The marvelous thing was coming into this haven of calm water and, for a season, not having to worry my head with anything but uncovering their wall-painting for them. He is seeking something from his month in the country, but not even he knows exactly what that is. The year is 1920, and Birkin is a World War I survivor, who has come home to a wayward wife, a life in splinters, and a nasty case of shell-shock. Carr’s understated, calm, peaceful novella about Tom Birkin, an art restorer, who has been hired for a summer job of restoring a five-hundred year old mural on a church wall in Oxgodby. Birkin tenderly reflects how his younger self had no idea what lay ahead as the beautiful, peaceful summer in Oxgodby looks to its first frost. Moon leaves for a Middle East archeological project. His project complete, Birkin leaves Oxgody to return to an uncertain marriage. The narrator briefly explores what might have been if. The story closes with a balance of the detachment told from a viewpoint 50 years later mixed with nostalgia for an era lost. When Moon, who is really looking for Medieval artifacts, using the contract to uncover the remains as cover, digs up the sarcophagus, he – with Birkin assisting - finds that the skeletal remains tells their own unexpected story giving even further depth to this novella which stands as its own masterpiece. Writing gets no better than this.īirkin eventually uncovers the masterpiece. One passage describes, in retrospection, the beauty of life in the era of the horse. A sad secret is revealed in this chance meeting.Ĭarr gives us succinct, beautiful descriptions of the Yorkshire country. At a chance meeting in town with another war veteran, Birkin finds out that Moon had received the Military Cross. Slowly, he falls in love with the minister’s wife, Alice Keach. As Birkin meticulously removes, patch by patch, the wash from the church painting, he realizes he has a once-in-a lifetime masterpiece before him. The twitch and stutter begin to fade as the summer moves its slow pace forward. He has brief conversations with the minister’s wife. He has dinner every Sunday with a village family. Moon and Birkin become friends.Īs Birkin settles into the rhythms of Oxgodby, he begins to heal. Officially, Moon is digging for a long dead relative of one of the village’s well-to-do patrons.

In the grass field below the belfry tower where Birkin sleeps, Charlie Moon, also a veteran of the war, works another project with his tent set up in the middle of the grass field. He has been contracted to restore a church wall painting that has been white-washed over. Tom Birkin, still suffering the effects from his experience of the first world war, as the twitch on the left side of his face and stutter attest, has arrived in the Yorkshire village of, Oxgodby.

A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr