"But then, inevitably, as happens to most of us, first through Saturday umpiring, later Sunday chapel, I was drawn into the changing picture of Oxgodby itself. But, oddly, what happened outside was like a dream. It was inside the still church, before its reappearing picture, that was real. I drifted across the rest. As I have said--like a dream. For a time."Tom Birken is summoned to the countryside from the teaming streets of London to practice his craft revealing a Medieval painting that was originally painted 500 years previously, and had been whitewashed over about a hundred years later. It is a picture of doom predating the fantastical, terrifying visions of Bruegel by at least a hundred years. Mad Meg by Pieter Bruegel Triumph of Death by Pieter BruegelBirken in 1920 is a shattered man. He has survived the war, but experienced his own vision of hell on the battle field of Passchendaele. The estimations are that the British allies and the Germans each lost over 200,000 men between July and November of 1917. He emerged from the wreckage of that battle, shell shocked, and still three years later betrays himself with a stammer and twitching cheek when he is experiencing a stressful moment. He has acquired a skill, a skill nearly expired, of carefully revealing and preserving old murals on church walls. The Oxgodby job is a gift, maybe one of the few remaining times when he will practice his craft. "Our jobs are our private fantasies, our disguises, the clock we can creep inside to hide." He has a wife who has betrayed him, a war that has wounded him, and a world that is telling him that his skills are obsolete. He needed this job. He has no idea what is behind the whitewash, but it isn't long before he knows he is working on a masterpiece. "So, each day, I released a few more inches of a seething cascade of bones, joints and worm-riddled vitals frothing over the fiery weir. It was breathtaking. A tremendous waterfall of color, the blues of the apex falling, then seething into a turbulence of red; like all truly great works of art, hammering you with its whole before beguiling you with its parts." Medieval era wall muralHe meets a man named Moon who is camping in a tent in the cemetery and has been commissioned to find the bones of an ancestor for their patron. As time goes on, and both men realize how simply wonderful this moment in time has been for them, they start to linger in their work, making it last, not wanting it to end. There is a story about Moon that you will have to read the book to discover. Oh and lets not forget that Birken meets a woman. Not just any woman, but one of those women that turn your knees to jelly and in the case of Birken make his cheek twitch. She is the vicar's wife, Mrs. Alice Keach. She was much younger than Keach(the vicar), no more than nineteen or twenty, and she was very lovely. More than just pleasant-looking I mean; she was quite enchanting. Her neck was uncovered to her bosom, and immediately, I was reminded of Botticelli--not his Venus--the Primavera. It was partly her wonderfully oval face and partly the easy way she stood. I'd seen enough paintings to know beauty when I saw it and, in this out of the way place, here it was before me."Netflix has yet again let me down. There is a movie from 1987 starring Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth, but Netflix does not have it. At this point it appears I will have to buy it to see it. I can only hope that they do the book justice. Kenneth Branagh as Moon. Natasha Richardson as Alice Keach. Colin Firth as Birken.The introduction to the book in the NYRB version is written by Michael Holroydand it is excellent. I love it when an introduction fires up the reader to read the book. He talks about his own odd intersection with J. L. Carr, but the most resonating bit he shares is in regards to Carr's funeral. "Carr died in 1994 and his funeral service in the Kettering parish church was, in the words of Byron Rogers, 'like the passing of a spymaster.' He had such disparate interests that there seem to have been many J. L. Carrs, and since he compartmentalized his friendships, few of his friends knew each other. 'What I remember most about his funeral service was the fidgeting...as the mourners kept squinting sideways to speculate about their neighbors,' Rogers wrote. 'Then, at the very last minute there was a clatter of high heels and a very young, very beautiful woman came in, dressed in fashionable black. She came alone and at the end was gone, just as abruptly, into the March afternoon.' No one knew her or could find out who she was--an ex-pupil, mistress, cricketer, flower-arranger, Sunday School teacher...but readers of A Month in the Country may feel that she had stepped out of its pages.Don't miss this one, a more than pleasant diversion for a Sunday afternoon. You will be right there in Oxgodby falling in love, gnashing your teeth over the absurdity of it all,enjoying the peacefulness of knowing, really knowing you are happy, and you too might discover the importance of lingering over a moment, a glorious moment when life seems to be working for you and not against you. If you are like me you might even find yourself yelling "for godsakes take her in your arms and kiss her." Highly Recommended! The Mysterious J. L. CarrIf you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.comI also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
Rating: 4.75* of fiveThe 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.My Review: A few, a precious few only, moments in life are trapped in the diamond facets of unforgettability. The moments that, in the movie we're all directing inside our heads at any given moment, define our character. In all senses of that word. Be they happy, sad, public, private, we all have them; very very few of us talk much about them; and almost no one makes art from them.Carr made art from a crystalline moment. Cold, glittering art, fire banked in its facets, glinting at the reader from sly angles and unexpected edges. Was this akin to his own character defining moment? I certainly don't know, but I suspect so. It's the best explanation I have for small moments clearly real and recalled in fresh, bright colors and sharp, focused images.She lived at a farmhouse gable end to the road--not a big place. Deep red hollyhocks pressed against the limestone wall and velvet butterflies flopped lazily from flower to flower. It was Tennyson weather, drowsy, warm, unnaturally still. Her father and mother made me very welcome, both declaring they'd never met a Londoner before. They gave me what, in these parts, was called a knife-and-fork "do," a ham off the hook, a deep apple pie, and scalding tea. In conversation it came out that I'd been Over There (as they called it) and this spurred them to thrust more prodigious helpings upon me.Novelists store moments like this, personal moments, in vaults that all of us have. The difference is the vault of the artist preserves all the details and nuances. Most of us come back from the vault with tatters and shreds; Carr, and others like him, come back with precious parures that flash a dazzle upon us commoners.The genius of this short novel, under 50,000 words, is that it doesn't tart up the glory of the images with overwrought settings. Keep it simple, make it well, and quality will out. It is a joy to find laughs and savors in the same book. It is a rare joy to find them polished to a deep flash, set at just the right moment, and not vulgarly paraded for our approval but rather simply put in their proper place and left for us to notice as we will.I made a run at this book after reading most of a very, very unhappy and terrible book. I was weighed down, felt that page-turning was labor. After a good sleep, I picked this gem up again and began at the beginning. It was the correct decision.We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever--the ways 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.How much poorer my world would be without the quiet luxury of these images in it. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
What do You think about A Month In The Country (2000)?
This is Carr’s masterpiece, short and relatively unheralded as it is. It did win the Guardian prize, and was short-listed for the Booker; and in 1987 was made into a motion picture. This was the height of Carr’s fame and recognition. According to Michael Holroyd’s introduction to the NYRB Classics edition, this wouldn’t have affected Carr one way or the other; he was in Holroyd’s words “an outsider, a man of integrity, who wrote from his sense of privacy.”In Carr’s forward, he tells us my idea was to write an easy-going story, a rural idyll along the lines of Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree. And … I wanted its narrator to look back regretfully across forty or fifty years but, recalling a time irrecoverably lost, still feel a tug at the heart.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.It is the summer of 1920. Again in his forward, Carr describes this setting as “the plow horse and candle-to-bed age”, when he himself grew up in this part of Yorkshire. Birkin is excited about the task ahead, and is an optimistic soul who tends to look on the bright side of things. But there are wounds in his background: his wife has left him, and he has been marked by his experiences in the War (Passchendaele), which have produced not only a severe facial tic but also memories which he would just as soon not have.The story Carr tells is not complicated. What I enjoyed even more than the story itself (which is superb) is the way in which he describes the setting, the way that the setting affects Birkin, and the way in which the setting, both time and place, almost becomes the story. The rural landscape of fields, hills and woods, the slow-paced, deliberate life-style of the people, their habits and customs, even the weather, are described in beautiful prose by Carr. For example, as Tom reminisces late in the storyAh, those days … for many years afterwards their happiness haunted me. Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of summer. Day after day of warm weather, voices calling as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness and, at day-break, the murmer of corn and the warm smell of fields ripe for harvest. And being young.No, the story is not complicated. But neither is it shallow. There is a depth to Birkin, of course - he is a man of emotional, psychological, intellectual, and artistic interest, and is revealed to be affected deeply by both people and setting in all these facets of his nature. The supporting actors too (mostly) are not simply rural caricatures; they are more than just sketches, quickly becoming real people who demand our attention and tug at our sensibilities.Here I’ve gone on so long, the review is nearly longer than the story – but nowhere near as good. Do yourself a favor and read this book. You might get through it in a couple hours. But please, don’t rush through it at top speed. Take pleasure in it, slow down once in awhile and let the evocative prose take hold of you. Be transported to a place, and back to a time, which few of us know first hand, but might wish we did. I do.(view spoiler)[And now, one hundred years after the Great War started, perhaps another chance to think about this time, in the early 20s, in which a survivor like Birkin finds meaning again in his life; unlike many, who either didn't make it through to the other side, or did, but lived a life ruined forever by the experience. (hide spoiler)]
—Ted
It hardly seems possible this was first written in 1978. It has the feel of a much older book, for Carr has entered the past and settled in there as though it were his. This belongs to that class of novels that wear their truths lightly: nearly every page describes a look, a feeling, a moment that we recognize no matter that the characters precede us by one hundred years. Shortly after WWI, a returned soldier comes to an old church in the north of England with the intention of uncovering a mural concealed beneath lime wash centuries before. It is slow work, and it is summer. He is not well paid. There is something to be said for penury. When one has little, one has no shield to wield off experience. When one is hungry, nearly everything tastes good.J.L. Carr says in his introduction that his original intention was to write a rural idyll and “I wanted its narrator to look back regretfully across forty or fifty years but, recalling a time irrecoverably lost, still feel a tug at the heart.” (Intro, xxi) The mural, the quiet, steady effort of the work, the townspeople, the vicar and the vicar’s wife, the weather: all these were “lying about in memory and employ[ed]… to suit one’s ends.”Though slight in size (just over one hundred pages from start to finish), this novel carries with it the stories of all time. It carries it’s knowledge lightly, carelessly even, and will make this book relevant and enjoyable reading for years to come. Thank goodness for The New York Review of Books. They are saving classic literature from oblivion.
—Trish
res-to-ra-tion, noun1. The act of restoring; renewal, revival, or reestablishment2. a return of something to a former, original , normal, or unimpaired conditionTom Birkin is a man looking back -- reflecting on a single summer in his youth after just returning from war, with spirits dulled, and mind and emotions still covered in battlefield residue.Hired to restore a recently discovered 14th century church mural in rural Yorkshire, Birkin looks forward to a fresh start with no worries and just the simple mission of uncovering a wall-painting. "...to forget what the war had done to me…and begin where I'd left off. "This is a tale of an individual scaling down to basics (chipping away the past, if you will), and slowly returning to life through discoveries of nature's small gifts, and the large rewards of community, friendship and possibly... new love. "There are times when man and earth are one, when the pulse of living beats strong, when life is brimming with promise...It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.” Beautiful, poetic language that slowly unfolds to tell a story of learning to live in the present and recognizing the now or never. Solid 5 stars
—Mikki
