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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Any good reader has, well, had it with novels of healing. The culture of confession has given rise to novels that begin with an unspeakable act (graphically described) and end in redemption (this part is usually more vague). That's not how it works in J.L. Carr's quiet, brief, dreamy A Month in the Country. Writing in 1978, Carr's narrator, Tom Birkin, recalls the summer of 1920. A veteran of the Great War and a cuckold, Tom arrives in Oxgodby to restore a medieval mural in the church. His single season in this town in the north of England passes quickly: he sleeps in the belfry, makes a friend or two, falls secretly in love with the vicar's wife, and, chipping away at plaster and dirt, uncovers a lost masterpiece. These events seem to melt past Tom in the heat of the perfect, fleeting English summer: "The front gardens of cottages were crammed with marjoram and roses, marguerites, sweet William, at night heavy with the scent of stocks. The Vale was heavy with leaves, motionless in the early morning, black caves of shadow in the midday heat, blurring the sound of trains hammering north and south."
Carr devotes many fewer words to Tom's time in the war. The vicar's wife tries to ask him about it. "'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." His healing consists of not talking about his past--perhaps a revolutionary notion these days. A Month in the Country, with its paean to a lost, good place, oddly recalls Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes. But where that novel was elliptical, Carr's work values clarity and simplicity above all. These are rare enough qualities, but to find them in a novel of romance and healing is a rarer pleasure still. --Claire Dederer
From Library Journal
Protagonist Tom Birkin is a broken man. Haunted by his experiences in the trenches of World War I and recovering from a divorce, Birkin accepts a job restoring a medieval mural of the apocalypse in a church located in a remote corner of Yorkshire. It is here, however, that Birkin, though alone with only an interpretation of the world's end for company, learns to live again. Carr's small gem of a novel was first published in 1980.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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First Sentence:
WHEN THE TRAIN stopped I stumbled out, nudging and kicking the kitbag before me. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Alice Keach, Kathy Ellerbeck, Miss Hebron, Barton Ferry, Joe Watterson, Lucy Sykes, Sara van Fleet, Unnatural Activities New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
WHEN THE TRAIN stopped I stumbled out, nudging and kicking the kitbag before me. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Alice Keach, Kathy Ellerbeck, Miss Hebron, Barton Ferry, Joe Watterson, Lucy Sykes, Sara van Fleet, Unnatural Activities New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 10
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100
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- A Day in Summer by J.L. Carr in Front Matter (1), and Front Matter (2)
- Under the Greenwood Tree (Oxford World's Classics) by Thomas Hardy in Front Matter (1), and Front Matter (2)
- Bernard Shaw by Pat M., Carr in Front Matter (1), and Front Matter (2)
- In the Country: Earlybirds Green (Wide Range) by Norah Clegg in Back Matter
- Changing Places by David Lodge in Front Matter
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- Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography by Michael Holroyd on 7 pages
- The Afterlife by Penelope Fitzgerald on 5 pages
- Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald (Understanding Contemporary British Literature) by Peter Wolfe on page 15, Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War by Peter Leese in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction (Concise Companions to Literature and Culture) by James F. English on page 50, and page 62
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90% buy the item featured on this page: A Month in the Country (New York Review Books Classics) $10.36 |
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