J L Carr (1912–1994) was definitely not part of the London literary world. In 1967, he retired early from his job as a primary school headteacher and devoted the rest of his life to writing novels, and self-publishing small volumes from his home in Kettering, Northamptonshire.
His 1980 novel A Month in the Country was the nearest he came to mainstream success. It was nominated for the Booker prize and successfully filmed.
It’s an unusual novel by an unusual man. Carr manages to pack more into one hundred or so pages than many novels of twice or three times the length. There are a couple of references to that master of short, intense fiction, Joseph Conrad. It starts quietly but gains in emotional intensity as it proceeds to an ending that may make the reader reflect on their own life.
Set in 1920, it is the story of first world war veteran Tom Birkin’s stay in the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby. He has been hired to restore a fresco in the local church, long hidden under whitewash and the grime of centuries. In the next field, another ex-soldier, Moon, is working on an archaeological enquiry. Both men are damaged by their war experiences.
Birkin is the narrator and we only gradually realise just how damaged he is, both by the war and the problems in his marriage. We also slowly come to realise that he is looking back at the events he describes, and that they are in a distant past. For example, he laments the decline of the local dialect “because of comprehensive schools and the BBC”.
The conversation with Moon about growing old takes on significance as we realise that Birkin must be narrating this in the present day, where he is now quite elderly.
The novel is a portrait of life in the village at that time, with its division between Chapel and Church, as well as Londoner Birkin’s personal story of his stay in the north.
What is unusual is that the golden, long-lost summer is taking place after the great war and not before it. The timeless rhythms of rural life, and Birkin’s acceptance by the people in the village, are restorative for his troubled soul and the novel becomes, among other things, the story of his recovery.
There is a lot more here, though. The vicar’s wife asks Birkin if he believes in hell. Is hell the mediaeval furnace of demons that is revealed on the church wall? Or is it in this life, in the pain of a loveless marriage and the muddy carnage of Passchendaele? The novel rather confirms my mother’s view that the long decline of Christian belief in Britain started with the first world war. That war cast a long shadow.
The preoccupations here are the timeless ones of English poetry: memory, the passage of time, missed opportunity and the fleeting nature of human experience. Looking back, Birkin realises that his pastoral idyll was taking place at the very end of the horse era. A way of life was coming to a close, yet no-one knew it.
Underlying the romanticism is a hard-headed realism: “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.”
The Good Reader 