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In the clay the holes of hands
The small clay sea-thing is below the cut.
Anterior view.
Posterior.
I said it had tube feet.
Maybe it's a sea-pangolin. I really need to dust my shelves.
A Month in the Country (1980) by J.L. Carr is a small, strange, and beautiful book. I discovered it in McIntyre and Moore's in December and never got around to describing it before the holidays hit. In the summer of 1920, Tom Birkin arrives in the small village of Oxgodby, Yorkshire, to restore what might be a medieval mural newly discovered in the nearby church. He brings with him a secondhand overcoat, a change of clothes in a straw fish-bass, a nervous twitch and stammer, and a bad case of depression; the substance of the novella is what he leaves with. There is another young veteran, similarly employed to find out a fourteenth-century ancestor's grave. There is a stationmaster-preacher whose daughter brashes her way into watching him work. The reverend is standoffish of scholar-soldiers, but his wife looks like Botticelli's Primavera. And under Tom's hands as they recover their skill with whitewash and red ochre, the past—not the recent years of failed marriage and Passchendaele, but the unknowable era of a man who could paint hell and Christ like they were things that could be touched—seems to lie so close, it too might be within reach, like a woman's face under a straw hat, among limestone and roses. There are very few novels that feel like poems, but this is one of them. It is not a cross between A Canterbury Tale and A.E. Housman, either, but it shares some of their summer country and lost, remembered hills. And its discussions of stonemasonry and medieval painting are brisk and technical. I have no idea what else J.L. Carr wrote, but I'm not sure I care; A Month in the Country is perfect.
Anterior view.
Posterior.
I said it had tube feet.
Maybe it's a sea-pangolin. I really need to dust my shelves.
A Month in the Country (1980) by J.L. Carr is a small, strange, and beautiful book. I discovered it in McIntyre and Moore's in December and never got around to describing it before the holidays hit. In the summer of 1920, Tom Birkin arrives in the small village of Oxgodby, Yorkshire, to restore what might be a medieval mural newly discovered in the nearby church. He brings with him a secondhand overcoat, a change of clothes in a straw fish-bass, a nervous twitch and stammer, and a bad case of depression; the substance of the novella is what he leaves with. There is another young veteran, similarly employed to find out a fourteenth-century ancestor's grave. There is a stationmaster-preacher whose daughter brashes her way into watching him work. The reverend is standoffish of scholar-soldiers, but his wife looks like Botticelli's Primavera. And under Tom's hands as they recover their skill with whitewash and red ochre, the past—not the recent years of failed marriage and Passchendaele, but the unknowable era of a man who could paint hell and Christ like they were things that could be touched—seems to lie so close, it too might be within reach, like a woman's face under a straw hat, among limestone and roses. There are very few novels that feel like poems, but this is one of them. It is not a cross between A Canterbury Tale and A.E. Housman, either, but it shares some of their summer country and lost, remembered hills. And its discussions of stonemasonry and medieval painting are brisk and technical. I have no idea what else J.L. Carr wrote, but I'm not sure I care; A Month in the Country is perfect.
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A Month in the Country is on my stack.
Nine
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It really is.
A Month in the Country is on my stack.
I hope you enjoy it! If nothing else, you should like the countryside and the art history.