A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics)

Product Information

Indeed, for all of his British stiff-upper-lip as the novel opens, Birkin arrives as a broken man. He’s looking for “a new start and, afterward, maybe I won’t be a casualty anymore.” And then, God help me, on my first morning, in the first few minutes of my first morning, I felt that this alien northern countryside was friendly, that I'd turned a corner and that this summer of 1920, which was to smoulder on until the first leaves fell, was to be a propitious season of living, a blessed time. A haunting novel about art and its power to heal, J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. A Month in the Country is the fifth novel by J. L. Carr, first published in 1980 and nominated for the Booker Prize. The book won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1980. Cloth and Pictorial Boards. Condition: Fine. Illustrated by Ian Stephens (illustrator). (121pp). Slipcase partly sunned, else as new Size: Slim Royal Octavo. Hardcover.

The masked handprint left by an anonymous individual on a wall may invite from its hidden place for its uncovering and thereby regenerate another, unrelated, individual. A mouth of Hell depicted, beautifully, may summon up the will to live after walking through a war of hell.And not the Colonel, the surviving brother of the rich widow who left the money for Moon’s search for the remains of one of her ancestors and for Birkin’s work of mural restoration. Birkin tells the reader: Oh come on! he said. You seen him. Worse, you’ve heard him. Let’s go out to the Shepherd and sink a jar to lost beauty”. That 1920 summer in the village of Oxgodby is remembered many decades later by Tom as a season of uncharacteristic warmth and brightness, more luminous than ever because of the contrast with the Hell he has experienced before it, a moment of 'splendor in the grass' that would last him a lifetime. The story of the little church in Oxgodby is his gift to us, the way he wants to be remembered as a man and an artist.

We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever – the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. For art can transform a stilted and stultifying message lost in its dire religion into an edifying inspiration. It opens seeing beyond the dated and emptied forms. in other words — not getting the best welcome or given the best living situation— Tom was actually rather happy — or at least content. His inner pride and strength—trust in his own abilities to handle the daily hard work—was never a question for Tom. A calendar of memory can be read like a book. Nature in its periodic seasons reanimates the life in us, the past and future life. The dead leaves or loves sediment and new feelings sprout and grow and a new impulse continues.

In memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen.”

We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever — the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. And I'm very annoyed about it. After everything we went through we deserved to have it end in some shared moment of Sometimes peace of mind and tranquility take a lifetime to achieve. For Tom Birkin that serenity only took one summer month, one month in the idyllic English village of Oxgodby. The memories of that summer month, those quiet moments surrounded by nature and art, were enough to renew Birkin forever. And what Birkin’s left with — some half century later when he is writing this remembrance — is a memory of peace, wonder, something deeply elemental, something deeply beautiful in the art he finds and the place he lived, a still joy and, yes, regret. Not just for lost love, but also for a lost moment. Carr was born in Thirsk Junction, Carlton Miniott, Yorkshire, into a Wesleyan Methodist family. His father Joseph, the eleventh son of a farmer, went to work for the railways, eventually becoming a station master for the North Eastern Railway. Carr was given the same Christian name as his father and the middle name Lloyd, after David Lloyd George, the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer. He adopted the names Jim and James in adulthood. His brother Raymond, who was also a station master, called him Lloyd.

It is the balmy summer of 1920 when Tom Birkin arrives penniless at Oxgodby station with his nerves “shot to pieces.” He has been commissioned under a bequest to carry out restoration work on a Medieval mural in the local church and has an appointment to keep with the Reverend J.G. Keach – a man he describes as having a “cold, cooped-up look about him.” I could never make out what this book wanted to be, when it grew up. It was sometimes boring and disorganized, and also sometimes inspired and filled with big, important “thinks.” I thought, quite mistakenly, that it was a summer-inspired travelogue, in the spirit of a book penned by a Frances Mayes or a Gerald Durrell, but instead it was a book about post-war trauma, dark in tone and unsure of its arc. Also, I believe that many writers who actually WROTE in the 1920s had a more modern voice and a more progressive feel than Mr. Carr did, writing this as a reflective novel, 60 years later. J.L. Carr’s masterstroke is to tinge the mural of Thomas’ chronicle with a gossamer of vivid observations that sparkle the old flame of hope, which glows brighter than ever when Alice Keach, the Minister’s wife, pierces through Thomas’ numbness with her curious vitality. How did Miss Hebron first know there was a mural there (she revealed and then covered a little of it herself)? She was wealthy, so why pay for restoration only after her death? Why did she care about why her forebear was not buried in the churchyard, and where he was laid to rest? How and why did the village acquire and lose wealth? But others are answered - surprisingly, but satisfactorily: who the falling man was, why he was covered up almost as soon as the mural was finished, and why the grave Moon finds is not on consecrated ground. A perfect balance. Birkin’s job of clearing away centuries of overpaint, soot and dirt from what turns out to be a stunningly imagined Judgement scene underneath starts as simply something to fill his time at a moment when his life has fallen apart. He’s got this twitch from the War, and his wife Vinny has left him for another man but will probably return and start the cycle all over again.