I would recommend "A Month in the Country" to anyone who has experienced depression, disillusion, loss, pain, uncertainty. It doesn't really matter if you believed in the same god as Mr. Carr (the son of a famous preacher), or in Mr. Freud or in any other modern '-ism' . We are all human, and we have the same needs to give our lives a sense of purpose, a reason to keep trying day after day, no matter how many times we fail. What we are experiencing now, stress in all its fanciful disguises and new medical definitions, is something every generation has gone through since time immemorial. Mr. Carr argues that the past, if you look at its art carefully, can give us precious tools to deal with pain and loneliness and despair. Birkin’s artistic sensitivity and training make him an excellent describer of furniture, machines, architecture, and even people and the broader context of ancient lives. Never has such a short novel impacted me so profoundly, dramatically, making me reflect on a few golden days in my past, my own in which I can close my eyes and smell the dust, taste the feint salt on her upper lip, hear the voices, see faces that moments ago would have been obscured by the fog of time, feel the sun on my face, warming me in the illusion that life will surely last forever: "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, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass." Tom tells us, but the memories sufficed. Much like Lucy Gault in William Trevor's novel, Tom realized that neither good times nor bad times last forever. Happiness is fleeting, but the contentment one once felt can be enough.

The garden. Seats to Right and to Left under trees; in the foreground raspberry bushes. KATYA and MATVEY come in on Birkin is not the only outsider. There’s the grumpy vicar, Keach (who resents the disruption caused by the restoration), his very young and beautiful wife, Alice, and finally, Charles Moon. All four are 30 or younger, though Keach in particular seems older.A Month in the Country is the fifth novel by J. L. Carr, first published in 1980 and nominated for the Booker Prize. The book won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1980. As I say, Carr’s novel is Birkin’s story, but his finely detailed, finely felt treatment of the other characters as well is a measure of the book’s delicacy, humanity and subtlety. “A casualty anymore”

Here I was, face to face with a nameless painter reaching from the dark to show me what he could do, saying to me as clear as any words, 'If any part of me survives from time's corruption, let it be this. For this was the sort of man I was.' Tom Birken is summoned to the countryside from the teaming streets of London to practice his craft revealing a Medieval painting that was originally painted 500 years previously, and had been whitewashed over about a hundred years later. It is a picture of doom predating the fantastical, terrifying visions of Bruegel by at least a hundred years. He is courteous, but also lonely. Just about everyone he meets recognizes this and recognizes his need to keep life at arm’s length. So, the people around him engage in a subtle dance with Birkin to draw him gently and caringly into their lives and draw him out of himself a bit. The masked handprint left by an anonymous individual on a wall may invite from its hidden place for its uncovering and thereby regenerate another, unrelated, individual. A mouth of Hell depicted, beautifully, may summon up the will to live after walking through a war of hell.I am a seasonal reader, often craving books with sizzling settings in the summer months and snowy locales in the winter. Last week I saw a review for J. L. Carr's Man Booker winning A Month in the Country and was intrigued enough by the title to read it for myself. Using stunning prose combined with well developed characters, Carr's novella is perfect for a leisurely summer morning. This story brought out a mixture of feelings for me …. I was expecting to read about a guy who was gloomy and very lonely —

All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen. He meets a man named Moon who is camping in a tent in the cemetery and has been commissioned to find the bones of an ancestor for their patron. As time goes on, and both men realize how simply wonderful this moment in time has been for them, they start to linger in their work, making it last, not wanting it to end. There is a story about Moon that you will have to read the book to discover. At the end of the War he married Sally (Hilda Gladys Sexton) and returned to teaching. He was appointed headmaster of Highfields Primary School in Kettering, Northamptonshire, a post he filled from 1952 to 1967 in a typically idiosyncratic way which earned the devotion of staff and pupils alike. He returned to Huron, South Dakota, in 1957 to teach again on an exchange visit, when he wrote and published himself a social history of The Old Timers of Beadle County. Birkin's past was not delved into at any great length but just enough to shed light on his present quest for change. The story focused on the moments of discovery Birkin made that summer through the veil of sadness. He was "surprised by joy" but not in a religious sense. It was a restorative encounter conferred both by the calm haven found in nature and a wholly absorbing vocation.That’s the phrase the war veteran thinks of when he arrives in the small, poor Yorkshire village that is “starveling country”! That night, for the first time during many months, I slept like the dead and, next morning, awoke very early.' There is a full cast of local characters; the local vicar and his beautiful wife and the rival Wesleyan Methodists. Carr, being brought up in the Wesleyan tradition captures the chapel rituals and attendees very well. Carr said he wanted the effect to be something like Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree in relation to the local characters.

Tom Birkin is a young man from the London area who has served an apprenticeship in the craft (and art) of restoring wall paintings in old churches. He has come to Yorkshire (the “North Riding”, roughly the third of Yorkshire north of York) to the small town of Oxgodby, on his first solo commission, financed via the will of a parishioner: to remove centuries of grime and whitewash from the wall high in the arch of the church. It is believed that a wall-painting lies there, and if so he is to restore it. The sound of these forging from flower to flower….cloudless skies….butterflies….blue jays….wood-pigeons…wild plants….poppies….bilberry scrubs…and those long summer days of warm weather…..brought the feelings of youth and love. Perhaps It is this simplicity and normality that affects Birken the most profoundly, for his life has been shredded by the war. There is also the mystery of the painting, which Birkin uncovers, and the grave that Moon seeks, to add an extra touch of interest. What happens in this story is just life, just living. There is nothing catastrophic, nothing exciting or dazzling, but in the midst of all this everyday life, there is the haunting sense of death in the effects the war has left on Birkin and his new friend, Moon; the ghost of the painter who left his soul imprinted on the church wall; and the lingering of “what if” that is suggested by the presence of the lovely Mrs. Keach, the vicar’s wife. This place is perhaps as unchanged as Birken and Moon are altered. How did Miss Hebron first know there was a mural there (she revealed and then covered a little of it herself)? She was wealthy, so why pay for restoration only after her death? Why did she care about why her forebear was not buried in the churchyard, and where he was laid to rest? How and why did the village acquire and lose wealth? But others are answered - surprisingly, but satisfactorily: who the falling man was, why he was covered up almost as soon as the mural was finished, and why the grave Moon finds is not on consecrated ground. A perfect balance.Sometimes peace of mind and tranquility take a lifetime to achieve. For Tom Birkin that serenity only took one summer month, one month in the idyllic English village of Oxgodby. The memories of that summer month, those quiet moments surrounded by nature and art, were enough to renew Birkin forever. Like Fitzgerald, I believe that A Month in the Country is a nostalgia for something we never had and agree when she suggests the tone “isn’t one of straightforward remembering,” but more about Birkin’s state of mind when he thinks of the people who will “visit Oxgodby church in its meadows and regret that they missed seeing the master painter himself” – the nameless creator of the outstanding artistry concealed beneath centuries of grime. When he realises the full wonder of what he’s revealing, Birkin slows down, like a reader who doesn’t want to finish a brilliant book. He becomes