A Month in the Country
Ratings18
Average rating4.2
15
Ratings18
Average rating4.2
In J. L. Carr’s deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside of high summer, and laboring each day to uncover an anonymous painter’s depiction of the apocalypse, Birkin finds that he himself has been restored to a new, and hopeful, attachment to life. But summer ends, and with the work done, Birkin must leave. Now, long after, as he reflects on the passage of time and the power of art, he finds in his memories some consolation for all that has been lost.
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A truly wonderful book I'd never heard of. Book 95 on James Mustich's list for me, trying to get over 100 before the end of the year.
This is a short novel but by no means a quick read about WW1 vet who is hired on to rehabilitate a frescoed wall in a medieval Yorkshire chapel.
This passage stopped me in my tracks:
“As far as I'm concerned me might have gone round the corner and died. But that goes for most of us, doesn't it? We look blankly at each other. Here I am, here you are. What are we doing here? What do you suppose it's all about? Let's dream on. Yes, that's my Dad and Mum over there on the piano top. My eldest boy is on the mantelpiece. That cushion cover was embroidered by my cousin Sarah only a month before she passed on. I go to work at eight and come home at five-thirty. When I retire they'll give me a clock - with my name engraved on the back. Now you know all about me. Go away: I've forgotten you already.”
This was really charming and simple. Not much happens but it doesn't matter. It's more about place and time and people. There is the slight excitement at the end with the grave site, but that's about it. Really beautiful.
This slender (135 p) book is a gem. A young man, survivor of the Great War, goes to a small village in Yorkshire in 1920 to restore a medieval painting that has been found in the parish church. His shell shock has given him a pronounced facial twitch and a stutter, his wife has run off with another man, and he is prepared to live on a pittance for the summer for the sake of having somewhere peaceful to stay and interesting work to do. The blurb on the back of the book says this is a story of lost love, and it is, but it's not simply a lost lady love. The emergence of the painting, the development of relationships with the villagers, the tentative friendship with another soldier back from the war who is supposed to be excavating a lost grave on the church grounds–all of these illuminate the themes of hell, healing, art and vocation.
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