posted on 15 Nov 2019

Rereading JL Carr’s A Month in the Country

During the 1970s and 80s most bookshops you went into would have a spinner somewhere crammed with curious little chapbooks – illustrated selections of poetry, curious dictionaries, arcane maps, all kinds of oddities. They were the fruits of a one-man “back-bedroom publishing house” called the Quince Tree Press, run by the ex-teacher JL Carr, a thoroughly English eccentric who might have existed more happily in the eighteenth century.

But JL Carr wasn’t just – or perhaps not only – a slightly crackpot publisher of novelty books and literary gifts. He was also an accomplished writer, and his masterpiece is A Month in the Country, written in 1978 and published in 1980, when it won the Guardian fiction prize and was shortlisted for the Booker prize. I read it again over the weekend.

Let me first say that I remembered almost nothing about it – about the plot, that is. But it is a book whose atmosphere has stuck with me for decades, as distinctive as a scent or a piece of music that you struggle to name but can’t forget.

The bare bones of the book are not complicated. It is August 1920, about to turn into a scorching hot summer, and Tom Birkin, shell-shocked and broken, is back from the trenches. Stammering and twitching, grieving lost friends too numerous to count, tormented by nightmares and estranged from a young wife who has recently left him, he arrives in torrential rain at a tiny farming village called Oxgodby in the north of England.

Birkin scrapes a precarious (but virtuous) living from the restoration and preservation of medieval wall paintings. The man who taught him retired, and the only other known expert is in failing health: soon, his teacher tells Tom, he’ll be able to starve without competition.

Tom has been hired by the vicar of Oxgodby’s fourteenth century church to uncover a medieval painted mural – a condition made in the recent will of one of the church’s main benefactors, Miss Hebron. Keach, the vicar, isn’t keen but without meeting these terms the church will not be able to claim the bigger prize of a £1,000 bequest.

In addition, Miss Hebron’s will states that Keach must also organise an archaeological dig to find the remains of a distant medieval ancestor of hers, buried ‘beyond the pale’ of the church’s cemetery walls in mysterious circumstances some time in the fourteenth century. A slightly mysterious figure called Charles Moon, another ex-soldier, is already at work on this, pitched alongside his dig in an old army tent.

That Moon and Birkin, impoverished survivors of the trenches, are here to work, earn a bit of money and live cheaply in rural austerity for a couple of months is immediately evident. What also becomes apparent is that both men, in addition to the visible signs of their trauma, also nurse other secret wounds and having had their season in hell are hoping that a season in rural isolation will help heal them, redeem them even.

As I say, that is the bare bones. But in the barely one hundred pages of this slight, spare and reticent novel, Carr also manages to explore the crusades, church vs chapel, the trauma, grief and domestic breakdown occasioned by war, country lore and an about-to-disappear rural England at the end of the horse age, and the practical intricacies of medieval painting restoration.

What makes this slender novel so special is its sensuous and atmospheric detail: the descriptions of English landscape, the dusty scent of stooked hay, mist lying over the fields, the damp, creaking “upside-down ship’s timbers” of the church’s bell chamber where Birkin sleeps at night on a camp bed; Moon’s pipe tobacco and Birkin’s first Woodbine of the day mixing with the smell of fried bacon and burnt hoof wafting up from the smithy’s; Keach the vicar’s young, beautiful, unhappy wife, her slender suntanned arms raised to adjust her wide-brimmed straw hat, a fading rose tucked in the ribbon band. Of course Birkin will fall in love with her, and of course it will be a doomed affair, over before it can even begin.

I was surprised to find on rereading this for the first time in over thirty years that the novelist Carr most puts me in mind of is Penelope Fitzgerald. He has something of the same reticence, the same apparently effortless facility for entering an imagined past, even a similarly sparse prose style. I had never before made this connection – although evidently others have, for the latest Penguin Modern Classic edition of the novel has a beautiful and warmly affectionate introduction by Fitzgerald.

I don’t think Carr is quite as pitch-perfect as Fitzgerald but A Month in the Country is nonetheless a tiny gem of a novel, unlike anything else Carr wrote and surely unlike any other fiction published in 1980. With its echoes of Turgenev, of early Sassoon and Housman, its pastoral melancholy, its miniature Proustian intensity, it is a novel that lives on for a very long time in the mind. Indeed, in the mind’s eye too, for it has moments of almost cinematic clarity that burn all the brighter for the novel’s overall quietness and restraint.

This morning, when I finished the novel, I read Penelope Fitzgerald’s introduction. I don’t have the current Penguin edition so I had to hunt out her collected reviews and non-fiction, A House of Air, which includes the piece on Carr. I was delighted to find that it opens with Fitzgerald explaining that she first came across Carr in an anecdote in Michael Holroyd’s Unreceived Opinions, in which Holroyd recounts winning a pound of steak and a JL Carr novel in a competition offered by a Kettering butcher. It seems that Carr, a friend of the butcher, sometimes paid his bill with remaindered copies of his novels. The butcher turned these to promotional use and staged the occasional competition – almost as plausibly improbable as something from a JL Carr novel.

The other thing that pleased me is that Fitzgerald says that in the intensity of its depiction of rural atmosphere A Month in the Country reminded her of Solzhenitsyn’s short story, Matryona’s House. Perhaps only Fitzgerald would make such a connection. So then I had to hunt out my copy of Solzhenitsyn’s Stories & Prose Poems, which includes that story. I’ll read it tonight.

 

Alun Severn

November 2019