A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr

Most people can recall the range of emotions connected to the most vivid or transformative moments of their lives. Falling in love, having a child, overcoming a seemingly insurmountable obstacle: these sacred moments seem to be stored in a different part of our brains.  Occasionally, we retrieve these memories that transcend time and space to appreciate their significance in our lives.

In J. L. Carr’s quiet and powerful novel, A Month in the Country (1980 Booker Prize-Shortlist), we meet Tom Birkin, a young WWI veteran, who experiences his own transformative experience when he spends a month in the English countryside. Birkin’s psyche is damaged from his wartime experience. He stammers and stutters and the left side of his face twitches. His wife has left him for another man and he has no family with whom he can live.  Rattled and traumatized by his role as a signal runner in the war, he takes a job restoring a 500-year old mural in a church in the little village of Oxgodby in northern England.  Whatever religiosity he might have possessed has been obliterated by his wartime experience.  Yet, he welcomes this opportunity to commune with art and pursue a paid professional project.

So in the summer of 1920, Tom arrives in Oxgodby where he feels grateful and reverent for the sounds, sights and smells of the countryside. Sensing his skittishness, the village people show him hospitality and respect, a stark contrast to the church authorities that provide him little warmth and the barest of accommodations.  Tom’s daily routine is slow and steady like the novel itself. He works methodically scrubbing away the layers of paint on the mural while tending to the layers of his pain. Each morning, the sun pours down on the fields adjacent to the church and Carr’s descriptions make you feel as if you have been transported to the slow routines of this village.

Though this transformative time was both fragile and fleeting, Tom’s month restoring the historic mural etched itself deep into his psyche. The particulars of Tom’s current life we do not know. What we do know is that the experience gave him hope and confidence to keep on.  And five decades later, Tom reflects with melancholy on his decision to leave Oxgodby. He says, “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 marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.”

This story is Birkin’s elegy and eulogy to the month in 1920 that healed his damaged soul.  If we are lucky, we all have a time or place or a moment that we remember with a sense of sacredness. Carr’s book is beautifully written and inspiring to read in the relative quiet and peace of  summertime. In our frenetic fast paced world, A Month in the Country is a perfect book for immersing oneself in a slower time and witnessing the possibilities of healing and transformation.