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Mar. 9th, 2025 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsJ.L. Carr's A Month in the Country is a short, lovely little book that I am finding/have found quite difficult to write about -- one of those books in which not very much happens except a person briefly living a life in a particular place at a particular time, and then leaving it again.
WWI veteran Tom Birkin arrives in a small English village, where his job is to restore a medieval mural, as part of the bequest left by an eccentric local notable: she's provided money to restore the mural, and money to locate the lost grave of one of her ancestors buried outside the churchyard, and so the local victor grimly arranges for this to happen despite his profound lack of enthusiasm for the inconvenience of it all.
On arrival Tom has little money and no connections, sleeping in the church belfry to save money. Over the course of his month in the country, he makes little of the former but much of the latter: with the fellow veteran who is working on the lost grave problem; with a local teenager who is fascinated by his work, and her friendly family; with the vicar's lonely wife; and with the medieval painter of the mural that he is uncovering. There's a lot of secondhand pleasure, for me, both in the specificities of Tom's voice and in the small, careful, detailed work that he's doing -- the day-to-day routine of the village, the particularities of the materials used to make the paint in the mural. It's a charming book, a bit wistful, often quite funny. It's a beautiful English summer. Tom is having a good time. Occasionally one can glimpse the world-devastating event that was WWI through the cracks in his narration. He daydreams about staying in the village, but he won't.
WWI veteran Tom Birkin arrives in a small English village, where his job is to restore a medieval mural, as part of the bequest left by an eccentric local notable: she's provided money to restore the mural, and money to locate the lost grave of one of her ancestors buried outside the churchyard, and so the local victor grimly arranges for this to happen despite his profound lack of enthusiasm for the inconvenience of it all.
On arrival Tom has little money and no connections, sleeping in the church belfry to save money. Over the course of his month in the country, he makes little of the former but much of the latter: with the fellow veteran who is working on the lost grave problem; with a local teenager who is fascinated by his work, and her friendly family; with the vicar's lonely wife; and with the medieval painter of the mural that he is uncovering. There's a lot of secondhand pleasure, for me, both in the specificities of Tom's voice and in the small, careful, detailed work that he's doing -- the day-to-day routine of the village, the particularities of the materials used to make the paint in the mural. It's a charming book, a bit wistful, often quite funny. It's a beautiful English summer. Tom is having a good time. Occasionally one can glimpse the world-devastating event that was WWI through the cracks in his narration. He daydreams about staying in the village, but he won't.
