The Fullness of Life Repaired: 'A Month in the Country' by J.L. Carr

A month in the countryside, by the English editor and novelist J.L. Carr (1912–1994), is what it appears to be: a simple, vital, and amiable novel, a "rural idyll"—as the author himself calls the very brief preface—soaked in bittersweet nostalgia, a charming story about our human condition. But it is also much more. The placid summer sunshine that bathes and warms every page of the novel, as well as the good-naturedness and predisposition toward happiness of its protagonists, hide the memory of bitterly cold, muddy winters, broken hearts, traumatized memories, and horrific wounds. Wise without grandiloquence, Carr's novel, originally published in 1980 and now translated into Catalan by Dolors Udina with her usual skill, brings to mind that memorable verse by Leonard Cohen that says: "Everything has a chink: that's how the light gets in."

The protagonist ofA month in the countryside is young Tom Birkin, a World War I veteran who, in addition to having to bear all the disasters, death, and destruction he saw during the fighting in the trenches, has also been betrayed and abandoned by his wife, who has run off with another Birkin, a good man. Oxgodby, a small town in the bucolic English countryside. He's here for work: he's been commissioned to restore some medieval frescoes in the church that are now dirty and covered up.

While working and living mostly in the church—climbing scaffolding for many hours each day, sleeping in the bell tower—Birkin receives visits from various townspeople: a curious and cheerful little girl, the daughter of the stationmaster; the grim vicar, seemingly authoritarian but haunted by the concern for the spiritual loss of his parishioners; Moon, another war veteran, also suffering from after-effects and trauma, who excavates around the church to find a centuries-old grave; and the wonderful Mrs. Keach, the vicar's wife, who shares a restrained, platonic, but intense love with Birkin. His relationship with these men and women, and his joyful daily life unveiling the mural—a Last Judgment motif that prompts pertinent reflections on guilt and justice—gradually restore Birkin's shattered soul.

After the monstrous cruelties of war and the pain of a stormy marriage, the peace and humble, restorative epiphanies of a happy summer: Carr is very good at recounting this evolution and summoning this atmosphere literary. It's a fitting choice that the narrator of the story is Birkin himself, but as an old man, more than half a century after the events took place. The tone with which the entire story unfolds, graceful and subtle, full of symbolism and detail, is moving and replete with nostalgia. There is sadness because all that existed and today nothing remains, but above all there is gratitude because all that existed and its memory of happy plenitude will remain until the end of time.