A Month In The Country

Ah, 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 murmur of corn and the warm smell of fields ripe for harvest. And being young. 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.

A Month in the Country feels like an unsuccessful attempt by Carr at the kind of quiet, introspective character study that Kazuo Ishiguro perfected in his brilliant

The Remains of the Day, published less than a decade later. Unlike Ishiguro, Carr never really pins down his narrator’s voice or reaches the profundity he is clearly aiming for—and unlike Ishiguro, Carr’s message is deeply immoral.

On the surface, there’s a lot to attract me to this novel. I love slow, dreamlike character studies, and the idea of one playing out against the slow restoration of a medieval painting tucked away in a run-down chapel in the post-war English countryside (where a one-man archaeological dig is also being undertaken in the overgrown churchyard) sounds almost too perfect for words. And while Birkin’s character was poorly drawn, the prose was often quite lovely, and I really did enjoy the descriptions of the countryside and chapel, and of Birkin working slowly away at the mural, discussing the various pigments and brush strokes and drawing careful conclusions about the unknown artist with whom he feels a connection. Unfortunately, this is only a tiny bit of the novel, which is kind of all over the place in terms of plot, character, and theme.

However,

A Month in the Country is ultimately defined by the pervasive sexual overtones that feel painfully discordant with the setting. (I suppose this is what NYRB means by “deeply charged.”) And I’m not just talking about

the artlessly shoehorned-in “revelation” regarding Moon’s homosexuality, which—Carr committing one of the great sins of historical fiction—Birkin responds to in a way that does not at all feel realistic for a man of his time and background

. To the extent that Carr studies Birkin at all, it is in the context of his strained relationship with his wife. Or, more accurately, it is in the context of

Birkin really wanting to cheat on his wife, a woman who he doesn’t really think of much at all, with a woman who also happens to be married. And, honestly, I kind of wish he

would have so that Carr, if a better and more moral author, could have added to the library of great literary works exploring infidelity and its repercussions. But neither Birkin nor Carr are interesting enough to actually make something happen—they’re just scummy enough to think about it and then wish it

had happened once the moment passes. Carr’s message seems to be: do what makes you happy in the moment, or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life

. Gross.

All that said, I’m still giving

A Month in the Country 3 stars because, while I don’t think it’s any good, I can’t deny that I enjoyed much of the reading experience and some of the prose was nice. I will not be reading more Carr.

Some favorite passages:

There were some good eighteenth-century headstones, their lichen-stained cherubs, hour-glasses and death’s heads almost hidden by rank grass, nettle patches and fool’s parsley.

My stammer put him off for a moment or two. ‘It wasn’t in the contract,’ he hedged, somehow managing to imply that neither were my stammer and face-twitch.

‘Whatever it is,’ he said curtly, looking up the ladder. ‘It will distract attention from worship.’ ‘Only for a short time,’ I said. ‘People tire of colour and shapes which stay in the same place. And they always believe that they have more time than they will have and that, someday, they’ll come on a weekday and have a proper look.’ I should have said ‘we’ – I’m just the same.

By nature we are creatures of hope, always ready to be deceived again, caught by the marvel that might be wrapped in the grubbiest brown paper parcel.

I never exchanged a word with the Colonel. He has no significance at all in what happened during my stay in Oxgodby. As far as I’m concerned he might just as well have gone round the corner and died. But that goes for most of us, doesn’t it? We look blankly at each other. Here I am, here you are. What are we doing here? What do you suppose it’s all about? Let’s dream on.

But, for me, the exciting thing was more than this. Here I was, face to face with a nameless painter reaching from the dark to show me what he could do, saying to me as clear as any words, ‘If any part of me survives from time’s corruption, let it be this. For this was the sort of man I was.’

What I’m really getting at is that it’s not all that easy to find your way back to the Middle Ages. They weren’t us in fancy dress, mouths full of thees and thous, quoths, prithees and zounds. They had no more than a few entertaining distractions to take their minds off death and birth, sleep and work and their prayers to the almighty father and his stricken son when things got too awful. So, in my job, it helps if you can smell candles, guttering in draughts, petitioning release for souls in purgatory, if you can see their smoke trailing amongst images, threading nave arcades, settling on corbels and bosses, blackening stone too high for the cleaning women to get at.

So he must have died on the job. But his last brush-strokes had been steady and sure, he’d been as fit at the end as when he’d begun. And then I understood. I turned and, shuffling to the scaffold’s edge, stared down at the stone-slabbed floor. He’d fallen.

Hell’s different things to different people and different things to the same person at different times.’

That was the missed moment.

But there are times when man and earth are one, when the pulse of living beats strong, when life is brimming with promise and the future stretches confidently ahead like that road to the hills. Well, I was young …

If going off with him is what she needed, then why not? I’m not her jailer. We didn’t really know each other when we married. Who does? For that matter, who knows all that much about anyone even after twenty years in the same house?

Do you know, until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that this bundle of bones was my falling man.

That morning I had my first letter. Heaven knows how she had learnt where I was, but it was from Vinny: she wanted me home again. There were other things too but that’s what it amounted to – she wanted me back. I had no illusions. She would go off again, would come back again. And I should be there.

We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever – the way 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. All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen. But this was something I knew nothing of as I closed the gate and set off across the meadow.