A Month in the Country
Title: A Month in the Country
Author: J.L. Carr (Joseph Lloyd Carr)
Rating: 4 out of 5
Hook: Contentment and beauty can be found when we are not looking for it but it can be fleeting in that moment.
The story follows Tom Birkin a survivor of the first world war, still shell shocked from the horrors of war. He finds himself at peace in Oxgodby restoring a medieval wall mural. He becomes friends with Charles Moon, an archaeologist digging in the meadow next to where Tom is working. The days past as he is working and he forms a friendship with Alice Keach the Vicar’s wife, they build up a friendship through conversations whilst she sits downstairs and Tom works in the bell tower above. Carr’s unique writing ability to hint at affection through general dialogue between two characters is effortless, reenforced by the main character’s (Tom Birkin) inner dialogue, we know he is falling in love with Alice Keach. As the story continues their feelings for one another bubble under the surface.
Quotes
I’ll like to share my favourite quotes from the book that demonstrates Carr’s writing.
Quote 1
“For the rest, only the sounds of an ancient building, a tremor on the bell-rope coming down and out through the hole in the floor, a stir in the roof timbers, stone still settling after five hundred years…” (Carr, J.L. 2000, p13). For me the quote creates imagery of an old building at night and how time has passed using sounds to describe the surroundings.
Quote 2
“her look wandering across the fabric of the church, then turning to follow the haphazard flight of a red admiral until flattened against a headstone”. “The butterfly flew into the air once more” (Carr, J.L. 2000, p31). Carr using an allegory of nature with the red admiral being Alice Keach feelings towards Tom, but the red admiral stops suddenly and is flattened against a headstone to demonstrate how conflicted she is and that can’t follow her heart as she is already married. Then the butterfly flies again represents their love for each other and that both, Tom and Alice are hiding from each other.
Quote 4
“There was warmth and ripeness in the air. Autumn was burning across the vale, the beeches flaming like torches as the heat mist ebbed away from hedges and spinneys and from flocks grazing along the slopes of the faded fields”. The quote is beautiful example of descriptive and pastoral writing from Carr.
Carr himself stated that it was trying to convey a pastoral novel in a similar manner as the author Thomas Hardy. See the quote from the foreword from the front of the book “my idea was to write an easy-going story, a rural idyll along the lines of Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree.” (Carr, J.L. 2000, foreword)
Quote 5
“I should have lifted an arm and taken her shoulder, turned her face and kissed her. It was that kind of day. It was why she’d come. Then everything would have been different. My life, hers” (Carr, J.L. 2000, p99). “So in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room…” (Carr, J.L. 2000, p104).
In the last couple of pages we realise the novel is a memory, a memory of the character Tom Birkin and his month in the country. How he found a place to be, felt like part of a community and found love. Carr is using past tense ‘should have’ and ‘kissed her’ to indicate time has passed and Carr is now remising on a life that could have been, looking back in hindsight and with sadness of a opportunity missed.
Final Thoughts
My final thoughts on A Month in the Country novel are that the story is bittersweet and quiet. It is not an action or crime; it is a love lost story but also about finding contentment through quiet work and to heal, heal from the horrors of war. I really enjoyed the book I would give it a rating of 4 out of 5.
Book Information
Genre: literature, novel, fiction, pastoral, rural, period.
Series: None
Edition: 3rd ed
Publication Date: 3rd February 2000 (previously published in 1980)
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Setting: Yorkshire, Oxgodby
Print length: 128 pages, Paperback
List of Characters: Tom Birkin, Charles Moon, Alice Keach and Rev Keach.
ISBN 978-0141182308
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