Meet the author: G.M. Baker
Hi, y’all! Welcome to our last author interview of 2023! I’ll be giving the interview series a break in December for holiday and schedule reasons, but plan to be back in 2024 to introduce you to more writers. If you enjoy these interviews, be sure to subscribe and share with a friend!
This month’s interview is with author G.M. Baker. G. M. Baker is trying to revive the serious popular novel, the kind of story that finds the truth of the human condition in action, adventure, romance, and even magic. He writes the newsletters, Stories All the Way Down, Ordinary Eccentricity, and Why I Am Still Catholic, and is the author of the historical novels The Wistful and the Good, St. Agnes and the Selkie, and the fairy-tale fantasy Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight.
What is your favorite part of the writing process, and least favorite part of the writing process?
The favorite part is when you get into that state that the psychologists call flow, which, I suppose, is the favorite part of every endeavor. It’s when the story is humming and the words are coming and the characters are saying and doing the things that come into their heads as if they were real and not your inventions. And the least favorite is the seventh proofreading pass, by which point the entire project has come to seem a wretched mess.
Have you always wanted to be a writer?
For as long as I can remember, anyway. It wasn’t just fiction, though. I founded and edited my high school newspaper. My first short story was published when I was 19, which was fortuitous because my father had said that he would pay my university tuition if I got legitimately published. I’m sure he did not expect to have to pay off that promise, but he did, which allowed me to spend my summers writing truly terrible science fiction stories, which I discovered in the bottom of a box during our last move and promptly burned. But over the course of my life, I’ve done almost every type of writing at least once. I did one piece of investigative journalism in which I exposed the incorrect disposal of cancer waste at a local hospital. I did one magazine feature story. I even published one poem. I spent a lot of my life as a technical writer. I’ve done job ads and marketing campaigns. I’ve published three technical books and dozens of articles. And finally, my four novels. I’ve tried other things along the way, but writing is the only thing that stays interesting. That is the secret, I think: find the thing that stays interesting and figure out how to make it pay. (Hint: fiction is almost never a way to make writing pay, but there are lots of other ways.)
In your historical fiction, which comes first: the desire to research a certain time period, or the story and characters?
Story and characters, definitely. I’m a bit of a heretic when it comes to historical fiction. The trend today is towards a very documentary approach to fiction – historical fiction whose principle appeal is what it teaches you about history. But really, that’s an illusion. Having been trained as an historian, I am aware that even the most meticulously researched historical novels don’t really teach history. The most contentious piece I ever wrote for my newsletter, Stories All the Way Down, is an article titled, No, You Can’t Learn History From Historical Fiction. Fortunately, as many people agreed as disagreed or I might have been run out of town on a rail.
I actually think of historical fiction more as a kind of fairy tale. G. K. Chesterton defines a fairy tale as the story of a sane man in a mad world. That’s a good definition, but it means a lot of works qualify as fairy tales. In The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo and Frodo are both sane men living in a sane place in the Shire, but they are pulled out of it and sent on an adventure through a mad world of orcs and dragons and magic rings. But lots of historical novels do the same. David Balfour, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, is plunged into a mad world of miserly uncles, slavers, and Jacobites. Huck Finn enters the mad world of the Mississippi. Jack Hawkins finds himself in the mad world of Treasure Island. Minus the fairy dust, this is very much the same thing.
To us, the past is a mad world. It operates by different rules and its inhabitants believe and practice startling things. In The Wistful and the Good, my main character, Elswyth, is the daughter of a minor Anglo-Saxon thegn, and I try to portray her world and her thoughts and actions as close to historical reality as the sparce historical record allows. But I also make her the beautiful daughter of a beautiful Welsh slave, a girl that everyone seems to fall in love with. And I begin her story six weeks after the Viking raid on Lindisfarne that was the 9-11 event of the Anglo-Saxon age. There are women like that, women that men will die for and make fools of themselves over. Folk songs are full of them, from the Maid of Fife to Eileen Og to The Star of the County Down. But great beauty is also a fairytale affliction – who is the fairest of them all? Elswyth is betrothed to the son of the local ealdorman – a senior nobleman – but she has a wistful heart and cannot settle. It is all fairy tale stuff.
The past is Fairyland. Particularly the parts of the past beloved of historical novelists. The worlds of Nelson’s navy and of Wellington’s army are fairylands – mad worlds – as is the Rome of the Caesars or the court of the sun king, or medieval India, China, or Japan. The American West is Fairyland. The Gettysburg battlefield, which I visited a couple of years back, is a fairyland, one with a particularly haunting feel to it, as is the valley of Glencoe, scene of the famous massacre, which I have also visited. They are mad worlds all, and into them we novelists send sane men and women, or at least their avatars. There is a reason that more historical novels as set in the court of Henry VIII than, I suspect, every other English monarch combined. Henry VIII is a fairytale ogre, and Ann Bolyn, depending on how you take her, is either the innocent princess or the villainous enchantress. They are fairytale figures, and the Tudor court is Fairyland.
This is why, to me, The Wistful and the Good and my literary fairytale, Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight, based on the old Scottish ballad of the same name, are not really very different. They are both fairytales in which sane, though flawed, young women must make their way through mad worlds. One world is mad with elf knights and enchanted forest glades and wise gardeners, and the other is mad with a mother who seduced the son of the manor to win freedom from slavery, a grouchy sister who is the finest needlewoman in Northumbria, a sorrowing Abbess, a roguish King, and, oh yes, Vikings. One may cleave close to the historical record and be shelved as historical fiction, and the other cleave to the Arthurian cycle and be shelved as fantasy, but they are both fundamentally cut from the same cloth. And so is most historical fiction, whether it cares to admit it or not. And that is a good thing.
All of which is to say that it all begins with the story and the characters. Every story needs a stage on which its poor players can strut and fret their hour. And that stage must be calculated to provide the particular stripe of madness that will bring out the particular stripe of sanity we wish to call forth from our characters. And the past can provide an appropriate stage, possessed of a particular stripe of madness for whatever kind of sanity you might want to pull forth from your character’s ordeal. The story calls for its proper stage. Unless, as for some, it is the stage that, in its particular brand of madness, calls for a particular brand of sanity to be enacted on it. It is that way round for some authors, it seems, but not for me. I choose the stage to suit the play and do what research I must to make it look the part. From the back, it is all plywood and scaffolding, and the front is mostly painted on, with a few apt props in the foreground. The art is in picking the right paint and the right props to seem convincing. And that, too, is true of most historical novels.
Tell us about someone who has inspired you creatively?
As I think about this question, I realize that all the names that are coming to mind are the authors of fairytales. I love Rudyard Kipling, particularly Puck of Pooks Hill, which is a fairytale retelling of English History, and the short story Riki Tiki Tavi. Riki Tiki Tavi is a fairytale turned inside out. It is the story of a young orphaned mongoose in the house of an English family in India. It is an animal story. Riki talks to various animals, including the Cobra’s themselves. The house and the garden of the English family ought to be the sane world and the world of the animals the mad world, but Kipling deftly reverses it. The house and the garden become the mad world in which Riki Tiki Tavi must fulfill his fairytale quest by defending the boy against the cobras.
Then there is Arthur Ransom, who manages something of the same trick, making an ordinary English lake into a mad world of Amazons and pirates into which the sane Walker children sail in their dingy. The telegram that their father, away at sea, sends to give his permission is a classic line, right up there with the opening of Pride and Prejudice or A Tale of Two Cities. “Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers, won’t drown.” I realize not many today would recognize that as the voice of sanity in a mad world, but it was how it struck me in my youth, staying up all night to read it under the covers by torchlight, and it is how it still strikes me today.
And then there is Kenneth Graham. The Wind in the Willows is very obviously a fairy tale. And it is a thing of many wonders, of which Toad is certainly a part, but far from the whole. The side-story, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, is, I think, the finest recreation of the numinous moment in all of literature. At least, in all that I have read.
And then there is Alan Garner, who comes a very close second, with a very different kind of numinous moment at the end of The Moon of Gomrath. And if you do not weep at the hunting of the unicorn Findhorn at the end of Elidor, I don’t know what hope there is for your soul.
I feel like I should have said something about Evelyn Waugh for Brideshead Revisited, Graham Greene for The Power and the Glory, and John Steinbeck for Cannery Row, which I consider three of the finest novels ever written. But though each of them, in its way, does fit Chesterton’s definition of a fairytale, if the question is creative inspiration, as opposed to mute admiration, it is still Kipling, Ransome, Graham, and Garner that spring most readily to mind.
What is one of the best books you’ve read lately?
I am currently reading Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. I have seen the miniseries twice. How can you go wrong with Robert Duval, Tommy Lee Jones, and Diane Lane full of luminous youth? But I came across the novel in a curious way. I was taking a masterclass offered by the Historical Novel Society, and one of the other participants was asking how to square the no-head-hopping rule that we were being preached as gospel with a scene from Lonesome Dove in which the cowboys come to town and the narrative hops quickly from one to another in an absolutely brilliant passage. And the answer to that question is that you can’t because the no head hopping rule is wrong. (I’m a heretic in this too!)
The other half of Chesterton’s observation on fairy tales is that a realist novel is the story of a madman in a sane world, which is the more striking and more profound observation of the two. The corollary of this is that fairytales are objective and realist novels are subjective. Sanity, after all, is about seeing things as they are; madness is about seeing them as they are not. It follows that an objective narrative style fits a fairy tale (and Lonesome Dove, like almost all Westerns, is a fairy tale), whereas a subjective narrative style, in which we see the world only as the protagonist sees it, through either a first-person or close third-person narrative style, fits a realist novel. And while historical novels are, by nature, fairy tales, many are written today as if they were realist novels, with the reader trapped in the mad, subjective world of a single protagonist.
Can you tell that I am not fond of that style of writing? There is nothing that puts me off a novel quicker than the word “I” in the first paragraph. We are told today that the old objective style of storytelling cannot possibly hold the reader’s attention. The truth, I have found, at least for my work, is that most readers don’t notice the difference. Nor am I the only writer writing in an objective style. No one seems to have told a lot of the writers on the perennial best-seller lists about the new rules. (And, yes, it is possible to write in an objective style with a first-person narrator, sterling examples being Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited and Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, but they almost always play the role of observer and chronicler to mad main characters – Sebastian Flyte and Jay Gatsby respectively – thus preserving the fairytale structure of a sane man in a mad world. Indeed, we might see this as the way to maintain the objectivity of a fairytale in what would otherwise be a realist novel, a tale told by a madman. Imagine Brideshead or Gatsby told by Sebastian or Gatsby themselves, and you will see what I mean.
Where is some place you feel most at home?
I have recently moved back to Nova Scotia after having spent most of my working life in Southern Ontario. My attachment to the place is somewhat curious. I was born in England and grew up in suburban Manchester, but when I was eleven, my father got a job teaching English at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia – a town of perhaps 3000 people which swelled to perhaps 5000 when the university was in session. We went from living on a suburban street a hundred yards from a bus stop and a railway station to an old converted one-room schoolhouse on a largely forested acre between a river and a dirt road, 10 miles out of town. I lived there for high school and undergrad, had a couple of short-term local newspaper jobs there, and then went away for grad school and better work opportunities. I didn’t return for 37 years, but Nova Scotia always seemed like home, and when we retired, my wife and I moved back (though not “back” in her case). And it still seems much as I left it 37 years ago. It is neither where I was born nor where I have lived most of my life, but it long has been and always will be home.
What is one of the best pieces of advice you’ve ever gotten?
When I first moved from Nova Scotia to Ontario, I got a temp job at an office in Ottawa. Over lunch one day the talk turned to dancing and an older lady, with an apparent taste for matchmaking, said, why don’t you ask Anna to teach you to dance. It was by far the best piece of advice I ever got, though to this day I still can’t dance. Sorry, that’s not really a transferable piece of advice, but it’s the best I’ve have.
You can check out all of Mark’s books at his website, and if you enjoy philisophical discussions about writing and books, be sure to check out his Substack, Stories All the Way Down.