After a lifetime of teaching English literature, I have accumulated a private and rather eclectic pantheon of great (mainly modern) novels, in which J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country holds a central place. Carr finished it in 1978, and it was published in 1980 by the Harvester Press, and then by Penguin in paperback. The novel received more acclaim in America than in Britain, although it did make the shortlist for the Booker Prize, where it lost out to one of William Golding’s less successful novels. In due course, as was Carr’s wont – because he thought little of most commercial publishers – he bought back the rights and published it under his own imprint of the Quince Tree Press, from which (blessedly) copies are still available (as are Carr’s seven other novels).
It is generally agreed that A Month in the Country is Carr’s masterpiece, although it is a very short novel (E. M. Forster would have defined it as a novella): in the Quince Tree edition, 106 pages only. It is set in Yorkshire in 1920, in what was apparently a marvellous summer. The two central characters, Tom Birkin and Charles Moon, had been soldiers in the trenches of the Western Front. We discover, quite late on, that Moon had been found in bed with his batman, stripped of his captain’s rank and sent to a military prison, despite a record of bravery which had won him the Military Cross. Birkin had been a ‘forward signaller’, sent out beyond the trenches to direct artillery fire; very few of them survived for long. So both he and Moon know about Hell, though they call it Passchendaele.
Birkin (the fir
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Subscribe now or Sign inAfter a lifetime of teaching English literature, I have accumulated a private and rather eclectic pantheon of great (mainly modern) novels, in which J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country holds a central place. Carr finished it in 1978, and it was published in 1980 by the Harvester Press, and then by Penguin in paperback. The novel received more acclaim in America than in Britain, although it did make the shortlist for the Booker Prize, where it lost out to one of William Golding’s less successful novels. In due course, as was Carr’s wont – because he thought little of most commercial publishers – he bought back the rights and published it under his own imprint of the Quince Tree Press, from which (blessedly) copies are still available (as are Carr’s seven other novels).
It is generally agreed that A Month in the Country is Carr’s masterpiece, although it is a very short novel (E. M. Forster would have defined it as a novella): in the Quince Tree edition, 106 pages only. It is set in Yorkshire in 1920, in what was apparently a marvellous summer. The two central characters, Tom Birkin and Charles Moon, had been soldiers in the trenches of the Western Front. We discover, quite late on, that Moon had been found in bed with his batman, stripped of his captain’s rank and sent to a military prison, despite a record of bravery which had won him the Military Cross. Birkin had been a ‘forward signaller’, sent out beyond the trenches to direct artillery fire; very few of them survived for long. So both he and Moon know about Hell, though they call it Passchendaele. Birkin (the first-person narrator of the novel) and Moon are benefiting from a legacy given by the late Miss Adelaide Hebron to the fabric fund of the Anglican parish church in the village of Oxgodby, in part to pay for Birkin, a trained restorer, to uncover a medieval wall- painting and for Moon, an archaeologist, to seek out the grave of one of Miss Hebron’s ancestors, Piers, buried in the fourteenth century outside consecrated ground because he had been excommunicated.
Moon lives in a tent over a trench he has dug in a field next to the churchyard, and Birkin sets up lodgings in the bell-tower of the church. Moon has an informed notion of where he will find the grave of Miss Hebron’s ancestor but he is more interested in what he thinks may be the relics of a much earlier building on the same site, while Birkin spends his days dangerously up ladders and scaffolding, gradually uncovering what he realizes is a work of genius, an almost undamaged painting of the Judgement Day, though it has been covered over for four hundred years.
The two stories merge in the last pages of the novel: the ‘falling man’ in the painting who is going down into the fires of Hell is almost certainly a portrait of the man whose bones Moon (helped by Birkin) finds in the dust of his shroud. Moon and Birkin open the stone coffin and look at the skeleton: ‘A metal thing swung from the rib-cage; [Moon] poked in a pencil and delicately fished it out. “Well, well, the crescent! So that was why they wouldn’t let him into the church. He was a Muslim. Caught in some expedition and then became a convert to save his skin!”’ There is another theme, probably the moral centre of the novel: Birkin is married, but his wife has gone off with another man, as she has a habit of doing. Birkin is fairly sure that, while he was away at war, Vinny had slept with other men too; now he knows for sure that she is serially unfaithful. The vicar, the Reverend J. G. Keach, a difficult and awkward man, deeply unsuited to the Oxgodby community and too poor to enjoy the huge rectory in which he lives, has a beautiful wife called Alice who is much younger than him. Alice makes friends with Birkin, often coming to watch him at work, and he (lonely, damaged man) falls in love with her; but when the moment comes in which he might do something about that attraction he doesn’t take the chance. They are in the bell-chamber, looking out where Moon has been excavating:
She turned . . . so that her breasts were pressing against me. And, although we both looked outward across the meadow, she didn’t draw away as quite easily she could have done. I should have lifted an arm and taken her shoulder, turned her face and kissed her. It was that kind of day. It was why she’d come. Then everything would have been different. My life, hers. We would have had to speak and said aloud what both of us knew and then, maybe, turned from the window and lain down together on my makeshift bed. Afterwards, we would have gone away, maybe on the next train. My heart was racing. I was breathless. She leaned on me, waiting. And I did nothing and said nothing . . .
I am quite glad I never had to teach the novel, because I know how difficult it would have been to get Sixth Formers to understand that decision, although it is utterly in character. ‘But why doesn’t he take the chance? She wants him, doesn’t she? They want each other, don’t they?’ I can see my good-hearted pupils frowning as they struggle to understand something so un-modern, a self-denial entirely atypical of the world in which most of us now live, where self-fulfilment, particularly of the sexual kind, has become our touchstone. Denial is unhealthy, isn’t it? It is only after that non-event that Vinny writes to Birkin to say she wants to return to him; and he knows he will accept her, even though she is certain to desert him yet again. When he goes to the rectory to say farewell, he finds the Keaches have packed up and left, probably for the more welcoming communities of Sussex. He will never see Alice again. Rereading the novel for the umpteenth time, I was once again astonished at how much there is in such a short book. Birkin gets himself quite deeply involved in the local community, in particular making friends with the Ellerbeck family, stalwarts of local Methodism. He umpires cricket matches, helps with the harvesting, even one Sunday finds himself subbing for Mr Ellerbeck as preacher at a Methodist service. (There is a wonderfully happy account of a day’s outing with the Chapel people.) Above all, there is a marvellous description of the great wall-painting of the Judgement Day which Birkin is employed to uncover. Carr was passionately committed to the preservation of old churches, as Byron Rogers recounts in The Last Englishman: The Life of J. L. Carr (2003), and clearly had a degree of expertise about medieval wall-painting.
Birkin gradually realizes he is dealing with a masterpiece: ‘A tremendous waterfall of colour, 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 . . .’ Just before he leaves Oxgodby for ever, he goes to look at the painting again and knows that, ‘whatever else had befallen me during those few weeks in the country, I had lived with a very great artist . . . And, standing before the great spread of colour, I felt the old tingling excitement and a sure- ness that the time would come when some stranger would stand there too and understand . . .’ If you care about novels, you should get hold of a copy of A Month in the Country. It is a great novel and will be read long after some of the detritus acclaimed these days has been flushed away by our blessed ally, Time.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 69 © C. J. Driver 2021
About the contributor
C. J. (Jonty) Driver has written novels, memoirs, biographies and seven collections of poems, the latest of which is Before (2018). Another collection, Still Further: New Poems, 2000–2019, will be published by the Uhlanga Press this year.
J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country can be ordered direct from the Quince Tree Press (www.quincetreepress.co.uk).
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