A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics)

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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 marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.” Tom’s friendship with Charles Moon (another veteran hired to uncover a lost grave on the premises), was ‘guy-bonding-enduring’. That night, for the first time during many months, I slept like the dead and, next morning, awoke very early.' To feel pain means to be alive and the resolution to pursue happiness is a courageous vow that Thomas is willing to take. But actually after the initial snottiness welcome from Vicar Keach …. who was not terribly enthusiastic about hiring Tom to restore a medieval wall mural, thinking he wasn’t a suitable person for the job….or happy that Tom would be living in the church’s bell-loft —

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. 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. The rain had ceased and dew glittered on the graveyard grass, gossamer drifted down air-currents… And as it lightened, a vast and magnificent landscape unfolded.”It's not an accident that Mr. Carr references both Hardy and Housman, he was a fan and a teacher of both. Me, too. The local people come to know him as “that chap from down south,” but they nevertheless take a liking to him. Besides, he isn’t the only stranger in the village. There is the enigmatic James Moon, an ‘archaeologist’ and fellow veteran seeking a lost 14th century grave; the dour vicar who consigns Birkin to sleep in the belfry; and his attractive young wife, Alice Keach, who reminds Tom of Botticelli’s Primavera. And horror is dark all along. Birkin survived Passchendaele, but was left with a stammer (not reflected in dialogue), intermittent facial palsy on one side, and no wife.

The garden. Seats to Right and to Left under trees; in the foreground raspberry bushes. KATYA and MATVEY come in on 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. Tom has just returned to England after a horrific experience as a soldier in WWI. He is a broken man; a man with a facial tic caused by the trauma of war. He is returning from hell, probably suffering from what now would be called PTSD. Perhaps a commission to restore a medieval mural in a country church will help him return to civilian life and give him direction. And I'm very annoyed about it. After everything we went through we deserved to have it end in some shared moment of sexiness, instead of petering out the way it did. You worry a lot about situations like that when you're in them, and then later you realize that you were worrying about exactly the wrong aspects of them.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. Or is it a condition we only perceive in retrospection remembering the past through the rose-tinted glasses of memory?

That 1920 summer in the village of Oxgodby is remembered many decades later by Tom as a season of uncharacteristic warmth and brightness, more luminous than ever because of the contrast with the Hell he has experienced before it, a moment of 'splendor in the grass' that would last him a lifetime. The story of the little church in Oxgodby is his gift to us, the way he wants to be remembered as a man and an artist. There is so much about this short novel that defines a perfect read for me . It’s a quiet story where seemingly nothing happens, but yet there is so much that happens in ordinary moments of life , which for me make them extraordinary. I always enjoy these intimate, introspective stories and I felt for Tom Birkin right away . The writing is lovely. What more could I ask for? 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!

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There was even a moment when “an extraordinary thing happened” and I briefly wondered if it might turn into a ghost story: