Books |
A Month in the Country
J.L. Carr
By
Published: Sep 12, 2022
Category:
Fiction
It’s fair to say there never was a writer remotely like J.L. Carr. For several years, this English schoolmaster taught in South Dakota. His first publications were 3” x 5” booklets (he made 61) and maps (he made 40). Then he wrote novels. As he told Vogue: “James Lloyd Carr, a back-bedroom publisher of large maps and small books who, in old age unexpectedly wrote six novels, which, although highly thought of by a small band of literary supporters and by himself, were properly disregarded by the Literary World.”
“A Month in the Country” was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1980. It won the Guardian Fiction Prize. In 1987, the movie of “A Month in the County” starred Colin Firth, Kenneth Branagh and Natasha Richardson. Given the quirkiness of the novelist, it did poorly, was neglected and ignored until 2004, when a fan agitated for the discovery of the 35 mm print. It is a favorite of a few cineastes — you’re getting an idea of the scale of Carr’s life and work? — and the accents are challenging. That said, it’s extremely moving. [To watch the preview, click here. To rent the stream on Amazon Prime, click here.]
The story is small and simple. Tom Birkin is a WWI veteran with PTSD. He’s divorced. Broken. In the summer of 1920, he takes a job in a Yorkshire village, restoring a long obscured, recently discovered medieval mural of Judgment Day. The village is tiny, and he’s immediately noticed. And, of course, there’s interest in what he’s revealing on the church wall.
There’s another stranger in the village: Charles Moon, who’s been hired to locate the grave of an excommunicated member of the church. And there’s a woman: Alice, the vicar’s wife, whose marriage is — but you know this — joyless.
You also know this: Tom’s not chatty. Alice tries to get him to open up about the war. Not happening: “‘What about hell on earth?’ she said. I told her I’d seen it and lived there and that, mercifully, they usually left an exit open.”
A lot happens in the month Tom works on the mural. It’s a gorgeous English summer that is, like all good weather in England, endangered. There’s a recognition of future sadness: Winter is “always loitering around the corner.” And yet…
“There was so much time that marvelous summer. Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain. It was a sort of stage-magic.”
Tom’s days on the scaffolding and his nights sleeping on his coat up in the belfry are repetitive, pleasant, and calming. The power of the novel is that, as he heals, his healing becomes ours — to read the book is to experience an emerging peace.
The summer will end. Tom Birkin will look back.
“Ah, those days…for many years afterwards their happiness haunted me. Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of summer. Day after day of warm weather, voices calling as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness and, at daybreak, the murmur of corn and the warm smell of fields ripe for harvest. And being young.
If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy?
No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.”
We’ve read this in a jillion books of philosophy and spirituality. An eccentric Brit does it in 135 memorable pages. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here.]
