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J.L Carr
A Month In The Country
A Month In The Country
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A haunting novel about art and its power to heal, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time.
Peta's review
I was listening to an episode of The Secret Life of Books a few weeks ago. One of the presenters, Jonty Claypole, mentioned that one of his favourite works of fiction was J.L. Carr’s novel A Month in the Country. I had not read the book, or even heard of the author. I immediately ordered a copy.
First published in 1980, A Month in the Country was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Prize in the same year. It was republished in 2010, as part of the Penguin Decades series, and has been in print ever since. Literary critic Ingrid Norton wrote in her 2010 review in Open Letters Monthly that “Carr’s great art is to make it clear that joy is inseparable from the pain and oblivion which unmake it.” In her Introduction to the 2000 edition, Penelope Fitzgerald wrote that “Carr… has the magic touch to re-enter the imagined past”, arguing that the narrative is more complex than “one of straightforward remembering or… of straightforward nostalgia, or even an acute sense of the loss of youth.” Rather, the novel evokes nostalgia for something we have never had: “a tugging at the heart – knowing a precious moment has gone and we were not there.” At the end of the book, the narrator asks himself that if he had stayed in Oxgodby, whether he would always have been happy. He concludes: “No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvellous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never, we must snatch at happiness as it flies.”
J.L. (Joseph Lloyd) Carr was born in 1912 in Thirsk, North Yorkshire. He was a teacher, then an officer in the RAF in West Africa. Between 1963 and 1992 he wrote eight novels, including A Month in the Country. In 1964 he established and ran the Quince Tree Press, which has been a Carr family-run business ever since. The publishing house focuses on Pocket Books: small selections from the great poets, as well as idiosyncratic dictionaries, wood engravers, volumes of fabled sayings and small histories. Carr also published his own novels.
A Month in the Country is what I would call quiet storytelling. Set in the small parish village of Oxgodby, the novel encourages reflection, many years later, on the summer spent there by the narrator in 1920, when he was hired to help carry out restoration work on a medieval mural in the local church. He’s joined by Charles Moon, an archaeologist and, like Tom, a WWI veteran. A strong friendship develops between the two men, both desperately in need of healing from the traumas faced on the Front.
One of the most poignant passages for me is Birkin looking back on his time in Oxgodby:
“We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.”
This, for me, captures the book’s central themes of memory, loss, and the aching longing for moments that feel irretrievably past.
In her review in The Guardian (2010), Natasha Tripney says of Carr’s writing:
“He also subtly evokes lost rural customs and ways of living that, even at the time, had begun to fade from view: cart rides and seed cake and honey-thick accents that had not yet been filed down by mass communication.”
I am very glad that Jonty Claypole recommended this book to me. It is a deceptively simple story that will linger with you long after you finish. I liken it to the fading medieval fresco buried under layers of paint and plaster, waiting to be uncovered. Birkin remembers:
“I was beginning to see what the painter had intended. It was no peasant dauber but a master, someone who could take his time, who had the skill and the vision to make the Last Judgment not a threat but a promise.”
This is exactly what Carr does in this tender, elegant novella.
(In 1987 the novel was adapted to film, starring a very young Colin Firth and Kenneth Brannagh. Unfortunately, try as I might, I haven't been able to find it on any streaming platforms.)
Peta
A Month In The Country is available to order now. We will have copies in store in early October.
Publisher Review
'That night, for the first time during many months, I slept like the dead and, next morning, awoke very early.'
One summer, just after the Great War, Tom Birkin, a demobbed soldier, arrives in the village of Oxgodby. He has been invited to uncover and restore a medieval wall painting in the local church. At the same time, Charles Moon - a fellow damaged survivor of the war - has been asked to locate the grave of a village ancestor. As these two outsiders go about their work of recovery, they form a bond, but they also stir up long dormant passions within the village. What Berkin discovers here will stay with him for the rest of his life . . .
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