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I J Baker on Mr O
Why did you write Mr O? Was there a motivating incident?
Mr O Winds Back the Clock grew from a fateful afternoon forty years ago. I had sought when in my twenties to make fiction from the events of that day, generating half a dozen short-story drafts. When I returned to that task in my fifties, I recognised that the tale needed more context than short fiction could offer.
You describe the originating afternoon as fateful. What happened?
I had visited a friend for what I had hoped would be a few hours of partying. His best friend had died unexpectedly overnight, and I found myself instead at an impromptu wake.
Is the novel autobiographical?
Like many – perhaps most – novels that have been narrated from a first-person central point of view, Mr O reads as though it is autobiography. Certain events reported by the narrator parallel events that I, the author, remember. However, the narrator could only be a fictional person.
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The narrator offers revealingly detailed reports of exterior and interior happenings. Is the book a kind of autofiction?
Arguably, Mr O’s narrative style recalls certain novels that have been said to represent autofiction. However, its narrative arc parallels the arcs discoverable in much traditional fiction.
The story is represented as often funny. Can you say something about the style of its humour?
The humour in Mr O is ironic and at times situational.
You will publish Mr O Winds Back the Clock independently. Did you offer it to an established publisher, and if not, why not?
I thought long and hard about offering the manuscript to a publisher, and preferably through a literary agency, and instead took this path, judging that I might find an appreciative readership more easily than an appreciative agent. I also wanted a strong role in the editing. The story reads simply, but there’s a lot going on.
If you had offered the novel to an agent, how would you have pitched it?
I might have said that it was Monkey Grip meets High Fidelity. The former for its settings and mood, and the latter for its narrative structure.
You say that you returned in your fifties to a narrative task begun in your twenties. How much time did you spend completing the novel?
I began to work in 2010 on what would become Mr O, and the final revisions were completed only this year, in 2024. At first I had not realised that the project would become a novel. I had resigned my job as night editor of an online newspaper, intending to spend a year turning my PhD dissertation into an academic book. I soon recognised that this was not how I wanted to spend the time I had bought.
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Did you suddenly decide that you were a novelist, or was that an ambition that you had long harboured?
About the age of twenty I resolved that I would test the hypothesis that I could write for a living. At the time I thought I would have to do this through publishing novels, and that decades might pass before I succeeded. I was surprised to get a non-fiction writing job only four years later, and for a long time saw my interest in producing fiction as my entertaining of an escapist fantasy.
The narrator of Mr O quotes from unpublished short stories he says he wrote in his twenties, whose characters also appear in the novel. What relation do they bear to anything you wrote at that time of life?
The novel’s narrator, Seamus Cullen, shares elements of his history with the novel’s author. The short stories that Seamus quotes from are based on stories that the author had drafted and mothballed.
The book is beautifully designed and typeset. How much professional help have you had with producing it?
Mainly by luck I was able to engage Duncan Blachford, of Typography Studio, when I was ready to put the book into print. Duncan liked what he saw, and connected me with David Winter, who was available freelance after a long stint as senior editor at Text Publishing. Both were extremely helpful, not only through exercising their professional skills but also in developing my appreciation for the novel’s literary strength.
The author image on your website is credited to Shea Kirk, an artist who has won much acclaim for his large-format portraits. How did you come to work with Shea, and what was it like to sit for him?
Duncan Blachford introduced me to Shea, who found Duncan’s description of Mr O compatible with his outlook and values. I was attracted to how revealing Shea’s work looked, openness also being a quality attached to Mr O’s narrator. The session occupied much of a day, and included a shoot for Shea’s long-running portrait project Vantages. I found Shea to be gracious and unassuming, and greatly enjoyed our long conversation.
Is this likely to be your only novel, or are you hoping to complete others?
Part of the reason Mr O took such a long time to write was my need to expand my understanding of how to produce fiction. I hadn’t recognised at first that to write a compelling novel was to create a fictional world, even when the world that sustained the story’s characters felt much like the world that would sustain any reader. Mr O Winds Back the Clock feels very complete, but leaves open the possibility that its fictional world could generate further events.
I J Baker
