Set in 1920, the film follows the experiences of Tom Birkin, who has been employed under a bequest to carry out restoration work on a medieval mural discovered in a church in the small rural community of Oxgodby, Yorkshire. A nice little novel to fill an afternoon tucked cozily in an armchair, watching out the window how the flower blossom. I underlined a passage in the book which seemed pertinent to today’s situation: “It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies. Carr was passionately committed to the preservation of old churches, as Byron Rogers recounts in The Last Englishman: The Life of J.

A Month in the Country - Penguin Books UK A Month in the Country - Penguin Books UK

As the pages read became greater than the pages left to read, I was able to guess at pretty much everything that remained to be told except for one or two details, but I still delighted in the manner of the telling and the little traces of humour inserted in the text like private jokes between the author and the narrator. The memories of that summer month, those quiet moments surrounded by nature and art, were enough to renew Birkin forever. His father Joseph, the eleventh son of a farmer, went to work for the railways, eventually becoming a station master for the North Eastern Railway. The score was subsequently arranged into a suite for string orchestra, and is available on CD in a recording by the English Northern Philharmonia conducted by Paul Daniel. Thomas Birkin never envisioned being haunted by happiness fifty years after a life-altering moment that presented itself wrapped in balustrades of washed-out color.Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. 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 . Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. The building was saved, but his crusade was also a failure in that redundancy was not averted and the building is now a scientific study centre. 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.

A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr | Goodreads

I thought it was written in the 1920s and would be an understated tastefully written meditation on the healing powers of art.

Birkin is now an old man, looking back at his youth – the novel is signed off “September 1978”, after another World War has passed. Over forty years later, after his novel The Harpole Report was a critical and popular success, he was invited to give a talk at Goldsmiths'. Set in the summer of 1920, but related in 1978, an older Birkin is remembering the month during which he is hired to uncover a medieval mural in a church in northern England.

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The book was a treasure that was slowly uncovered; when it was fully exposed, I was astounded by the beauty of the work in its entirety and the image it left on my consciousness will remain with me for a long time to come.The sense of things lost to time is pronounced but not overplayed and there's a gently elegiac quality to the developing picture of a warm and hazy English countryside summer. Birkin considers odd couples more than once, especially Keach and Alice, and how utterly different they are at home, compared with elsewhere.