Shade
New Member
This slight, superb novel must count as the shortest ever shortlistee for the Booker Prize, at 85 pages. In the year of publication, 1980, it also won the Guardian Fiction Prize (since discontinued in favour of the Guardian First Book Award). So why isn't it better known? Was its success too early, in the days when literary awards didn't make novels into bestsellers? (It's even been made into a film with a pre-P&P Colin Firth)
Perhaps its low-key status is because of its (lack of) length. Or because its themes - nostalgia for one's country, memory, regret, the ruinous effect of the Great War - now seem quaint and more the field of middling plodders like Anita Brookner than the stuff of great modern literature. Whatever the reason, A Month in the Country effortlessly swans into the upper ranks of my notional list of Authentic Overlooked Masterpieces.
The story is, as the title suggests, an account of a month spent in the village of Oxgodby, remembered by Tom Birkin in his old age. In 1920, fresh from the war, he went there to restore (or reveal) a 16th century painting on the church wall which had been covered up for generations. He finds the process restorative, meets several interesting characters and falls in love. It all sounds rather unfashionable, and perhaps it is, but what does fashion matter when the writing sings as well as it does here? Birkin is brought out of himself by the understanding that, once the painting is restored, it will be possible for people to commune across the years not only with the painter, but with the restorer, Birkin himself.
(Even his references - Elgar, Housman - are 'unfashionable.' But the latter provides the best of the book's three epigraphs: "Now for a breath I tarry, / Nor yet disperse apart - / Take my hand quick and tell me, / What have you in your heart.")
At times the book reminded me of To Serve Them All My Days, mainly for the deceptively bucolic setting and the deft (rather defter, in my opinion, than Delderfield's) handling of post-war trauma. It's about one-seventh the length of TSTAMD of course, so comparisons are not necessarily helpful. But it shares with that book, I think, a quality of solid good writing - with assured talent stamped on every page - without the fanciness and fussiness that features in so much of the stuff that normally appeals to me. A small miracle.
*****
Perhaps its low-key status is because of its (lack of) length. Or because its themes - nostalgia for one's country, memory, regret, the ruinous effect of the Great War - now seem quaint and more the field of middling plodders like Anita Brookner than the stuff of great modern literature. Whatever the reason, A Month in the Country effortlessly swans into the upper ranks of my notional list of Authentic Overlooked Masterpieces.
The story is, as the title suggests, an account of a month spent in the village of Oxgodby, remembered by Tom Birkin in his old age. In 1920, fresh from the war, he went there to restore (or reveal) a 16th century painting on the church wall which had been covered up for generations. He finds the process restorative, meets several interesting characters and falls in love. It all sounds rather unfashionable, and perhaps it is, but what does fashion matter when the writing sings as well as it does here? Birkin is brought out of himself by the understanding that, once the painting is restored, it will be possible for people to commune across the years not only with the painter, but with the restorer, Birkin himself.
(Even his references - Elgar, Housman - are 'unfashionable.' But the latter provides the best of the book's three epigraphs: "Now for a breath I tarry, / Nor yet disperse apart - / Take my hand quick and tell me, / What have you in your heart.")
At times the book reminded me of To Serve Them All My Days, mainly for the deceptively bucolic setting and the deft (rather defter, in my opinion, than Delderfield's) handling of post-war trauma. It's about one-seventh the length of TSTAMD of course, so comparisons are not necessarily helpful. But it shares with that book, I think, a quality of solid good writing - with assured talent stamped on every page - without the fanciness and fussiness that features in so much of the stuff that normally appeals to me. A small miracle.
*****
