Dear Reader,
I have been getting out on the trails with my horse in the last week or so, and we’ve loved spotting the wildflowers (wild geraniums) and birdlife (the pileated woodpecker) as we ride. The bugs are coming, so the window for trail riding is closing soon, and we are trying to make the most of it.
I have a summer book for you. In honor of one of the best short novels I have ever read, I am keeping this week’s edition brief. My sincere thanks to the wise and funny team at the podcast Backlisted. They turned me on to this essential book, to which they devoted their inaugural episode. Tune in to their channel and check them out.
Review
A Month in the Country
J. L. Carr
The New York Review of Books, 2000
135 pages
$14.95
A signal feature of long summer car trips in my childhood was the radio signal. In the era before cassette players began nesting in dashboards, we listened to the radio. When crackles invaded and then conquered the signal of whatever station we had been enjoying, the occupant of the passenger seat was generally in charge of searching for a new station. You twizzled the knob through striations of static, up and down the dial until suddenly — BAM! — you heard a voice singing with perfect clarity. Tammy Wynette (Stand by Your Man) or Stevie Wonder (Isn’t She Lovely?) or Joni Mitchell (A Free Man in Paris). Or Johnny and June Carter Cash in a perfect duet (You’ll Be All Right).
Discovering J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country (1980) last year was like one of these serendipitous radio dial discoveries of the past: suddenly hearing a voice and a song that seems impossible not to have known, to have lived without. Carr (1912-1994) was a brilliant and eccentric writer, who was also at various times in his life a headmaster, an aerial photographer, an intelligence officer, and a creator of quirky maps and dictionaries.
Carr wrote this book toward the end of his career, when his wife was dying. It is the story of a young man healing his spirit in a Yorkshire village. Tom Birkin has survived the horrors of combat in World War I, only to return and find that his wife is not standing by him. In fact, she has decamped with another man. As the title announces, A Month In the Country is an interlude, and that interlude contains within it a swirling motion of new beginnings, looks backward, and farewells. Indeed, the book is narrated by Birkin as an older man reflecting back on this short period in his life.
Birkin arrives in the village of Oxgodby (by God!) a miserable mess with a sodden overcoat, an art degree, an empty wallet, a face twitching from PTSD, and a job to do: the uncovering and restoration of a medieval wall painting in the village church. The will of a wealthy parishioner has made her bequest to the church contingent on this project, which the vicar has reluctantly hired Birkin to carry out. Amid all the glories of an English summer, there is a mystery, a friendship, a love story, a confrontation with faith, and a fond connection with a local family (based on Carr’s own) and their folkways.
What ties the book together is Birkin’s work on the painting. He is utterly absorbed, spending his days on the scaffolding in a variety of uncomfortable positions and his nights sleeping on the floor of the belfry. The craft, the process, and the connection to the masterpiece he is bringing back to life all create a framework for rebuilding his own life.
Each day, I used to avoid taking in the whole by giving exaggerated attention to the particular. Then in the early evening, when the westering sunshine shone in past my baluster to briefly light the wall, I would step back, still purposefully not letting my eyes focus on it. Then I looked.
It was breathtaking.
The picture itself is a Doom: a scene of Christ rendering judgement at the Apocalypse. (Substack doesn’t yet support footnotes, so I will share here that Johnny Cash wrote quite a song about Judgement Day near the end of his career. It’s called “A Man Comes Around.”) During the Reformation, such scenes of moral instruction and spiritual warning were often destroyed or painted over. Birkin engages with the picture (“a seething cascade of bones, joints and worm-riddled vitals frothing over the fiery weir”) and tunes in to its maker (“I couldn’t put a face on him. But he was fair-headed; hairs kept turning up where his beard had prodded into tacky paint”). The work helps him come to an understanding of his battlefield experience: hell on earth. He tells Alice, the vicar’s wife, “I’ve been there; I have a map of it in my head . . .” Isn’t Alice lovely? Indeed, she is, her hatband adorned with a fresh rose every day.
A Month in the Country doffs its cap to a number of great English writers, but especially to Thomas Hardy and his rural idyll Under the Greenwood Tree. As in Hardy, the characters and scenes around Birkin are all lovingly drawn—not just the station masters, church wardens, and barley farmers, but also the daily routines (shaving in the lilacs, lunch break on a tomb), and the non-human stalwarts: coal stove, gas chandelier, and church organ. The writing does, as Carr intended, “tug at the heart,” yet without being at all sentimental.
I was drawn into the changing picture of Oxgodby itself. But oddly, what happened outside was like a dream. It was inside the still church, before its reappearing picture that was real. I drifted across the rest. As I have said—like a dream. For a time.
Birkin becomes a free man in Yorkshire, free to get on with his life. He’ll be all right.
A Month in the Country is a great summer book. It might even serve as an inspiration for this particular summer. With political chaos and pandemic subsiding for the moment, perhaps we can imagine our own interludes, ones that will absorb us in ways that not only refresh, but restore. Maybe we’ll drive home singing out loud with the radio.
Other Voices, Other Forms
I’d love to visit the Yorkshire Sculpture Park some day. Look at these Henry Moores in the landscape.
On June 5th, the Park is unveiling the first installation in an initiative called The Oak Project, “aimed at creating connections to nature through art.” This piece by Morison Studio, which is working at the intersection of architecture and sculpture, is called “Silence — Alone in a World of Wounds.” It is designed to disintegrate over a period of time.
Poem of the Week
Thomas Hardy wrote “And There Was a Great Calm” to mark the end of World War I. The poem ends with this stanza.
For Your Reading Radar
Cynthia Barnett’s The Sounds of the Sea is a long-form exploration of the history and science of sea shells, and it will be published on July 6th. John Williams of the New York Times writes, “The seashell might seem a decidedly small foundation for a book, but Barnett’s account remarkably spirals out, appropriately, to become a much larger story about the sea, about global history and about environmental crises and preservation.” Barnett’s previous book, Rain, was long-listed for a National Book Award.
For Your Calendar
The Hay-on-Wye Festival is entirely virtual this year, it will run from May 26 to June 6th. The program is loaded with talks by eminent writers on our Frugal Chariot subjects: Nature, Climate, Journey, and Place. I recommend scrolling to the bottom of the festival schedule and clicking on the various genre filters to narrow things down. I’ll try to do a post for subscribers this week pointing to some of the events that look especially promising.
Bookshop of the Week
I think J. L. Carr would approve of The Book Mill in Montague, Massachusetts, which is housed in an 1842 gristmill. Their motto is: “Books you don’t need in a place you can’t find.” They have recently reopened, and I am hoping to visit in a couple of weeks. Look for me in that pink chair in the corner.
That’s it for this week. xoxo. Nicie