A Month in the Country: Is This the Greatest Novella Ever Written?

The Book Club

In this episode of The Book Club, hosts Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett explore J.L. Carr's acclaimed novella 'A Month in the Country,'

Key takeaways

• The novella captures the psychological aftermath of WWI through subtle, understated narration rather than explicit depictions of violence.
• Carr's Yorkshire upbringing deeply informs the novel's pastoral setting and melancholic tone.

Main topics

• Post-WWI trauma and shell shock
• Nostalgia and memory in literature

Notable quotes

"Ah, those days, for many years afterwards, their happiness haunted me."

Conclusion

The episode concludes with both hosts expressing deep admiration for 'A Month in the Country'—a slender

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This episode is brought to you by Klarna. Tabby, Speaker 2 (0:04) as I Speaker 3 (0:04) was saying to you the other day, I Speaker 2 (0:06) don't get to do as much daydreaming as I used to. I used to go into these great reveries when I'd come up with my best ideas. I don't have a chance anymore Speaker 3 (0:12) because I spend so much time doing my life admin. It's the same for you, isn't it? Speaker 1 (0:17) You know, I used to spend a lot of time rewriting my favourite books so that I would get the endings that I'd always hoped for. Speaker 3 (0:24) But you know how you can get that time back, Tabby? I've started using... Klana to handle my real world money admin. And that gives me the headspace for the more important things like thinking about books. Because Speaker 1 (0:34) their app lets you view all your finances in one place. You can set budgets, stay on top of reminders and manage your payments. So you don't have to worry about any plot holes. Speaker 3 (0:46) And you know the other thing about the app, when you shop through the app, you unlock exclusive deals and you can get cash back on things that you are going to buy anyway. Speaker 1 (0:55) Download the Klarna app so you can stay on top of your money and think about, well, anything else. Klarna balance account required to receive cash back points. Limitations, terms and conditions apply. I went across to Moon's tent and we sat on the grass in the evening sunshine. Speaker 2 (1:21) Well? Speaker 1 (1:22) He asked. I've been talking over hell with Mrs. Keech. Do you think about it often? I said. He pursed his lips, wrinkled his nose and studied the back of his hand. Then, and this was unusual, he looked directly at me. Speaker 3 (1:38) Often. Particularly at night. That's the bad time. Your window's open, you must have heard me. Speaker 1 (1:44) He knew there'd be neither perfunctory sympathy nor questions. Speaker 3 (1:48) But I tell myself it will be better as time passes and it sinks further back. But now we're different. We know. We're men apart. Maybe wives know. Yes, of course they must. And people do understand. I met a chap who went back to teaching. Like you, he'd been a signaller out in the middle, out on his own, with only a wire trailing back to his battery. He told me that for the first four weeks, if a pupil dropped a desk lid, he'd throw himself on the floor. At first, they used to snigger. Then they didn't laugh anymore, only stared, horrified or in pity. Finally, they just pretended not to notice. Me? In the middle of it, I used to think, well, we're in the shadows now, but they'll have to blow the whistle someday, and then all at once it'll be different. We'll go from this to that. But of course it couldn't be like that, could it? It has to work itself out. So I keep reminding myself that I'm still a bit round the bend, and perhaps always shall be. Speaker 1 (2:48) He laughed. Speaker 3 (2:49) You too? It Speaker 1 (2:50) was a question that he didn't expect to be answered. The side of my face had been clicking away as he talked. Speaker 3 (2:56) It's not anything like so bad as when you first turned up, Speaker 1 (2:59) he said. I flushed, but he went on. I Speaker 3 (3:02) don't suppose you noticed it happening, but Ox Speaker 2 (3:04) Godby's just about ironed you out. Speaker 3 (3:08) Hello, everybody. So that was from A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr. It was written in the late 70s, published in 1980. It won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It's the shortest book that we've done so far on the Book Club. but one that is absolutely exquisitely written. So it's set in Yorkshire after the First World War. It's a book about grief and trauma, about shell shock, but it's also about nostalgia. It's about the English countryside. It's about loss and memory. It's about the vanishing world of rural England. It's about art and the church, the scars of war, different kinds of hell. And the kind of fleeting lost chance of love. And it all unfolds in this wonderful bucolic setting. It's a kind of, it's a slight book, but I think an extraordinarily beautiful one, Tabby. Speaker 1 (4:08) Yeah, I mean, it manages to convey so much in its sort of slender pages. And it also has quite a special place in the lore of the book club, because about a year ago, our executive producer, Tony Pastor, Speaker 1 (4:24) He handed it to me when the book club was but a twinkle in the milkman's eye. And he said, oh, you've got to do this on the show one day. And here we all are. So this one's for you, Tony. So I read it about a year ago and I loved it. I thought it was beautifully written, exquisite, and it was very tender and very moving. But coming back to it this time, when I was rereading it this time, I remembered next to nothing about the plot. Speaker 4 (4:49) Because Speaker 1 (4:50) very little happens. And actually, I could remember very little of the characters themselves, really. The mood and the atmosphere, however, clung to my mind. The slightly reticent, slightly sardonic style as well that conveys a great deal while saying not very much. And also, God, the beautiful nature writing. I know that you think very well of this book, Dominic, because you felt that in my notes, I didn't quite, you know, quite do it justice. So justify yourself. Speaker 3 (5:18) No, I think you have done it justice in the notes. Absolutely. But I think maybe I'm even fonder of it than you are. So yeah, it's 100 pages long. So this really is a book that you can read in an evening because it's very easy to read. It's not a demanding book at all. I totally agree with you, by the way, about that it's the atmosphere and the style and the impressions and the mood that you remember. Because like you, I'd read it before. I couldn't remember the name of the central character. I knew there was something. I knew that it was a story about a bloke who goes and restores a painting in a church and he meets another guy and they sort of hang around in the countryside. This is in the 1920s. But I couldn't remember much more than that. But I did remember, you know, this almost poetic sensibility with which the book is written. The landscape, the long summer, the hedgerows, the birds. And this sense of something slipping out of reach, something so fleeting. Speaker 1 (6:17) There's a great sense of nostalgia. And on that note, I think we should actually say a word on the tone of the novel, because the whole thing is told in retrospect by an elderly narrator who is thinking back to this glorious moment in time that is now long gone and then views the writing with a lovely, sad... sense of nostalgia. So for instance, ah, those days, for many years afterwards, their happiness haunted me. Sometimes listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of summer, day after day of warm weather, voices calling as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness and at daybreak, the murmur of corn and the warm smell of hayfields ripe for harvest and being young. So God, God, you get a sense there. First of all, the beauty of the writing, the atmospheric conjures, but also It's something more complex, I think, than a longing for the past or sentimentality. It's slightly more cynical than that. Rather, there's kind of a sense of regret that runs through everything, the sense of having let something go, but being totally incapable of changing it. And perhaps, you know, there's never the option to change it. So what's the point of even considering it? It's different to kind of the sense of remembering that we get and say the go-between or Rebecca. And Carr himself said that when setting out to write the novel, he had wanted the narrator to look back regretfully across 40 or 50 years, recalling a time irrecoverably lost and still feel a tug at the heart. And he succeeds because as Penelope Fitzgerald, who writes the introduction, says, Carr is by no means a lavish writer, but he has the magic touch to re-enter the imagined past. But then Carr admits that while he was writing it, he ended up looking through... this window onto a darker landscape inhabited by neither past nor present. And again, I think you can feel this. This book is so much about what's going on beneath the surface. Speaker 3 (8:05) Yeah, about the gaps between what's said and unsaid and about what's happening. And the characters are not even admitting it to themselves. Speaker 1 (8:12) Yeah, the way that the trauma of, say, war can dog you because that is important for the context of this novel. Speaker 3 (8:18) It is, absolutely. It is. I think it's a beautiful book. And I think that passage that you read is a brilliant example. of how it captures a particular mood, the summer, the rural rhythms. There's something very Thomas Hardy or A.E. Houseman, which we'll come back to actually, because Thomas Hardy is a definite influence on this book. So maybe a bit of context for people. So we are in 1920. The First World War ended two years ago. And the whole of the novel unfolds with the memory of the war, like a kind of black cloud, I guess, overhead. metaphorical cloud because it's this long unbroken summer but two main characters traumatized by the war and they meet other people who've lost um you know sons in the first world war so much of the story is about reckoning with the scars that you suffered so our main character is tom birkin and he's a war veteran um he has got a twitch we've already heard that mentioned because of shell shock uh his wife has left him And he and his friend, the guy he befriends in the course of the book, Charles Moon, they are really good examples of the generation of the trenches. And they've come home and this isn't a land fit for heroes. They feel a bit alienated. It's Speaker 1 (9:36) that lost generation thing again, isn't it? Speaker 3 (9:38) Yeah, I guess it is. Their whole lives have been shaped by the experience of the war and by the suffering and the horror they saw there. A little bit like Septimus. in Mrs. Dalloway. I mean, this is a much lower key version of a similar kind of experience. And Birkin has come to this remote village in Yorkshire to restore a painting in the church. That's his kind of expertise. And so there's another theme of the book, which is kind of the, well, there are multiple themes. There's art, there's history, and there's also the kind of the decline of religious belief because Birkin no longer believes in God. And at one point, as we'll see. He shouts, I don't believe in you, God, you know, and he's basically referring to the First World War. So it's not just that you said a lost generation, it's a disenchanted generation that has lost its faith and is groping for something to give meaning to their lives, I guess. Speaker 1 (10:30) Yeah, particularly in pastoral communities like this. You know, you mentioned Thomas Hardy and Thomas Hardy often writes about the encroachment of modernization upon... blissful pastoral English countryside. And that's a big part of this book as well, because you get the sense that this is like a moment in time, but it's the last of a particular age, you know, maybe slightly that wind in the willows thing again, a world on its way out. I mean, you've sort of given us the plot already, but basically when Birkin arrives, he's very poor. He's sort of shell-shocked by his time fighting in the trenches. He's also been estranged from his wife and he's, you know, carrying the scars from that. He arrives in the pouring rain into Ox Godby in Yorkshire. He has a twitch and a stammer, and this is brought on by the shell shock, but he bears it stoically. And he makes a living out of restoring medieval wall paintings. And that's why he's come ostensibly, you know, to restore this medieval painting. And then there's this guy, the Chile Reverend Keech, who has hired him, but he's not very happy that he's there. He's basically had to do it because it's a condition of a bequest left to the church. And straight away, he meets another outsider to the village. And this is Charles Moon, who you played in that opening reading, who's also a former soldier, also suffers from nightmares at night. We learn later that he has a checkered war record, a tragically checkered war record, really. And he is there also. thanks to this bequest, because he is there to make reasonable efforts to dig up an ancestor of hers from the 14th century, buried in strange circumstances beyond the walls of the church. And he's kind of an archaeologist. He's carrying out a dig, but he doesn't seem particularly invested in the work. Speaker 3 (12:09) So when you say her, this is the woman who gave the bequest, both to do the wall painting and to uncover the grave of her ancestor. And this is Miss Hebron, isn't it? Speaker 1 (12:20) Yes, exactly. Speaker 1 (12:22) Those are kind of the ostensible reasons why both men are there. But we increasingly learn in moments revealed from the past, never emphatically and never in big, you know, sort of overly emotional globules. But increasingly, we learn more about them that they both carry kind of invisible wounds and they're sort of there for the healing afforded by the rural isolation of the countryside. And also we learn about the lovely rural community in Ox Godby. The villagers are very welcoming towards Birkin. And also he meets the vicar's wife, Alice, with whom he forms a not physical, but a sort of a romantic attachment that's never consummated. So I think Natasha Richardson plays Alice Keech in the movie with Colin Firth. She does. And Kenneth Branagh. Yeah, Kenneth Branagh, his Speaker 3 (13:12) first film role. And actually, I love the relationship between Mrs. Keech and... Tom Birkin, because it's very understated. It's ephemeral. I mean, but it's very, it's very moving. I think it's this brief moment of connection between these two people who, you know, they never really have a possibility of acting upon it. Speaker 1 (13:33) Let's get into the man behind it all, because this setting, Yorkshire, the landscapes, the communities, this is all would have been very, very familiar to the book's author. And this is J.L. Carr, James Lloyd. So Speaker 3 (13:49) born in 1912. He's not one of the world's greatest known novelists, but I think he's greatly underrated. So if you're making a list of really, really superb British novelists after the Second World War, I think he's got to be in that list. So he's born into a Methodist family in Yorkshire. And the Methodism and Yorkshire obviously plays a part in this book. There's a family called the Ellebecks who welcomed Tom Birkin in. And they're very Methodist. They're very kind of a sort of, they're simultaneously warm, but they're also kind of culturally conservative. And I think that J.L. Carr said that's kind of, you know, his own family was very like that. His own father, like Mr. Ellerbeck, was a station master and a Wesleyan lay preacher. And he went to a village school in the North Riding, J.L. Carr. And then he ended up at Castleford Secondary School because he'd failed to get into the grammar school. And in fact, the name of the village, Oxgodby, echoes the village where J.L. Carwitz School, which was called, Ozgodby. It's a real Speaker 1 (14:52) mouthful, that. Speaker 3 (14:53) Right. And actually, he didn't want to be a writer. He said later, I can't think of anything worse than to have your breakfast and sit down and start writing a novel. It would be like death itself. So he's not a professional writer. Speaker 1 (15:06) This is how you feel about the notes, isn't it? It's one big treadmill of sitting down to write what is essentially a novel about someone else's novel. So you don't even get the prestigious title of novelist. I'm Speaker 3 (15:18) actually going to be honest with the listeners. I don't even have time for breakfast anymore. Oh, Speaker 1 (15:22) boo hoo. Cry me a river. Speaker 3 (15:26) He became a teacher and he went to South Dakota as an exchange teacher, which actually found its way into one of his later novels. He kind of, he didn't massively take to South Dakota, though he did actually go back and visit afterwards. I Speaker 1 (15:39) mean, it must have been very alien. Speaker 3 (15:41) Oh, so alien. Go from Yorkshire to, yeah. Speaker 1 (15:43) Yeah. But then it's interesting because it's on his way back, travelling back home across the Pacific that he hears that the Second World War has been declared. Speaker 3 (15:50) Oh, right. And then he joined the RAF, didn't he? Speaker 1 (15:52) Yes, he arrives back in England in 1939, and then he joins the RAF in October 1940. But given that he comes from a Wesleyan Methodist family, he doesn't want to kill anyone. He doesn't want to be personally involved in any of the killing. So instead, he's trained as an aerial photography technician and posted to West Africa. And then he served at RAF bases in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Gambia. And then after he comes home, he serves as an intelligence officer. And then in March 1945, he married Gilda Gladys Sexton, who is known as Sally. And she was a Red Cross nurse. And then they had one son, Robert Carr. And he actually included the second epigraph in my edition of the novel after she died, which I think is quite sweet. Speaker 3 (16:34) So there are three epigraphs. There's one by Dr. Johnson. one by Hausman and one by Herbert Trench. And he put the Herbert Trench one in as a tribute to his wife. Speaker 1 (16:42) So romantic to have Dr. Johnson dedicated to your dead wife. So Speaker 3 (16:47) anyway, he became a teacher. And he became the headmaster of a primary school in Kettering in Northamptonshire. This is personal for me because JL Carr lived next door to my grandparents. Speaker 1 (16:58) I have to say that is a lovely fact. It's good to have Sandbrook seniors on the show. Speaker 3 (17:03) So my granddad, I can remember when I was growing up, used to talk about Mr. Carr because he was the headmaster of a local school. That's amazing! And therefore in those days,