A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics)

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A Month in the Country Blu-ray review". highdefdigest.com. Archived from the original on 18 September 2016 . Retrieved 17 September 2016. That description reminded me of some of the grisly medieval Romanesque religious art in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, including these I photographed a few years ago:

A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr | Goodreads

What is the elixir for experiencing the atrocities of war? Happy days in Oxgodby can never be relived,He has no idea what is behind the whitewash, but it isn't long before he knows he is working on a masterpiece. "So, each day, I released a few more inches of a seething cascade of bones, joints and worm-riddled vitals frothing over the fiery weir. It was breathtaking. A tremendous waterfall of color, the blues of the apex falling, then seething into a turbulence of red; like all truly great works of art, hammering you with its whole before beguiling you with its parts." The genius of this short novel, under 50,000 words, is that it doesn't tart up the glory of the images with overwrought settings. Keep it simple, make it well, and quality will out. It is a joy to find laughs and savors in the same book. It is a rare joy to find them polished to a deep flash, set at just the right moment, and not vulgarly paraded for our approval but rather simply put in their proper place and left for us to notice as we will.

J.L. Carr (Author of A Month in the Country) - Goodreads

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.But the edges are brighter for it. Birkin's idyll in the country is brought into relief by what Birkin has gone through in the past and the disappointments that, it is implied, await him. Carr's great art is to make it clear that joy is inseparable from the pain and oblivion which unmake it.

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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. Don't miss this one, a more than pleasant diversion for a Sunday afternoon. You will be right there in Oxgodby falling in love, gnashing your teeth over the absurdity of it all,enjoying the peacefulness of knowing, really knowing you are happy, and you too might discover the importance of lingering over a moment, a glorious moment when life seems to be working for you and not against you. If you are like me you might even find yourself yelling "for godsakes take her in your arms and kiss her." Highly Recommended!a b "Old way of being church". Church Times. No.7546. 26 October 2007. p.20. ISSN 0009-658X . Retrieved 7 June 2014.

Penelope Fitzgerald on A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr Penelope Fitzgerald on A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

But then, inevitably, as happens to most of us, first through Saturday 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." Even before I read the first line of the novel, I was enchanted with his chosen epigraphs. The second one is the famous A E Housman line that Roger Zelazny used to describe a post-apocalyptic world ("For a Breath I Tarry") . Tom Birkin, the narrator of the story, is himself the survivor of an apocalypse: the slaughter of the First World War in the trenches of France. Tom has returned to England with both visible and invisible scars. He takes a summer job in a small village in Yorkshire. As a highly skilled restaurateur hired to uncover an ancient mural in the local church, Tom hopes that by immersing himself in the work that he loves, he can heal the wounds left by the war and by a failed marriage. J.L. Carr’s masterstroke is to tinge the mural of Thomas’ chronicle with a gossamer of vivid observations that sparkle the old flame of hope, which glows brighter than ever when Alice Keach, the Minister’s wife, pierces through Thomas’ numbness with her curious vitality. It starts like a penny dreadful, with the arrival - by train - of the young Tom Birkin in Oxgodby (a suggestive name left open to interpretation), an unsightly northern English village. He has to uncover a medieval fresco in a church and restore it. We are 1920, and Tom turns out to be another traumatized victim from the trenches in the First World War, wounded at Passchendaele. We then become acquainted with the paradisical life in the village, in full summer, and the story takes on the allure of a rural idyll. But with each subsequent conversation and each scene, new angles emerge, up to and including a very classic just-not-romance. Humor and melancholy alternate, until together with Tom we leave Oxgodby with a heavy heart. The first breath of autumn was in the air, a prodigal feeling, a feeling of wanting, taking, and keeping before it’s too late.”Two demons with delicately furred legs clutched him, one snapping his right wrist whilst his mate split him with shears.” There is forbidden love of at least two kinds (“coddling it up in myself”), missed opportunities, and a casual revelation by a third party that forever affects a friendship. I’m not quite sure what message Carr intended with the last of those. Birkin learns that Moon was dishonourably discharged for homosexuality. He says he doesn’t mind, but “from that time on, things were never quite the same between us”. Pat O’Connor’s unjustly neglected 1987 film is a fine example of British pastoral cinema, boasting two engaging early film roles from future greats Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh. A captivating adaptation of J L Carr’s much-loved novel, A Month in the Country tells the story of a traumatised First World War veteran Tom Birkin (compellingly portrayed by Colin Firth) who, in the summer of 1920, travels to the beautiful Yorkshire village of Oxgodby to uncover a medieval wall painting in the local church. A haunting novel about art and its power to heal, J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. In J. L. Carr’s deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside of high summer, and laboring each day to uncover an anonymous painte In J. L. Carr’s deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside of high summer, and laboring each day to uncover an anonymous painter’s depiction of the apocalypse, Birkin finds that he himself has been restored to a new, and hopeful, attachment to life. But summer ends, and with the work done, Birkin must leave. Now, long after, as he reflects on the passage of time and the power of art, he finds in his memories some consolation for all that has been lost. [129]…more A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr – eBook Details