A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics)
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A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics)
- Brand: Unbranded
Description
It reminded me, at a time when life sometimes gets in the way of my reading, that this book is why I love to read . I may have wished for this story of a young man’s healing after the horrors of World War I and Passchendaele to go on for another hundred pages or more, but I’ve come to terms with the fact J. With a screenplay by Simon Gray, the novel was made into a 1987 film, directed by Pat O'Connor and starring Colin Firth, Kenneth Branagh, Natasha Richardson and Patrick Malahide. Instead the narrator is a bantering almost Jack-the laddish character who refers to his backside as his bum and imagines the vicar and his wife having sex.
When he realises the full wonder of what he’s revealing, Birkin slows down, like a reader who doesn’t want to finish a brilliant book. His nerves are shot from his experiences in the war, and he views a month in the country as therapeutic. I look again, and watch myself, a brand new mother, rocking my baby during one of our midnight meetings, in the stillness, the newborn puzzle piece nested against my breast. Together in the closing days of summer, the two friends unearth the ancient coffin of Hebron’s ancestor. Only then does Birkin allow himself to think about his war experience at the brutal and chaotic siege of Passchendaele in Belgium, in which more than a half million soldiers died.Carr died in 1994 and his funeral service in the Kettering parish church was, in the words of Byron Rogers, 'like the passing of a spymaster. One summer, just after the Great War, Tom Birkin, a demobbed soldier, arrives in the village of Oxgodby. Be they happy, sad, public, private, we all have them; very very few of us talk much about them; and almost no one makes art from them.
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. Birkin survived Passchendaele, but was left with a stammer (not reflected in dialogue), intermittent facial palsy on one side, and no wife. The jacket illustration shows Tintagel Parish Church in Cornwall, but the story is set in Yorkshire. Perhaps It is this simplicity and normality that affects Birken the most profoundly, for his life has been shredded by the war. As I read on, my first impressions took definite shape and I was able to admire the craft with which the story unfolded.
On his first morning in Oxgodby, Birkin told himself, "I was going to be happy, live simply…" Of his first real job, he declared, "I willed it to be something good, really splendid, truly astonishing. The setting was idyllic, rolling hills, sheep, a nice little church with a hidden painting waiting to be revealed by our main character.
Although, no matter what age, we always have some fond memory of a time in our early childhood or our young adulthood that will give us pause. Employed to recover a concealed medieval painting on the wall of the local church, Thomas believes that a change of scenery will soothe the scars the bloodbath of war and a shattered marriage have imprinted on him. The narrator, Tom Birkin, reflects on a summer spent in the small Yorkshire village of Oxgodby in 1920.Moon, commissioned to find a grave site on the church grounds becomes a friend , sharing a past in the war.
There was an atmospheric beauty to the writing and humor in Birkin's observations of what was to be his home for a month in the country. 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") . I have noticed before, that a lot of my favorite novels do not need a thousand pages, or world shattering conflicts to get to the point.Those long warm days went on in majestic succession… The Vale was heavy with leaves, motionless in the early morning, black caves of shadow in the midday heat, blurring the sound of trains hammering north and south. 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. Carr said he wanted the effect to be something like Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree in relation to the local characters. At the end of his year in the USA Carr continued his journey westward and found himself travelling through the Middle East and the Mediterranean as the Second World War loomed.
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
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