Published in 1980, J.L Carr’s A Month in the Country follows Tom Birkin, an art restorer on his first job who visits Oxgodby, Yorkshire following the first world war. Birkin is to spend the summer uncovering a medieval church mural, finding as much to interest him in the people of the village as the mural itself. There’s the Vicar’s wife, Alice Keach, whose kindly yet lonely manner charms Birkin fairly quickly; Kathy Ellerbeck, the teenage daughter of the stationmaster (who doubles as a Wesleyan preacher); and Charles Moon, a young man of roughly the same age, hired to find the ancestral remains of a deceased church benefactor in the grounds of the same church Birkin finds himself working in.
Carr writes in such an understated way that there is a big risk of overlooking the rich symbols and metaphors embedded inside this 100 page novella. It’s very easy to get lost in the idyllic atmosphere of the fictional Oxgodby, and there are certainly themes common to other ‘comfy reads’. The beautiful countryside and domestic setting, discussions of art, history and religious philosophy, and the gentle camaraderie between Birkin and his new neighbors make it seem simple for the modern reader to attribute this all as simply building an aesthetic. While there are certainly notes of ‘light academia’, to reduce it to this would be shallow. Carr frames all of these aspects around the deeper topic of trauma – how it is perceived, managed and viewed retrospectively, giving all the positive elements in the novel a tinge of melancholy and fleeting desire.
Take for example, the obvious theme of restoration, a metaphor used to invite the reader to draw parallels between the restoration of the mural against the physical and mental restoration of the war scarred Tom Birkin. However in both cases, it is an incomplete restoration. Birkin is very upfront about the fact that he is not an artist setting out to create something new, but a labourer sent to clean up the art of others: “Any faint areas or even bits which may have disappeared… you can fill them in. So long as it’s appropriate and tones in with the rest, I leave it to you” says the Vicar on their first meeting. Both Tom and the Vicar acknowledge that the picture can never really be made whole again, and the best we can do is fill in the gaps. Yet the Vicar here goes a step further in suggesting that to restore something is to fill in that which is missing, even if its new parts don’t quite match what was originally there. Birkin seems to balk at this a little, knowing that not everything can be fixed in such an uncompromising way. This is how he himself avoids falling into the trap of pretending he is totally restored – notably, there is no epiphany moment in the novel where Birkin breaks down and bares his soul. Where other authors would include a heart-tugging confession to Moon, about how much the war has affected them both, Carr avoids this (not that this is a bad thing – some of my other favourites rework this trope well). Instead, Birkin makes peace with the fact that, much like the painting, he never will be the same as he was before. So while Birkin leaves Oxgodby patched up in a sense – the stammer and nightmares smoothed over – he is far from whole, still carrying an inability to take action and reluctance to linger.
The decision not to linger is evident from the narrative framing of the story being told by a now elderly Thomas Birkin, reflecting back on this precarious time in his life. He notes “But, oddly, what happened outside was like a dream. It was inside the still church, before its reappearing picture, that was real…for a time”. Associating a dreamlike quality with this period, it’s clear that while Birkin’s time in Oxgodby acted as a respite from his trauma, it was ultimately a temporary respite, too fantastical to last long. This safety bubble exists for Birkin within a very specific point in his life, and serves as only a hiatus in the trauma. It is a pessimistic take on trauma, but is also something Birkin seems to be actively seeking – he makes no effort to prolong his time in the country, although he is reluctant to leave, even considering delaying the removal of his scaffolding until Moon points out that he “can’t make it last forever.” Birkin seems take this sentiment as far as possible, imposing his own restrictions on interacting with the ‘dream’: he tells us that he never visited Oxgodby again, never sought news about the village after he left, never wrote to people he met, and took care not to maintain any of the friendships he formed, little to say of his relationship with Alice Keach. At first it baffled me when Birkin decided not to act on his clear feelings for Alice, but this made total sense by the end of the story. He cannot act on his feelings, where the consequence would be either:
a) entering a short relationship which would be broken off at some point, endangering the positive associations of his time in Oxgodby
b) entering a long term relationship with Alice ending in marriage, which would remove his experiences from this specific time period, and effectively waking him up from the ‘dream’ forever and erase this safety net of happy memories.
No, Birkin prefers to have his period of happiness be exceedingly brief, to allow him the knowledge that even if he is unhappy now, writing from the 1970s following his marriage to a woman who is repeatedly unfaithful to him, he’ll always have that summer in 1920. This is how he is able to justify the detached, blithe way in which he relates the story, by implying it wasn’t real, just an escape which now exists solely in his memories.
A Month in The Country involves a man who no longer believes in God, living and working in a church. But at the end of the summer, he doesn’t leave the church believing in God – in his own words, he believes in the artist, nameless and fameless as he might be, and he forms a connection with this painter who has literally created a Judgement. It stands to reason then, that when asked to fill in as a preacher for a day, Tom Birkin can find few words to say about God, but is able to talk passionately about this painting. His source of comfort is knowing that while he himself might not be capable of creating a source of goodness or even remaining near it, he has at least contributed in some small way to an artwork that might one day inspire something in several generations of people. It is in this way that Carr raises an important question on short vs long term relief from trauma, and whether the latter really exists. If our worst experiences will always be a part of us, it stands to reason that so will our best ones. Is it really best, then, to try (and inevitably fail) to erase trauma? ) Or perhaps it is better to give ourselves just an intermission – pockets of relief that can be recalled at any moment, and dismissed just as easily.
Have you read A Month in the Country? I would love to hear your thoughts on this novella below!
Just read it recently, a gem of a book. Yes, the unresolved trauma, healed somewhat, but very much unresolved gives the book a dose of reality that fiction could have erased. We all live through life with our traumas, and it’s how we heal, how we learn to live with them and move on that makes us real.
And the decision not to take that next step with Alice Keach, not to risk the inevitable hurt, was brilliant. Carr allows Birmingham to keep that little neat bundle of happiness that was his time in Oxgodsby.
This is a book I will read again and share with others. Have not seen the movie, but will check it out.
Brilliantly put – ‘real’ is a great way to describe this book, despite its sometimes dreamlike quality. Thanks for sharing.