A Month in the Country
Ratings16
Average rating4.2
15
Ratings16
Average rating4.2
In the summer of 1920 two men, both war survivors meet in the quiet English countryside. One is living in the church, intent upon uncovering and restoring an historical wall painting while the other camps in the next field in search of a lost grave.Out of their meeting comes a deeper communion and a catching up of the old primeval rhythms of life so cruelly disorientated by the Great War.
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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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