J.L. Carr's 'A Month in the Country'

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A novel - a small tale generally of love.

Dr Johnson’s definition is the first epigraph to J.L. Carr’s 1980 novel A Month in the Country. The definition, like the book, is seriously understated. A Month is definitely small (just 85 pages in the Penguin Classics edition) but one of the marvels of this narrative is how, somehow, it still contains multitudes. It is about trauma, community, friendship, the countryside, time, the pleasures of work, simplicity, memory, England, architecture, art, archaeology (of various sorts) and, yes, love. And all this is seamlessly done.

I reread the book again after many years, and it truly stands up to re-reading. Bookended by the conclusion of one journey as Tom Birkin stumbles out of his train onto the Oxgodby station platform and the start of another as he closes the church gate and sets off to go back to that station, the story lets out its treasures effortlessly. All is drawn together by the perfectly-achieved first person perspective as Birkin settles into Oxgodby, finding a contentment that is all the deeper for its inevitable transience:

All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, ever wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, 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.

‘This’ is the story of Birkin’s restoration of a medieval wall-painting; his friendship with the archaeologist Moon (himself doubly traumatised by his past); his integration into the community, particularly the Ellerbeck family; his falling for Alice, wife of the local clergyman (somewhat sketchily-drawn, but then again Birkin never really knows her, and, typical of the generosity of Carr’s vision, a late scene softens the way we see her husband Reverend Keach, the closest character to a ‘villain’ in the book).

Like the wall-painting, the pleasures of the story are revealed steadily and slowly, and by the end you can only stand back and admire. 

And ‘this’ is the story of something anyone can have. A perfect moment in time, a perfect summer, treasured with gratitude as well as an aching nostalgia:

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 marvellous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.