A Month in the Country

by J. L. Carr

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A short, spellbinding novel about a WWI veteran finding a way to re-enter-and fully embrace-normal life while spending the summer in an idyllic English village. 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 show more 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. This audiobook is expertly read by Christopher Tester, with audio engineering by Mike Thal. It was produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont. show less

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Jannes Under the Greenwood Tree was according to the Carr's own foreword one of the main inspirations for A Month in the Country
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Widsith Two excellent, but very different, novels about damaged English soldiers returning home from the First World War with shell-shock.
Petroglyph Both of these books are gentle, mostly quiet novels about an outsider entering a small English town to see through an arts-related project. Their setting surpasses a pedestrian "look at these weird locals". Lots going on in the background if you look for it.
shaunie Both books focus on the restoration of a wall painting and the descriptions are pretty similar. Both lovely books!

Member Reviews

147 reviews
Set just after the end of WWI, A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr is Tom Birkin's memories of a summer he spent in the northern village of Oxgodby and how it helped him to recover from the war. Birkin came to restore a painting on the wall of the local church, sleeping in the belfry and trying to make his small payment last as long as he can make it. The painting he uncovers enthralls him; it's more than just another quick decoration for the medieval artist who painted it and Birkin is drawn in to its complexity. Working in the churchyard below is another veteran, Moon, who has been hired to find the grave of his benefactor's ancestor. Through his friendship with Moon, the reticent but sincere relationships he forms with people in the show more village and especially the visits of the rector's wife, Birkin is brought back into living fully.

Which makes this book sound kind of slow and boring, doesn't it? There's a real charm to A Month in the Country, not in a chocolate box illustration sweetness, but in the way the harsh northerners and a shell-shocked Londoner find contentment in knowing each other. And in the understated friendship he forms with Moon, who has his own war-related demons to fight. Carr writes beautifully in an understated way that perfectly suits the story he's written. This is a book that, for an hour or two (it's a very slender book), immerses the reader in slowly clearing whitewash off of an old wall painting, revealing inch by inch the saints and sinners hidden for centuries, eating Sunday dinner with the station master's family, smoking Woodbines while leaning on tombstones while Moon talks about what lays underneath the meadow and hoping that the vicar's wife will stop by for a visit soon. This is a book that reads like a summer afternoon.
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½
”But there are times when man and earth are one, when the pulse of living beats strong, when life is brimming with promise and the future stretches confidently ahead like that road to the hills.” (page 101)

Tom Birkin is a wounded survivor of World War I and a broken marriage. His trade – art restoration – brings him to a quiet village in the north of England to restore a church mural. J.L. Carr’s novella reads like syrup, and I mean that in a good day. It’s the literary equivalent of the hot and sticky summer days described so well in the book. As Tom works to uncover a lost masterpiece, he slowly begins to find himself again and his place in the world. Not much happens but the story is pitch-perfect and Tom’s re-emergence show more into himself is rendered beautifully. show less
A wonderful little book that's so slight and ethereal it eluded my attempts to really get a hold of it. A Month in the Country sees an older man looking back on a period of his youth when, just back from the horrors of the Great War, he worked in a quaint Yorkshire village in the 1920s restoring a painting on the wall of the local church. He made a few friendly connections, fell for the vicar's beautiful young wife (an unrequited love) and spent time alone, focused on his restoration work while village life moved quietly around him. In short, he found some peace in his soul and, in his old age, recalls it fondly.

This is all the book is, and to be honest it's enough. As much as I would have liked there to be more structure: for the show more characters to have arcs, for themes to emerge, for the prose to dwell on the pastoral beauty of the surroundings, I knew that's not what the book was. As much as I would have liked the relationship with the vicar's wife to find resolution, I know this is how life is, as opposed to novels: a connection failing for want of the right word, a moment of timidity or things left unspoken, an anticlimactic end to your hopes and only 'what ifs' that you file away in your memories for the rest of your days.

J. L. Carr's book is lovely: a slice of pastoral warmth that's not so much a novel but more a snapshot of Eden captured by someone moments before it faded, like those wonderful dreams you have that fall out of memory shortly after you wake, no matter how hard you try to hold on to them. For those of a gentle disposition, Carr's village and the experience of his protagonist represent that feeling of mundane bliss we long for, the place and time when things relent. One finishes the book knowing there would be no greater place to rest than in a quiet English village with good people and simple meals, as you enjoy your work and a beautiful woman comes to speak with you and summer lights the fields with gold and you know it must soon end. For the book to be longer, or more dynamic or literary, would spoil that singular effect.
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It was everything it should be. I closed the book and caressed its cover.

Lovely writing telling a simple, honest story. Layered in a delicate, never over-wrought way. Good people, simple food, families, friends, church-goers, travels by bike on old English roads, summer scents of old roses and sounds of buzzing insects. Two young chaps hired to unearth different aspects of the medieval history of the village, and while temporarily transplanted they quietly heal their own post WW I wounds.

Then, like everything, it's over: summer turns to autumn, mysteries are revealed, and injuries begin to scab over.
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
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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.
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In the summer of 1920, Tom Birkin and Charles Moon, both veterans of the Great War, find themselves working in the North Riding village of Oxgodby. Birkin is restoring a medieval wall-painting in the church, whilst the archaeologist Moon is supposed to be looking for a tomb. Both projects have been imposed on the disapproving vicar by an eccentric bequest. But in spite of this frosty reception, we soon see the work, the tranquil atmosphere and association with the down-to-earth villagers starting to undo some of the damage they have brought back from the war with them.

Moon, as we see right from the start ("the three holes in the tunic’s shoulders where his captain’s pips had been...") is officer-class but has somehow fallen from show more grace, and has a hard time getting acceptance from the locals, but they recognise Birkin - despite his southern accent and art-training - as "one of us". He approaches his work like an artisan, and that's clearly how he's been trained, by a master-craftsman whose skills may well go right back to the generation of the anonymous master who painted the Oxgodby Doom. The villagers respond to that, and Birkin is soon being summoned to have his Sunday lunch with the stationmaster's family and integrated, despite his protests, into the life of the Wesleyan Chapel. But he's also starting to make friends with the grumpy vicar's beautiful wife...

It's a lovely, tantalising little story, in which not much appears to happen on the surface, but a great deal obviously does shift to help Birkin grow beyond the troubled state he's in at the beginning of the story. And it's interesting how in the end it seems to be his association with the very "ordinary" Ellerby family that has had a much profounder effect on him than the exotically erotic plotline we were looking forward to! The respect with which Carr treats the Ellerbys - who could so easily just have been played for laughs - is wonderful and astonishing (until we reflect that they probably have more than a slight resemblance to Carr's own family...). And they are so very real. You can easily imagine being sucked in by a family like that and signed up to look after the "dafties" in the Sunday School or sent out without any qualifications or experience to preach in the most obscure little chapel in the Circuit because no-one else is available. (In fact, I don't need to imagine it - something very similar to that happened to me in my Yorkshire days...).
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Rating: 4.75* of five

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 show more lost.

My Review: A few, a precious few only, moments in life are trapped in the diamond facets of unforgettability. The moments that, in the movie we're all directing inside our heads at any given moment, define our character. In all senses of that word. Be they happy, sad, public, private, we all have them; very very few of us talk much about them; and almost no one makes art from them.

Carr made art from a crystalline moment. Cold, glittering art, fire banked in its facets, glinting at the reader from sly angles and unexpected edges. Was this akin to his own character defining moment? I certainly don't know, but I suspect so. It's the best explanation I have for small moments clearly real and recalled in fresh, bright colors and sharp, focused images.
She lived at a farmhouse gable end to the road--not a big place. Deep red hollyhocks pressed against the limestone wall and velvet butterflies flopped lazily from flower to flower. It was Tennyson weather, drowsy, warm, unnaturally still. Her father and mother made me very welcome, both declaring they'd never met a Londoner before. They gave me what, in these parts, was called a knife-and-fork "do," a ham off the hook, a deep apple pie, and scalding tea. In conversation it came out that I'd been Over There (as they called it) and this spurred them to thrust more prodigious helpings upon me.

Novelists store moments like this, personal moments, in vaults that all of us have. The difference is the vault of the artist preserves all the details and nuances. Most of us come back from the vault with tatters and shreds; Carr, and others like him, come back with precious parures that flash a dazzle upon us commoners.

The genius of this short novel, under 50,000 words, is that it doesn't tart up the glory of the images with overwrought settings. Keep it simple, make it well, and quality will out. It is a joy to find laughs and savors in the same book. It is a rare joy to find them polished to a deep flash, set at just the right moment, and not vulgarly paraded for our approval but rather simply put in their proper place and left for us to notice as we will.

I made a run at this book after reading most of a very, very unhappy and terrible book. I was weighed down, felt that page-turning was labor. After a good sleep, I picked this gem up again and began at the beginning. It was the correct decision.
We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever--the ways 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.

How much poorer my world would be without the quiet luxury of these images in it.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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½
Viel ereignet sich nicht auf den rund 150 Seiten dieses kleinen Büchleins. Aber dennoch ist es überaus lesenswert, diese in liebevoller und das Herz wärmende beginnende Heilung des jungen Kriegsversehrten Tom Birkin. Noch immer schwer gezeichnet vom Soldatendasein im 1. Weltkrieg, dazu gerade verlassen von seiner Frau, nimmt der junge Restaurator den Auftrag in einem kleinen Dorf an, ein mittelalterliches Gemälde in einer Kirche freizulegen. Vorsichtig nähern sich Tom und die Dorfbewohner einander an, es entstehen Freundschaften und langsam, ganz langsam beginnen seine Verletzungen weniger zu schmerzen und die Freude am Leben zuzunehmen.
Carr lässt Tom aus der Ich-Perspektive erzählen, sodass man sein Denken und Fühlen show more unmittelbar miterlebt. Wie er vorsichtig sein Umfeld taxiert, während er gleichzeitig versucht, die Erinnerungen an die Kriegserlebnisse zu unterdrücken. Voller Zurückhaltung, aber auch mit freundlichem Interesse beobachtet er die Menschen und es wächst der Wunsch in ihm, einer von ihnen zu werden. Carrs Sprache ist voller Wärme aber auch Humor, sodass es wirklich ein Genuss ist, Toms Geschichte zu lesen. Wie er sich beispielsweise dem Ofen in der Kirche widmet: "Verärgert gab er (der Pfarrer) ihm einen kleinen Tritt. Er und der Ofen starten einander finster an wie zwei Erzfeinde. ... Ich streichelte besänftigend die Stelle, die der Pfarrer zuvor so schnöde gestoßen hat."
Ein schönes kleines Buch, wie die Zeit, der richtige Ort und die richtigen Menschen auch die schlimmsten Verletzungen langsam heilen können.
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Published Reviews

Reissued as part of the Penguin Decades series, JL Carr's slender, Booker-shortlisted and semi-autobiographical novel was published in 1980 but looks back to an earlier time. The narrator, Tom Birkin, reflects on a summer spent in the small Yorkshire village of Oxgodby in 1920. Near destitute and still visibly shaken by his experiences during the first world war and through the painful show more break-up of his marriage, he has been assigned the job of restoring a medieval mural hidden beneath whitewash on the wall of the village church.

As he painstakingly removes several centuries' worth of paint and grime he becomes gradually less closed off and begins to make friends within the community, in particular with Moon, another war veteran, who is camped in the churchyard, ostensibly looking for a lost grave. As Birkin uncovers patches of gilt and cinnabar up on his scaffold, Moon digs his pits outside the church walls; both of them are striving for some sort of, if not restoration, then freedom from their past, and for Birkin, at least, his stay at Oxgodby is a time of healing.

Slim as it is, this is a tender and elegant novel that seemingly effortlessly weaves several strands together. Carr has a knack for bringing certain scenes into sudden, sharp focus, rather as waves lift forgotten things to the surface. He writes with particular precision and admiration about the joys of skilled men going about their business. He also subtly evokes lost rural customs and ways of living that, even at the time, had begun to fade from view: cart rides and seed cake and honey-thick accents that had not yet been filed down by mass communication.

The sense of things lost to time is pronounced but not overplayed and there's a gently elegiac quality to the developing picture of a warm and hazy English countryside summer. This pleasant vision is countered by his rawer and more acute account of the deep mark left on a man when a chance of happiness is glimpsed and missed and left to settle in the memory.
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Natasha Tripney, The Guardian
Aug 8, 2010
added by VivienneR

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A run on A Month in the County? in Folio Society Devotees (March 2024)
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Author Information

Picture of author.
31+ Works 3,864 Members

Some Editions

Blythe, Ian (Introduction)
Blythe, Ronald (Introduction)
Emeis, Marijke (Translator)
Fitzgerald, Penelope (Introduction)
Holroyd, Michael (Introduction)
Rogers, Byron (Foreword)

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Series

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Work Relationships

Common Knowledge

Canonical title
A Month in the Country
Original title
A Month in the Country
Original publication date
1980
People/Characters
Tom Birkin; Ted Hebron; Alice Keach; Charles Moon; Kathy Ellerbeck
Important places
Oxgodby, North Yorkshire, England, UK; Steeple Sinderby, North Yorkshire, England, UK; Ripon, North Yorkshire, England, UK
Important events
World War I; Battle of Passchendaele
Related movies
A Month in the Country (1987 | IMDb)
Epigraph
A novel - a small tale, generally of love'
- Dr Johnson's Dictionary

Now for a breath I tarry,
nor yet disperse apart -
Take my hand quick and tell me,
What have you in your heart.
- A.... (show all) E. Housman

She comes not when Noon is on the roses -
Too bright is Day.
She comes not to the Soul till it reposes
From work and play.
But when Night is on the hills, and the great Voices
Roll in from sea
By starlight and by candlelight and dreamlight
She comes to me.
- Herbert Trench
Dedication
For Kathie (1980)
For Kathie
and for Sally . . . fare well

(1991)
First words
When the train stopped I stumbled out, nudging and kicking the kitbag before me. Back down the platform someone was calling despairingly, 'Oxgodby . . . Oxgodby.'
Quotations
We can ask and ask, but we can't have again what we once thought ours forever...
Our jobs are our fantasies, our disguises, the cloak we can creep inside to hide.
It was the most extraordinary detail of medieval painting that I had ever seen ... "Is there anything anywhere else like it? In the same league?" No, I told him, there wasn't. Once, yes. But no longer. Croughton, Stoke, Orcha... (show all)rd, St Albans, Great Harrowden - they'd all been splendid in their day. But not now.
On my way home ... on the empty road ... I suddenly yelled, "Oh you bastards You awful bloody bastards! You didn't need to have started it. And you could have stopped it before you did. God? Ha! There is no God."
So there I was, knowing that I had a masterpiece on my hands but scarcely prepared to admit it ... Each day I used to avoid taking in the whole.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)But this was something I knew nothing of as I closed the gate and set off across the meadow.
Blurbers
Waugh, Auberon; Laski, Marghanita; Holroyd, Michael; Fitzgerald, Penelope; D.J. Taylor
Original language
English

Classifications

Genres
General Fiction, Fiction and Literature, Historical Fiction
DDC/MDS
823.914Literature & rhetoricEnglish & Old English literaturesEnglish fiction1900-1901-19991945-1999
LCC
PR6053 .A694 .M6Language and LiteratureEnglishEnglish Literature1961-2000
BISAC

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ISBNs
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23