A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics)

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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. Birkin is not the only outsider. There’s the grumpy vicar, Keach (who resents the disruption caused by the restoration), his very young and beautiful wife, Alice, and finally, Charles Moon. All four are 30 or younger, though Keach in particular seems older. The Publisher Says: 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. 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. I would recommend "A Month in the Country" to anyone who has experienced depression, disillusion, loss, pain, uncertainty. It doesn't really matter if you believed in the same god as Mr. Carr (the son of a famous preacher), or in Mr. Freud or in any other modern '-ism' . We are all human, and we have the same needs to give our lives a sense of purpose, a reason to keep trying day after day, no matter how many times we fail. What we are experiencing now, stress in all its fanciful disguises and new medical definitions, is something every generation has gone through since time immemorial. Mr. Carr argues that the past, if you look at its art carefully, can give us precious tools to deal with pain and loneliness and despair.

What happens in this story is just life, just living. There is nothing catastrophic, nothing exciting or dazzling, but in the midst of all this everyday life, there is the haunting sense of death in the effects the war has left on Birkin and his new friend, Moon; the ghost of the painter who left his soul imprinted on the church wall; and the lingering of “what if” that is suggested by the presence of the lovely Mrs. Keach, the vicar’s wife. This place is perhaps as unchanged as Birken and Moon are altered. It transpires that an archaeologist, Moon, has also been commissioned by the same bequest to find the grave of an excommunicated ancestor who was said to be buried outside the church yard, and their discoveries eventually converge in a surprising way. Another subplot involves Birkin's mostly suppressed feelings for the vicar's wife.A Month in the Country is a celebration of brokenness — not the suffering of brokenness but, rather, the vulnerability that brokenness brings.

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.” Haunted by his experiences at Passchendaele, Birkin has returned from the war with a conspicuous facial twitch. The doctors tell him it may get better, and he believes then that time will “clean [him] up”; indeed, his escape to the idyllic Yorkshire countryside proves to be cathartic. The introduction to the book in the NYRB version is written by Michael Holroydand it is excellent. I love it when an introduction fires up the reader to read the book. He talks about his own odd intersection with J. L. Carr, but the most resonating bit he shares is in regards to Carr's funeral.This is one mystery that annoyed me. Birkin makes two references to the mural probably being of Luke 16: initially, he refers to “the judge and his bailiff; below them, three Lords of Luke 16” and later, it’s “the three brothers” of the same chapter. But Luke 16 has two stories: the unjust steward, and Lazarus and the rich man. No threes, let alone brothers. What have I missed? Never has such a short novel impacted me so profoundly, dramatically, making me reflect on a few golden days in my past, my own in which I can close my eyes and smell the dust, taste the feint salt on her upper lip, hear the voices, see faces that moments ago would have been obscured by the fog of time, feel the sun on my face, warming me in the illusion that life will surely last forever: "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." The rain had ceased and dew glittered on the graveyard grass, gossamer drifted down air-currents… And as it lightened, a vast and magnificent landscape unfolded.” 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.” Life is filled with moments. Moments of cowardice, of hesitation, moments when our courage fail us: to make a small step, to take a big leap, to dance, or move our lips a few inches to those of another. Repetitive moments of daily toil: eating, fixing the bed, performing our trade, defecating. Moments of idleness when we do nothing but lie down and embody the emptiness within us. These moments are not remembered, are forgotten, or glossed over with untruth. These moments fill out what is left after the highlights of our lives have been told. And so there they remain, dull threads in our chaotic tapestry of life, until such a time when we are compelled to revisit.

Simply put, this book has given me all I look for: a cascade of words that ring so true and are beautifully written; wonderfully realised characters even though we know them so briefly; a perfect setting (especially for an Anglophile who loves art and archaeology); and a simple story about complex people. I had come to South America to get over someone after an awful breakup, and so I wasn't looking for anything. I wanted zero complications. Right? Sure. As I said to myself on several occasions. So nothing happened that night. Nothing happened the next night either, or any of the nights that followed as we got involved in the strange life of Quito, and dealt with death threats and psychotic outbreaks and false passports and the other things affecting our circle of friends. And we got to know each other quite well. We went away together for a couple of weekends, and talked about past relationships; and most evenings in Ecuador ended with us on our balcony as the sun came up, finishing a bottle of rum and sharing stories. We both had a couple of flings with random people, but nothing very serious. I am a seasonal reader, often craving books with sizzling settings in the summer months and snowy locales in the winter. Last week I saw a review for J. L. Carr's Man Booker winning A Month in the Country and was intrigued enough by the title to read it for myself. Using stunning prose combined with well developed characters, Carr's novella is perfect for a leisurely summer morning.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.