Sweet child of mine

Most writers mark the completion of one of their works with some kind of gesture – going out for a meal, perhaps, or booking a holiday. Jo Baker, however, likes to round things off in style.

Four hours after finishing the first draft of her new book, The Mermaid’s Child, the Belfast-based novelist launched straight into an even more demanding creative project – giving birth to her son Daniel.
“It was pretty much: full stop, save to disk, lap-top closed, into labour.”
The Mermaid’s Child is, Baker admits, “a good, old fashioned yarn” – set during an unspecified past in an indeterminate location – it traces the journey of Malin Reed from brutalised, androgynous orphan to tough, wise, mother-to-be. It’s a book about “friendship and love” but one where sand dunes, travelling circuses, slave galleys and pirate ships provide the backdrop.
“Angela Carter once said that she was fed up with reading novels about infidelity in Hampstead, that’s why she started writing fiction that wasn’t constrained in the ways that social realism can be. I only heard that after I started to write this one, but it rang true.”
Baker acknowledges that Carter’s seditious way with a fairytale provided a strong influence on the book, and, when detailing Malin’s growing awareness of the complexities of her sexuality and dealing frankly with the recurrent acts of violence visited upon her, the strain of revisionist Victoriana currently being examined by the likes of Sarah Waters and Michael Faber also looms large.
The stylised and arcane tone of The Mermaid’s Child is pursued with such conviction you might think that Baker’s art has always inhabited such exotic terrain. Not so. Her 2001 debut, Offcomer, was a frequently harrowing and recognisably contemporary account of a young woman’s struggle to find emotional equilibrium in Oxford and Belfast.
From bedsit to Bedouin tent – the time between the two books have witnessed quite a creative lurch.
“Lurch would be right,” Jo laughs. “Offcomer was a really dark book; a really uncomfortable book. With this book, there’s a lot of violence in it, but I think overall it’s a much more joyous thing. I think that the main difference is that Offcomer was a book I had to write, this one is a book I wanted to read.”
Both novels display fearlessness when it comes to dealing with emotionally fraught situations, with the earlier work – whose main character struggles throughout with a compulsion to self harm – proving especially powerful.
“What I really wanted to capture in Offcomer was that sense of living in the world,” Jo explains. “Which is not to say that I was sitting with a razor blade every night, but if you’ve been through a difficult period and, for whatever reason, been isolated, it can leave you skinless and open to the elements.”
Now happily settled in Belfast with Daniel and her husband, the playwright, Daragh Carville, it’s a testament to the strength of Jo’s literary voice that, despite writing such different novels, a unifying personality runs through both.
“I think both books are about characters who find themselves completely at sea, and unable to find something or someone with which they can connect and belong.
“Having studied literature you kinda hesitate to talk about biography because theory teaches us that it’s pretty much irrelevant, but I’ve come to realise that that’s bollocks. It’s got to do with where I’ve lived and who I am. I grew up in the North of England with my parents who are from the South of England. Both of them have some kind of Jewish background but neither have an identifiable religious heritage.
“There was a lack of continuity on a lot of levels there. I went to Oxford as a Northerner, but not an urban Northerner, which, in itself, posed problems. And then I came here and just became English. I mean I think it’s all been good for me, but there always is that sense of not belonging. The books have all drawn very strongly from that.”

The Mermaid’s Child is out now.