A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Many of the incidents in the novel are based on real events in Carr's own life, and some of the characters are modelled on his family. A Month in the Country is Birkin’s story, but no character is given short shrift — not the 14-year-old Emily Clough, dying of consumption; not Rev. As for Carr’s other fiction, I’ve heard very good things about the football one – How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup. Now an old man, Birkin looks back on the idyllic summer of 1920, remembering a vanished place of blissful calm, untouched by change, a precious moment he has carried with him through the disappointments of the years.

It captures a brief moment, a month in the country, for a young soldier, traumatised by the first world war who begins to find his way back through restoring a long lost judgement painting in an old country church.Birkin's idyll in the country is brought into relief by what Birkin has gone through in the past and the disappointments that, it is implied, await him. However, despite this he remains grateful for this perfectly captured moment and hopeful for his future. Carr was passionately committed to the preservation of old churches, as Byron Rogers recounts in The Last Englishman: The Life of J. A carved shaft branched gracefully into whorls of stone raised upon a convex lid, at its head a hand holding a sacramental cup, a wafer poised at its rim. Birkin is fairly sure that, while he was away at war, Vinny had slept with other men too; now he knows for sure that she is serially unfaithful.

When you can change husbands as easily as changing a lightbulb, how do you know whether the one you have now is the good-enough one, or the wrong one, or the best one? We discover, quite late on, that Moon had been found in bed with his batman, stripped of his captain’s rank and sent to a military prison, despite a record of bravery which had won him the Military Cross. I especially loved the descriptions of the houses and gardens Birkin was invited into, the huge, nearly empty rectory and the homes of the Ellerbecks, poor Emily's family, Lucy Sykes.These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. The narrator, Tom Birkin, reflects on a summer spent in the small Yorkshire village of Oxgodby in 1920. The hot sultry summer, more than a month in truth, of recovery and for Birkin and Moon at Oxgodby in 1920 is captured in aspic forever with consummate skill. Birkin gets himself quite deeply involved in the local community, in particular making friends with the Ellerbeck family, stalwarts of local Methodism. I don’t want to reveal much more about what happens in the novel, other than to give a flavour of some of the keynotes.

They are “two of a kind”, both quietly dedicated to their specialised work, and both beneficiaries of the late old lady of the decaying manor-house, whose shrewd eye still seems to be overlooking their work. A Month in the Country' is so beautiful and involving that as I was reading it I kept measuring what was left and regretting that there wasn't more. With a screenplay by Simon Gray, the novel was made into a 1987 film, directed by Pat O'Connor and starring Colin Firth, Kenneth Branagh, Natasha Richardson and Patrick Malahide. A lovely tight clean copy which appears to be unread, presented in a clear removable protective sleeve.He failed the scholarship exam, which denied him a grammar school education, and on finishing his school career he also failed to gain admission to teacher training college. When he goes to the rectory to say farewell, he finds the Keaches have packed up and left, probably for the more welcoming communities of Sussex. Quickly grabbing it, paying for it, and nestling it into my bag, I scurried home intending to read it there and then.