A Month in the Country

J.L. Carr's short novel (just over 100 pages) was first published in 1980, and I studied it for either English or English Lit a few years later. I remember loving it, and it was safe on my shelves, but I hadn't revisited it for forty years, until I was prompted to do so by a Facebook friend.

A Month in the Country is a beautiful, elegiac little book, set in an idyllic English summer in 1920. The narrator, Tom Birkin, is restoring a painting in the church; Charles Moon is excavating someone's lost ancestor in the grounds outside. Both are survivors of the War, and both are deeply scarred. Nothing much happens, but gradually some things shift and begin to heal; in fact, what happens is that Birkin begins to make connections in the village, and these connections continue to nurture him long after that magical summer is gone.

A couple of years after I studied the book in high school, and unbeknownst to me, they made a film out of it, starring Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh in very early roles. I'm very excited to see it (though apparently it's not as magical as the book). It's so weird what survives in the memory -- as I re-read it, I remembered reading about Alice Keach's father testing her on obscure types of apple, and the fig leaves pressing up against the windows of the vicarage like hands, and one character being found 'in bed with his batman,' and what that implied, and I remembered what was particular about the missing ancestor and how he featured in Birkin's altarpiece. But loads of more dramatic scenes and details had vanished from my mind completely. I found myself thinking, oh, that's where that came from.