A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics)

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The masked handprint left by an anonymous individual on a wall may invite from its hidden place for its uncovering and thereby regenerate another, unrelated, individual. A mouth of Hell depicted, beautifully, may summon up the will to live after walking through a war of hell.

in other words — not getting the best welcome or given the best living situation— Tom was actually rather happy — or at least content. His inner pride and strength—trust in his own abilities to handle the daily hard work—was never a question for Tom. Birkin is not the only outsider. There’s the grumpy vicar, Keach (who resents the disruption caused by the restoration), his very young and beautiful wife, Alice, and finally, Charles Moon. All four are 30 or younger, though Keach in particular seems older.What is the elixir for experiencing the atrocities of war? Happy days in Oxgodby can never be relived, Sometimes peace of mind and tranquility take a lifetime to achieve. For Tom Birkin that serenity only took one summer month, one month in the idyllic English village of Oxgodby. The memories of that summer month, those quiet moments surrounded by nature and art, were enough to renew Birkin forever. 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 lost. In his novella, Carr employs descriptive prose that has me longing for a countryside. Warm summer days are perfect for picnics, budding romances, and staying up late contemplating one's role in life. Carr develops characters in Birkin and Moon who are non believers yet are employed by a church. Most of the action occurs within the belfry where Birkin works and sleeps, even the contrast as he fights an inner impulse to strike up relations with Alice. For a male author, I enjoyed Carr's development of his female characters and was glad that they were simply platonic. It transpires that an archaeologist, Moon, has also been commissioned by the same bequest to find the grave of an excommunicated ancestor who was said to be buried outside the church yard, and their discoveries eventually converge in a surprising way. Another subplot involves Birkin's mostly suppressed feelings for the vicar's wife.

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.” Oh come on! he said. You seen him. Worse, you’ve heard him. Let’s go out to the Shepherd and sink a jar to lost beauty”. Tom Birkin is a young man from the London area who has served an apprenticeship in the craft (and art) of restoring wall paintings in old churches. He has come to Yorkshire (the “North Riding”, roughly the third of Yorkshire north of York) to the small town of Oxgodby, on his first solo commission, financed via the will of a parishioner: to remove centuries of grime and whitewash from the wall high in the arch of the church. It is believed that a wall-painting lies there, and if so he is to restore it.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 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. I intend to read some novels that are first World War based for this year’s anniversary and this one is the first. It is a novella by a rather eccentric teach There is a full cast of local characters; the local vicar and his beautiful wife and the rival Wesleyan Methodists. Carr, being brought up in the Wesleyan tradition captures the chapel rituals and attendees very well. Carr said he wanted the effect to be something like Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree in relation to the local characters. At the end of the War he married Sally (Hilda Gladys Sexton) and returned to teaching. He was appointed headmaster of Highfields Primary School in Kettering, Northamptonshire, a post he filled from 1952 to 1967 in a typically idiosyncratic way which earned the devotion of staff and pupils alike. He returned to Huron, South Dakota, in 1957 to teach again on an exchange visit, when he wrote and published himself a social history of The Old Timers of Beadle County.