By J.L. Carr (1912-94), this was published in 1980, and was short-listed for that year's Booker Prize.

I'd not heard of either author or title, and then suddenly, this little book (just 111 pages in my Internet Archive version), was everywhere. It popped up on Five Books under the rubric "short novels"; it came up as a recommendation here; it was flagged by Simon Haisell, who described it as "a short, precise and almost perfect book"...

And it's totally that. We meet Tom Birkin just as he's arriving by train in the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby, where he's contracted to uncover an old mural in the church. It's 1920. Birkin has had a bad time during World War I; his nerves are still not back to normal; he has a stammer and a facial twitch as a result. Plus, his wife has left him. He's adrift, and turned in on himself.

But, bit by bit, he is healed. By the steady, painstaking work, which eventually discloses a 14th-century masterpiece depicting the Last Judgement. By the beauty of the countryside. By the simple life he leads. By the undemonstrative but warm-hearted hospitality of the villagers, especially the Ellerbeck family, who are great stalwarts of the chapel. And by his friendship with another veteran, Charles Moon (contracted, in his turn, to find the grave of someone who'd been excommunicated many centuries ago).

Even healing is bittersweet, however. Birkin falls in love with Alice Keach, the vicar's wife (and she, almost certainly, with him). But those were different days, "another world", as he puts it. Opportunities that could have been taken by more enterprising lovers were left to become might-have-beens. Eventually, Birkin's wife announces she wants him to come back, and he agrees to do that, although he knows there will be more marital troubles in store.



And memory is bittersweet, too. That summer -- that golden, glorious summer -- lives on in the memory of the narrator as part paradise and part question-mark.

This nostalgia, like everything else in the novel, is superbly understated. We know from page 18 that we're looking back a long way: "God, when I think back all those years! And it's gone. All the excitement and pride of that first job, Oxgodby, Kathy Ellerbeck, Alice Keach, Moon, that season of calm weather -- gone as though they'd never been." As we near the end of the book, and his inevitable departure, this is the note that sounds most insistently: "Ah those days... for many years afterwards their happiness haunted me. Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of summer. Day after day of warm weather, voices calling as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness and, at day-break, the murmur of corn and the warm smell of fields ripe for harvest. And being young. If I'd stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvellous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies."

It's Moon who tells it like it is: "You can't make it last for ever... I mean here, Oxgodby, the friends you've made, this marvellous summer, the splendid job you've done. I mean the lot. You can only have this piece of cake once; you can't keep on munching away at it. Sad, but there it is! You'll find that, once you've dragged yourself round the corner, there'll be another view; it may even be a better one."

Was it a better one? It's hard to know, given the elegaic tone the narrator adopts, and the jewel-like clarity with which this peerless summer stands out in his memory, and the way he wraps things up as he leaves the village: "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. But this was something I knew nothing of as I lifted the loop [of twine] and set off across the meadow."

This, then, is what Carr is supremely good at. He doesn't make a big, histrionic deal of things, and yet the pages vibrate with restrained emotion. He puts his finger on that mixture of regret, wonder, gratitude, and speculation that we -- finite human beings, able only to look into the past and never into the future -- experience whenever we cast our minds back to other times.


Pickering, another Yorkshire village, 2017

Beyond the personal, it is also clear that we're poised on the edge of an era. Rev Keach, a prickly man whom we have not cared for, gains our sympathy just a little when he confesses he is starting to doubt his relevance: "You too have no need of me," he tells Birkin. "You have come back from a place where you have seen things beyond belief, things which you cannot talk of yet can't forget, but things which are at the heart of religion. Even so, when I have approached you during your stay here, you have agreed that it is very pleasant for this time of year... And you have hoped that I shall go away."

Also on the exit ramp are horses, "those great magical creatures soon to disappear from highways and turning furrow. Did I know it even then? I suppose not, nor anyone else of Oxgodby. From childhood, they had always known the sound of hooves fitfully beating stable floors in the night hours and the bitter smell of burning horn at the smithy. How could they foresee that, in a few brief years, their fellow sharers of field and road would be gone for ever?"

Teetering on the brink, too, are the very distinctive local accents: "Nowadays, I suppose comprehensive schools and the BBC have flattened that splendid twang with their dread stamp." Even the food kind Mrs Ellerbeck sends over for Birkin and Moon -- rabbit pie, currant teacakes, curd tarts -- represents (in Moon's words) "disposable archaeology".

Nor does Carr want to give the impression that everything was wonderful back then. A child dies of consumption; Moon's homosexuality meant he was forced to endure the traumas of a military prison, despite his acknowledged courage in battle; life was by necessity simple, and lived at home: "Only the well-to-do in those parts went far afield and even a week at Scarborough was remarkable."

But all these points are very lightly sketched. Carr absolutely doesn't beat us over the head with things. Even Birkin's war experience is given to us with a touch here, a dab there. Which, of course, doesn't prevent its being powerfully clear that what he encountered had burned its way into his psyche probably for ever. He expresses little, but having met a family whose son was killed, he yells into the cornfields on his way home: "Oh you bastards! You awful bloody bastards! You didn't need to have started it. And you could have stopped it before you did. God? Ha! There is no God."



The story of the mural provides a counterpoint to the tale of Birkin. Clearly the product of a talented artist, the fresco and all it portrays (not to mention the chapel and grave that Moon unearths) had been covered up by the sands of time, as though they never were. Yet patient hands can bring them back to life. The past can't live again, but a glimmer of it might. Birkin says of the mural: "Bringing back that long-dead man's apocalyptic picture into daylight obsessed me... Even when I wasn't on the job I found myself dwelling on that immense spread of colour. Particularly during those first two or three weeks when only Moon interrupted me. But then, inevitably, as happens to most of us, first through Sunday umpiring, later Sunday chapel, 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 finds it helps his restoration work if he tries to get into the heads of the people in his fresco: "They weren't us in fancy dress, mouths full of thees and thous, quoths, prithees and zounds. They had no more than a few entertaining distractions to take their minds off death and birth, sleep and work and their prayers to the almighty father and his stricken son when things got too awful. So, in my job, it helps if you can smell candles, guttering in draughts, petitioning release for souls in purgatory, if you can see their smoke trailing among images, threading nave arcades, settling on corbels and bosses, blackening stone too high for the cleaning women to get at."

Birkin's era, the month he sets in aspic for us, is now almost as remote. But Carr brings to life the gossamer and the dew, the thrushes and the blackbirds, the hollyhocks and the butterflies, the cricket pitch and the cavernous vicarage.

And we can wonder... From various clues and a sudden flash of inspiration, Birkin deduces that the creator of the masterpiece he's bringing back to life lost his life in a fall from the platform from which he painted. And having established that the excommunicated man (found buried with a crescent) had been guilty of apostasy -- "So that was why they wouldn't let him into the church. He was a Muslim. Caught in some expedition and then became a convert to save his skin!" -- Moon then intuits that HE is the falling man in Birkin's mural.

This figure had always particularly intrigued Birkin. He's part of the brigade who are going to hell, but he's painted very brilliantly: "It was the most extraordinary detail of medieval painting that I had ever seen, anticipating the Breughels by a hundred years. What, in this single detail, had pushed him this immense stride beyond his time?" This figure -- covered over years before the rest -- was also very distinctive, leading Birkin to wonder: "Why plunging into hell, was he HIMSELF? Had the painter known him? Was it a portrait recognizable to kinsmen, who had hidden him from public view almost before the paint was dry?" There's nothing in the text to make my query explicit: But had the painter loved him, we wonder? Making this his one last declaration -- that Moon, with his own sad story, was permitted to fathom?

We don't know. Because it's the past, and it's lost, and all we can recreate are glimmers. Cool, fire-fly glimmers where once was a glowing cauldron of life.

Be that as it may, this whole restoration task, as Rohan Maitzen points out, is full of meaning: "[It] is at once literal -- described with rich technical detail, inviting us to marvel at the human capacity for creation and the way art touches and enlivens us across time and difference -- and metaphorical, with the painter’s dedication to his task, in the full expectation that it will not last, that it will be lost to obscurity, standing in for our own commitment to our lives, which also will not last, which will also be obscured by the relentless passage of time. Faced with that prospect, we can either throw ourselves into it, as the artist does, giving it the very best we have, or retreat, succumb, despair. But spelling it out like this spoils it a bit, just as Tom knows that if he tries too hard to perfect the details of the uncovered painting he risks ruining it."

All in all, a beautiful book. A little masterpiece.



***

According to Michael Prodger, James Joseph Lloyd Carr, aka Jim, "mined his own life for his books". The elements that turn up in A Month in the Country are his North Yorkshire birthplace, and his father's position as stationmaster and Wesleyan lay preacher (mirroring Mr Ellerbeck's). Carr went to school in a village called Osgodby, and "the church that contains the wall painting is based on one in Northamptonshire: Carr was secretary to the Northamptonshire Historic Churches Trust". In fact, he converted to Anglicanism because he loved churches...

He was for many years a teacher. While headmaster of a primary school in Kettering, Northamptonshire, "he stated his conviction that 'Juvenile lawlessness is caused by lack of self-esteem and lack of self-esteem by lack of success and lack of success by an inability to read.' Consequently, he pledged: 'No child shall leave here at 11 a non-reader'. Apparently, only a single child under his tenure ever did."

What an accolade.