A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics)

Product Information

The characters are so well drawn, the atmosphere is stunning — almost dreamlike at times — and the writing sublime.

There is Moon, an archaeologist and fellow veteran of the war, a point that gives him some understanding of Birkin’s mental condition; Alice Keach, the vicar’s beautiful young wife who seems somewhat out of place beside her husband at the vicarage; and the Ellerbecks, a kindly local family who befriend Birkin, providing him with homemade food to supplement his meagre supplies. Carr, an obstinate man, didn’t care that it was already Turgenev’s title – besides, the novella has a Turgenevian mood to it. Now an old man, Birkin looks back on the idyllic summer of 1920, remembering a vanished place of blissful calm, untouched by change, a precious moment he has carried with him through the disappointments of the years. First printing: royal octavo; hardcover, quarter-bound in cloth with illustrated boards and gilt spine titles; 121pp. Birkin is fairly sure that, while he was away at war, Vinny had slept with other men too; now he knows for sure that she is serially unfaithful.The two central characters, Tom Birkin and Charles Moon, had been soldiers in the trenches of the Western Front. The grave outside the churchyard wall was suggested by Tintagel, where a number of early graves were encountered at Trecarne Lands and excavated. 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. Over forty years later, after his novel The Harpole Report was a critical and popular success, he was invited to give a talk at Goldsmiths'. Birkin gets himself quite deeply involved in the local community, in particular making friends with the Ellerbeck family, stalwarts of local Methodism.

The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. It is written from Birkin’s perspective, looking back as an old man to a golden summer of his youth, an interlude between the horrors of war and the resumption of his real life; a brief period of suspended time given to him to heal his mind and perhaps his soul. To tell you the truth, I’m rather reluctant to watch it, especially as certain impressions of the story are already fixed in my mind. This limited edition uses the revised version of the text that Carr himself would publish the following year at his Quince Tree Press. They put on an excellent season of films based on books and, where possible, asked people associated with it to attend for some questions afterwards.

Set in rural Yorkshire during the summer of 1920, the film follows a destitute World War I veteran employed to carry out restoration work on a Medieval mural discovered in a rural church while coming to terms with the after-effects of the war. I explained that I loved the film and I thought the choral/orchestral music worked brilliantly but it was very big and rich and I felt a score would have to emerge from it and be very pure and expressive and quite small — and that I could only hear this in my head as done by strings only. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. It’s actually a second reading for me – I first read it a couple of years ago but couldn’t quite find the right words for it at the time.

In contrast to the book, which is narrated as a recollection by Birkin as an old man, the film is set entirely in the 1920s, except for a brief moment towards the end. I especially loved the descriptions of the houses and gardens Birkin was invited into, the huge, nearly empty rectory and the homes of the Ellerbecks, poor Emily's family, Lucy Sykes. 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.This pleasant vision is countered by his rawer and more acute account of the deep mark left on a man when a chance of happiness is glimpsed and missed and left to settle in the memory. When you can change husbands as easily as changing a lightbulb, how do you know whether the one you have now is the good-enough one, or the wrong one, or the best one? Mr Ellerbeck preaches at the Wesleyan chapel, and out of a sense of gratitude for their hospitality, Birkin becomes involved in the chapel community although he is a non-believer, perhaps because of the scenes of horror he witnessed in the war.