’re looking for something dark and quiet that explores the way we treat women, you’re in for quite the treat. I’m certain I’ll be coming back to this again and recommending it left and right. Already my favorite book of the year (although I’ll revisit this in December), The Body Lies is honestly a masterpiece.

Blog | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook show less