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.