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A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics)

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It is summer, 1920, and, as Tom Birkin watches, Moon has been digging into the North Yorkshire turf of Oxgodby for several hours, taking his time. No book evokes so well as this the long vistas of that high ridge of North Yorkshire between Thirsk and Sutton Bank. With the peaceful and idyllic countryside setting providing a backdrop as he slowly finds solace and meaning amidst the ruins of his past. However, I found it rather slight overall, like a pretty piece of pastoral music, pleasant but not soul-stirring. Carr was passionately committed to the preservation of old churches, as Byron Rogers recounts in The Last Englishman: The Life of J.

A Month in the Country is Birkin’s story, but no character is given short shrift — not the 14-year-old Emily Clough, dying of consumption; not Rev. Slim as it is, this is a tender and elegant novel that seemingly effortlessly weaves several strands together.Next time you have an afternoon or, better yet, a day that stretches before you tempting you to read a book in one sitting, pick up “ A Month in The Country” by J. Of course, as my fellow readers will understand, many other books were read before I finally plucked this slim volume down from the shelf. The wonderful Backlisted team also covered the book on one of their podcasts, which you can find here. Shortly before his death, Dave Sheasby completed a radio adaptation of the book, which was first broadcast on the BBC Radio 4 Saturday Play in November 2010 and repeated in May 2012.

Alice makes friends with Birkin, often coming to watch him at work, and he (lonely, damaged man) falls in love with her; but when the moment comes in which he might do something about that attraction he doesn’t take the chance. The film was the recipient of two awards: Pat O'Connor won the Silver Rosa Camuna at the Bergamo Film Meeting in 1987 [20] and Howard Blake was awarded the Anthony Asquith Award for Musical Excellence by the British Film Institute in 1988.But last week, on a balmy summer’s afternoon as the bees hummed around the lavender in the garden, I finally read it in one glorious gulp. You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly. Birkin gradually realizes he is dealing with a masterpiece: ‘A tremendous waterfall of colour, 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 full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. It's 1920 and veteran Tom Birkin finds refuge in a quiet village where he spends his time uncovering a medieval wall-painting.I don’t want to reveal much more about what happens in the novel, other than to give a flavour of some of the keynotes. However, despite this he remains grateful for this perfectly captured moment and hopeful for his future. And what Birkin’s left with — some half century later when he is writing this remembrance — is a memory of peace, wonder, something deeply elemental, something deeply beautiful in the art he finds and the place he lived, a still joy and, yes, regret.

A carved shaft branched gracefully into whorls of stone raised upon a convex lid, at its head a hand holding a sacramental cup, a wafer poised at its rim. The simplicity of the men's needs while they worked at their separate projects, paid for by the will of an observant and thinking woman with the `face of a field marshal'. Like the wall-painting, the pleasures of the story are revealed steadily and slowly, and by the end you can only stand back and admire. 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.I saw the film when it came out in 1987, suffering from early symptoms of flu, so it was a hallucinatory experience. It’s a love story of great poignancy about a missed chance, and it’s a memory of an irrecoverable past, of “blue remembered hills” that can’t be found again. It describes the fragility, longing and loss so incredibly well and the last page is one of the best endings to a novel, similar in some ways to the end of 'Gatsby'. The plot concerns Tom Birkin, a World War I veteran employed to uncover a mural in a village church that was thought to exist under coats of whitewash.

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