Quiet splendour

I just finished J L Carr’s masterpiece A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY.

Lyrical, lilting, enchanting. Carr draws you into his pastoral idyll slowly, quietly, so that before you quite realise what’s happened, you’re caught up in a magical world. Set in a fictional Yorkshire village, the young Tom Birkin arrives fresh from the battlefields of the First World War to uncover a medieval painting on the ceiling of the village church. A reserved and inwardly focussed man, not much is spelled out. One is left to glean, from snatches of conversation, from Birkin’s inner monologues, the deep issues he’s dealing with: loss, war trauma, hope, life’s purpose/meaning, love, sense of duty, accomplishment. Through his work in the village for that month, one accompanies Birkin as he tries to make sense of the world and his place in it.

A moment in time that even he acknowledges might not have been real:

Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain … Day after day it was like that and each morning I leaned on the yard gate dragging at my first fag and (I’d like to think) marvelling at this splendid backcloth. But it can’t have been so; I’m not the marvelling kind. Or was I then?

But such was the transformative nature of that summer, I reckon he was that kind. For that month.