A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Birkin’s artistic sensitivity and training make him an excellent describer of furniture, machines, architecture, and even people and the broader context of ancient lives. And I don't know if it was because of timidity or inexperience or a desire not to spoil anything, or drunkenness, or accumulated misunderstanding, but neither of us did anything except say goodnight and goodbye. That month in Oxgodby with its kind people, warm summer days and nights, new friendships, infatuation with the vicar's wife, and a yet unknown masterpiece he is restoring, all contribute to the healing of his psyche.

The memories of that summer month, those quiet moments surrounded by nature and art, were enough to renew Birkin forever. But if giving way to nostalgic reverie allows us not to regret missed opportunites that choke us in waves of self-pity and prompts us to be grateful for small streaks of fortune instead, I will settle on melancholy any given day. in other words — not getting the best welcome or given the best living situation— Tom was actually rather happy — or at least content.I didn’t quite know how the author would manage this feat but I was confident it would turn out to be so. Carr’s masterstroke is to tinge the mural of Thomas’ chronicle with a gossamer of vivid observations that sparkle the old flame of hope, which glows brighter than ever when Alice Keach, the Minister’s wife, pierces through Thomas’ numbness with her curious vitality. There is plenty of humour, especially about the relationship and rivalry between Church and Chapel, and some wonderful period detail. It could have been a Baroque altar-piece, an oriental throne, a gigantic examination exercise performed by a cabinet-maker’s apprentice. An extraordinary, heart-rending novel, written as a sort of twilight benediction to a pastoral place and its people.

That’s the phrase the war veteran thinks of when he arrives in the small, poor Yorkshire village that is “starveling country”! The local people come to know him as “that chap from down south,” but they nevertheless take a liking to him.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. But oddly this character in the painting has far more relevance to Moon’s fate than it does to the narrator’s, though it appears the narrator doesn’t see this. Birkin is looking back from 1978 and I am reminded of Hartley’s quote “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”. There is forbidden love of at least two kinds (“coddling it up in myself”), missed opportunities, and a casual revelation by a third party that forever affects a friendship.