A Month in the Country: An English Pastoral with Long Shadows

  

A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

 

This week's selection is a direct follow-up of Orbital, Samantha Harvey's space pastoral.  As I noted earlier, she said J.L. Carr's book A Month in the Country inspired her to write a tale in which no dramatic events take place, but  where context and climate are all important.

 

Carr writes in the first person from the point of view of Tom Birkin, badly damaged by World War I, who had trained as an art

restorer and finds himself cleaning up a mural in a village church in England during the month of August 1920.  I suspect that I found the book particularly pleasing because his evocation of wonderful summer weather rhymed with what we have been experiencing: not too hot, enough rain to keep things fairly green, sweet smells of growing things all around.   I also had an afternoon and evening free to indulge in reading, which allowed me to float along on the river of Carr's words.

 

But even without the weather cooperating, I think I would have delighted in the book, which is seemingly such a simple story.  There are threats in the shadows.  We do not learn what exactly happened in the War which left the man with an uncontrollable twitch to his face, and memories that he would is trying to repress.  Similarly, there is the mystery of the gorgeous mural that he is cleaning, which turns out to be a painting by a Master, not an ordinary itinerant painter.  Is there a connection between it and the grave that another ex-soldier, now an archeologist, is supposed to be looking for?

 

Then there is the name of the woman who left the money to clean the mural and find the grave: Hebron.  FamillySearch says that it is a name from Northumberland, possibly from "from Old English hēah ‘high’ + byrgen ‘burial place, tumulus’."  But there are other Hebrons in this world, and possibly therein lies a good part of the tale.

A Kind of a Space Pastoral: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

 

 

The past couple of weeks have been wonderful for star-gazers.  There was the complete eclipse of the sun that swept across the   North Atlantic and Europe, a grand show of the Perseid meteor shower, a rare planetary alignment visible (so it is said) a bit before dawn a couple of weeks ago here, and finally last night's partial eclipse of the moorn.  Sad to say, I didn't see any of the events either because of cloudy skies or too bright city lights. 

 

Whatever, now is a good time to consider Orbital by Samantha Harvey.  Published in 2023 and the winner of the Booker Prize the following year, the book documents 24 hours in the lives of six astronaiuts and cosmonauts on the international space station.  There is no great drama: the space travelers get on reasonably well despite being from countries that sometimes have been enemies (Russia, the US, Japan, Italy and the UK).  Even the small glitch in the system that keeps the spaceship liveable for humans passes as more of a nuisence than a real danger. What the novel chronicles are the musings of the crew about the earth and what they are doing up in space.  And that is more than enough...

 

Harvey says she got the idea for the book after reading A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr.  Not much happens in it either, but the time, place and concerns are there to read and are precious.

 

A book to savour, and to dip back into frequently as you try to puzzle out what life on earth means

Marie Benedict's Carnegie's Maid and Why the Philanthropist Started Paying for Libraries

Libraries are among my most favourite places, and I've long been curious about Andrew Carnegie who financed hundreds of them  in the US, Canada and abroad at the turn of the 20th century.  (The photo is of the original Carnegie Library in Walla Walla WA where I got my first library card, age 5 or 6.) When looking for a good biography of him, I came across another library treasure that isn't quite a "true" story, but an historical novel that givdes a possible explanation of why the industrialist gave away his fortune.  The book is Carnegie's Maid by Marie Benedict, a prolific novelist who specializes in writing historical novels about women on the edges of great things.

 

Her books include novels based on the lives of  Mileva Marić (The Other Einstein, 2016), Hedy Lamarr (The Only Woman in the Room, 2019), Clementine Churchill (Lady Clementine, 2020), Belle da Costa Greene (The Personal Librarian, with Victoria Christopher Murray 2021), and Rosalind Franklin (Her Hidden Genius, 2022).  

 

I have some experience in trying fill in the gaps in the lives of historical figures.  One of my first books was about Robert Nelson, a doctor and anglophone Patriot in the Canadian Rebellions of 1837-38. His francophone colleagues were the one who were remembered when I wrote The Words on the Wall: Robert Nelson and the Rebellion of 1837 in the 1990s, and I wanted to set the record straight.  I did a lot of research in archives and libraries, and the book has 198 footnotes. But to make his story readable and believable, I felt compelled to invent some events and characters that fill in Nelson's emotional life. Therefore, I'm  on Benedict's side when it comes to allowing a little real fiction into novels about the lives of "real" people.

 

So far I've read two other of her books, the ones about Hedy Lamarr and Belle da Costa Greene, and been swept away by all three.  Benedict begins with solid information about her heroines, and then does some imagining of things that might have happened to them.  In Carnegie's Maid she clearly indicates that the person is made up, but she also explains why she thinks that someone in Carnegie's life inspired him to make his generous gifts to so many towns although she's equally clear that no one knows for sure.  Whatever, the result is a very good read.