A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr



A Month in the Country is a novel by J.L. Carr, nominated for the 1980 Booker Prize. The setting is Oxgodby, a Yorkshire village, during the beautiful summer of 1920. Art restorer Tom Birkin arrives to uncover a medieval mural at the local church. He is a veteran of the First World War, suffering the effects of shell shock, or combat stress as it would be called now. Tom’s marriage is also causing him misery. The hope is that a month living in lovely summer countryside working on a painting will restore Tom’s spirits.

I read the book during a heatwave in July 2026. Enjoying all the descriptions of summer – deep red hollyhocks pressed against limestone walls, velvet butterflies flopping lazily from flower to flower – it struck me that summers like this can’t really happen anymore. Hot days are now experienced with climate concerns in the background, making it difficult to appreciate those hollyhocks in quite the same way. It’s all red warnings for extreme heat and sleep deprivation. Finishing the book, wondering what to say about it, I glanced at the BBC website and read an article about the ambulance service, where the number of call-outs tracks rising temperatures.

Back to writing my review, while the summer of 2026 is difficult to see in wholly positive terms, the same is actually true of summer 1920 as described in A Month in the Country. The beauty and peace of that blissful August exist in relation to the experiences of war that came before, and Tom’s continuing marriage troubles that we feel might be coming after. This few weeks of light is brought into focus by surrounding darkness. The suggestion is you can’t have one without the other.

Alright, adjust the desk fan, and let’s have a think about the picture that Birkin is restoring. Initially this painting of the Final Judgement does not seem to be expressing wishy-washy modern sentiments about good and bad as relative qualities, each defined by the other. The Final Judgement shows the bad going to Hell, the good ascending to Heaven, people getting what they deserve, because good is good, bad is bad, and there’s no fussy, fancy grey area in between. Meanwhile, back in the real world Tom meets Charles Moon, another war veteran, who has been given the job of locating a lost grave in the churchyard. This is a man, a recipient of awards for bravery in rescuing injured men from the battlefield, who found himself court-martialled and imprisoned once his homosexuality was discovered. This hero criminal was judged by people who were villains themselves. How does Moon’s experience sit with a conception of life dividing people into sinners or saints? And going back to the painting itself, its apparently black and white morality is actually subtly undercut by various cunning little details. For example, the people falling to Hell are depicted much more vibrantly than the troop of dowdy souls moving dutifully up to Heaven.

So, the heatwave in July 2026 was a fitting time to read the elegiac, charming, gently subversive, quietly funny book that is A Month in the Country. Summer, the epitome of peace is not so peaceful anymore, and Carr’s book suggests that peace is always associated with its turbulent opposite.



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The Horse is a 2024 novel by American writer Willy Vlautin. Al, a singer-songwriter, has had a long career in the music business with periods working as a chef. After some highs and many terrible lows, he finds himself in his sixties living on the site of a remote, disused mine in Nevada, which he inherited from a member of his family. It’s the middle of winter and Al’s accommodation is a shack that used to be the ‘assayer’s office’. An assayer is an official who tests the purity and value of precious metals found in rock dug out of the mine. Al looks back at his life and acts as something of an assayer himself, looking at what happened to him, trying to find value amidst a great deal of rubbish. Meanwhile outside his shack there is an abandoned horse standing in the snow. Al, a humane sort of chap, tries to work out how to save the horse.

Finding gold is not easy, as shown by the occasions when Al mentions precious metals in his reminiscences. At one point he plays guitar in an outfit called Gold ‘n Silver, the worst band he was ever involved with. Gold ‘n Silver abandon him after he collapses on stage. The lead singer of another of his bands has a breakdown at a venue called Gold Dust West. Al smokes Old Gold cigarettes, which along with alcohol don’t do him any good. A casino venue in Carson City where Al fills in after a band loses their guitar player to a stabbing, is called the Nugget. All that glisters is clearly not gold.

Meanwhile Al is always trying to write songs based on his life experiences. He is good at this, and sometimes when things go really well, he writes something special, which feels like “a little bit of gold” – precious metal made out of the ordinary rock of his life.

Al struggles on, exploring his life story, and trying to save the horse. His efforts make for a fascinating and very readable meditation on what value means.

A book review is an assayer of sorts, and this assayer suggests that The Horse is a little nugget of the good stuff.

In the TV show Schitt’s Creek, the wealthy Rose family are left destitute when their business manager is charged with embezzlement. Moving to a small town, called Schitt’s Creek, they end up living in a motel. Despite a rocky start to their new life, the Roses soon find the town’s folk accept them for who they are, rather than for how much money they might, or might not, have. This acceptance extends to the Rose’s bisexual son David, who finds love in Schitt’s Creek, when he couldn’t find it in New York.

I loved the show, but there was something about it that puzzled me. Why was this small town so liberal and tolerant? In reality rural towns tend to be conservative places. It’s not made clear which country Schitt’s Creek is in, but if we imagine it’s an American town, then this is the sort of place providing a generous source of votes for Donald Trump. Election maps show a stark divide between liberal, densely populated cities and conservative, sparsely populated countryside. Social scientist, Jonathan Rodden of Stanford University has recently published a book, called Why Cities Lose, trying to explain this split. There are various theories – some going back into history: one idea suggests that people with personalities more open to new experience headed for the nineteenth century’s emerging industrial towns, while those of a more cautious, conservative bent tended to stay on the farm.

This urban rural divide has become increasingly deep in recent times, exacerbated by voting systems which give excessive weight to physical size of voting area. The fact that liberal-voting city dwellers are packed into small areas, can give them less electoral clout compared to fewer rural voters spread out in larger spaces. This is a particular problem in the United States, where Democrat candidates can win with massive majorities in urban areas, but lose by slim margins in many rural locations. With a first past the post system, the result is fewer seats for Democrats than their individual votes would actually represent, which is how Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, even though she had a popular vote advantage of nearly three million. This all contributes to a wider political divide between city and countryside than would otherwise be the case if individual votes carried equal weight.

How to overcome this divide? Schitt’s Creek has a go by disguising a racially diverse, culturally tolerant city, as a small town. Despite frequent linking shots of out-of-the-way grain silos and quiet railway crossings, there is much of the nature of a densely packed city existence in Schitt’s Creek. The Rose family are thrown together physically, in two neighbouring motel rooms, when up until now they have led isolated lives in luxury apartments. They are also obliged to live and work closely with various different sorts of people around them.

So, is this city-like town just a delightful fantasy? Is it a way of escaping the painful realities that are dividing many countries, America especially? Partly I think the answer is yes, but it’s not quite as simple as that. After all, urban life has pitfalls. The economic advantages of a city can create great wealth, and there is nothing like money for cutting people off in an entitled bubble. The Roses are not bad people, but they did fall into the isolating money trap during their glory days. A small town is a good place to strip away the wall of wealthy sophistication, and get back to relating to people in a more real, down-to-earth way. Johnny Rose, former head of the massive Rose Video chain, takes an interest in the dilapidated motel that has become his home, and starts working with its manager to try to make improvements. This means cleaning rooms, and working on the reception desk. Johnny’s son, David, opens a shop where he learns that you have to welcome customers, rather than keeping them away in the interests of exclusivity. Johnny’s daughter, Alexis, finds herself in a real relationship with the local vet, in contrast to her wealthy life, which had her moving through a series of high-profile but empty liaisons. Johnny’s wife, Moira, once a TV soap star, finds herself working with locals in singing groups and amateur drama productions. Compared to her life on the soap, where she seemed to spend most of her life drunk, Moira’s amateur theatrics are a welcome improvement.

In the end, understanding and acceptance of others is the key, and Schitt’s Creek suggests that aspects of both city and rural life can help us with that. The trick is to combine the best, and limit the downsides, of both.

If you haven’t seen the show I won’t give away the outcome, other than to say that if the Roses learnt a few things living in Schitt’s Creek, I learnt a few things watching them. Bravo, Dan and Eugene Levy, and their great cast. You made a show for our times.

The House in the Cerulean Sea is a fantasy novel by TJ Klune, published in 2020. It’s about Linus Baker who works for a government department overseeing homes for children with magical powers. After many years of dutiful service, he is given a special job of inspecting a secret home run by one Arthur Parnassus. It is here that Linus has his eyes opened to the discrimination that magical people suffer, and has to decide what his response will be.

This book is a morality tale. Linus and Arthur discuss Kant and Schopenhauer – Kant a rules is rules man, and Schopenhaur a more easy-going, do as you would be done by, proponent.

Name checking these heavy weight philosophers does not reflect the tone of the book, which is more YA than intellectual tome. The story very much waves the flag for team Schopenhauer. There are nods towards team Kant, Linus struggling with his weight, for example. We see him trying to follow a diet at the beginning of the book. His natural inclinations lead him to food, when stern Kant’s ‘unconditional principle’ would say that you can’t just eat whatever you like whenever you want. But, this is a background detail compared to the emphasis on forgetting rule books, in favour of empathy as the basis of morality. Indeed, after spending time at Parnassus’ house and forgetting his beloved book of regulations, Linus gets slimmer without even trying. Does this mean you can throw off restrictions, live on the beach, enjoying a beach body without the pain of dieting?

Your response will probably depend on whether you are more Kant or Schopenhauer. I would humbly suggest, we need both, but for me, the no rules beach living is sadly a bit extreme. Rules might change according to altered circumstances, but that does not mean they are meaningless, since the temptation to follow natural inclinations to immediate, and very possibly unwise, gratification remains unchanged in changing times. Also basing morality on empathy is a bit risky when a proportion of people, known as sociopaths, have a constitutional lack of this ability.

So tricky topics. This book certainly touches on contradiction, but I have to say, at the risk of sounding like an old bore, it prefers to go in for lots of sentimental sweetness when maybe too much of that sweet treat gratification might not be realistic, or good for you.

Brick Lane is 2003 novel by Monica Ali, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It tells the story of Nazneen, a young woman from Bangladesh who is married off to an older man and obliged to live with him in the Brick Lane area of East London.

This book caused controversy when it was published, some in the Tower Hamlets Bangladeshi community feeling it portrayed them in a negative light. Personally I thought the negative light shone much wider than that community. Perhaps the approach of the book is summarised in the small details of twee knickknacks that Nazneen finds herself dusting in her London flat. These figurines include lions and tigers, which have a wider significance, as the names of rival groups – Lion Hearts, right wing British nationalists, and Bengal Tigers, a Bangladeshi Islamic group formed to oppose them. Lions and Tigers actually require each other to justify their belligerent existence. And the book quietly presents them both as pointless clay figures, together on a shelf.

This lion/tiger symbolism is the sort of thing that Nazneen’s husband Chanu would appreciate. And he would have liked all the stuff about fate and free will in the book. Chanu was my favourite character really, a bumptious man, proud of his reading of classic English literature. Lion and Tiger slogans annoy him equally, not that all the subtleties of his high-end reading get him very far. He takes a considered essay on race relations along to a Bengal Tiger meeting, but is not brave enough to present it.

There is no simple answer in this book, though it is perhaps telling that Chanu is possibly the most successful character, not perfect by any means, not a hero, but somehow more sympathetic than any lion or tiger. So personally I don’t think this is a book to be offended by. The character I most identify with is hapless Chanu, who like me thinks he is a cut above cheap political posturing, preferring to sit quietly with the subtleties of fancy reading. But I’m not offended by the portrayal of a passive, sometimes completely useless, bookish fellow. It’s true – I wouldn’t be keen on reading out my race relations essay at a rowdy meeting either. Chanu is a character of the middle ground, in a book which is even handed in bravely casting a neutral eye over lives that usually polarise themselves into one side or another.

The Sense of an Ending is a 2011 novel by Julian Barnes, winner of the Booker Prize for that year.

Tony Webster looks back at his life from retirement age. He remembers school days, preparing for final exams, a clever boy in a tight group with two other similarly able boys. Then Adrian, a step up in clever, joins their gang, giving nonchalantly impressive answers to questions that their history teacher poses – questions like ‘what is history?’

Tony leaves school. The account of the rest of his life could be seen as a meditation on memory and history. History is ‘the lies of the victors’ says school boy Tony in class. His teacher reminds him that is also the ‘self-delusions of the defeated’. Is Tony one of life’s victors? He’s done pretty well, survived long enough to write the story down. But evidence emerges that he could actually be one of the deluded defeated.

So you can ponder along these lines. But before you start thinking this book is just for seminars and essays, I would point out it’s also a good read that carries you along. There is more than a suggestion that history also carries you along, doing what it does, caring nothing for efforts to understand or shape it. Going back to the school scenes, one particular lad who didn’t merit membership of the History Boys’ gang, was asked to characterise life during the reign of Henry VIII. He suggests that the word ‘conflict’ would sum it up. When pressed for further details, he tries, ‘much conflict’. These wise words actually end the book. This unknown boy, a most minor of characters, turns out to have the final say. Maybe life’s winners and losers share the same ambivalent history in the end.

Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall tells the story of Paul Pennyfeather, who we first meet as a blameless undergraduate studying theology in 1920s Oxford. At school he had edited the magazine, been President of the Debating Society, and ‘exercised a wholesome influence for good’ according to his report. Now at Oxford, on the night of the infamous Bollinger Club dinner, he is returning to his college room after listening to an interesting talk on plebiscites in Poland, intending to read a chapter or two of the Forsyth Saga before going bed. Unfortunately, the old school tie he is wearing happens to be similar to that of the rampaging Club. The tie attracts the attention of a drunken Bollinger, who strips Paul of his trousers. Rather than upset the wealthy and well connected attacker, the college authorities choose to blame the incident on humble Paul, accuse him of indecent behaviour, and expel him from the university.

This incident sets the tone of Decline and Fall, where there are laughs, but also reflections on fate and morality if you want that sort of thing. Fortune is a capricious mistress, favouring and condemning with fickle abandon. Following his expulsion, Paul goes to work at a North Wales public school, does quite well, and falls in love with Margot Best-Chetwynde, an immensely wealthy and beautiful windowed mother of one of the pupils. When Margot agrees to marry him, fortune seems to smile on Paul. Actually, no. Margot Best-Chetwynde, apart from having a drug problem, is also in the business of running ‘entertainment clubs’ in Latin America. On the day before the wedding, Margot asks Paul to go to Marseille to smooth out an apparent misunderstanding involving a group of girls en-route to one of her establishments. Paul doesn’t realise that he has been given the job of bribing local police to turn a blind eye to people trafficking. He is arrested, charged and sent to prison.

Paul falls foul of his sense of honour, which prevents him speaking up about Margot, or the Bollinger boy. Because he is good, he is punished, while those with no scruples do well. But Paul is not down and out for too long. Good things sometimes happen to him. The book is called Decline and Fall, but Paul is on a journey of ups as well as downs, maybe even cancelling themselves out into kind of a steady state.

And talking of honourable people, what do we think of the person who wrote this book? He does write some uncomfortable scenes, such as the ones involving Margot’s boyfriend, Chokey. And be warned if you are Welsh, because this author seems to have unpleasant preconceptions about you. But then as soon as I was inclined to get judgy, the wider theme of the novel came along to make me reflect on the shaky basis of judgy-ness. Good qualities can have bad outcomes and vice versa. Decline and Fall suggests that no one is a paragon of virtue in this complicated world, authors included.

Funny, interesting, subtle, unwholesome, ridiculous, philosophical. Well worth reading.

An unnamed man suffers a significant injury when something falls on his head. The exact nature of the accident is unclear. The terms of the compensation settlement do not allow the victim to talk about it, but they do make him wealthy. The man then describes his recovery, the relearning of skills that most people take for granted. Something like picking up a carrot demands forensic attention to the movements involved. The man becomes obsessed with details, spending his settlement wealth in staging precise re-enactments of arbitrary events in his life.

This is an odd book, but it does a good job in showing how much oddness hides in behaviours accepted as normal. Obsessive re-enactments might seem creepy, but they are not so different to practising the movements of a sport over and over until they become smooth and automatic. There is a contradiction here – you rehearse movements repeatedly, really think, and focus on each constituent part, with the aim of making those parts flow together, unthinking, unconscious, and natural.

You could also compare the man’s re-enactment rituals with the experience of reading a novel. Do you read a novel to think about its nuances, or to relax and have a break from thinking? People do both, often with the same books.

Remainder takes such contradictions to extremes, engaging with details so precisely that they stop meaning anything. Things reduced to their essentials are kind of value free – like the maths of curves, just a lot of numbers, the same numbers, however, guiding missiles as they curve to their target.

I asked myself whether Remainder wants its reader to think, or to have a break from thinking. Mainly the former I would say. It’s fairly hard work. I can see why author Tom McCarthy had trouble finding a publisher back in 2005. But there is also a fascinating hypnotic quality that carries you along. This is a very interesting read, which might get you thinking, at the same time as sending you into a bit of a fever dream

When I was at school in the 1980s, being a writer seemed an unlikely aspiration. Special people were writers, not Kent school boys who happened to like reading. But then, after years of frustrated effort, something happened, maybe around 2010, when I caught up with the fact that the computer on my desk now allowed anyone to have a go at being a published writer. Publish yourself. But what sort of books would I write? Who was I and who would read my work? Today, writers can work in a bewildering variety of genres tailored to certain groups of readers. It’s as though each group can aspire to have their own books. Wondering how I might fit in with all this, I have long pondered on how books ended up where they are today. The following is the result of my pondering.

To begin at the beginning, all contemporary categories of writing are descended from an original single category of book which existed when the printing press first appeared around 1440 – the Bible, or books about the Bible. In 1440, very few people could read, and books were prohibitively expensive. Writers are sometimes known as authors, and that word author – derived from the word authority – is very much a hang over from the time when “divinity” was, in effect, literature’s only genre. The ultimate author was the writer of the Bible. And with printing still in its infancy, this book reached people not through people reading it, but through the Church telling people about it.

The invention of the printing press also coincided with a rediscovery of Greek and Roman writers. These rediscovered classical texts almost immediately began to widen the scope of literature, even if the writers of these works were themselves considered as semi-divine sources of authority and wisdom.

One of the great social convulsions of Western culture soon followed. And it was all to do with reading. Into the sixteenth century, improved printing press design, some increase in literacy, and a new-fangled brand of Christianity called Protestantism, allowed people to start reading the Bible for themselves. Ironically this opportunity for individuals to read the Bible, marked the beginning of the end for the power of a single book. If people were reading the Bible, they could also read other stuff – maybe the Greek and Roman writers who were coming into print. And this natural tendency towards a widening viewpoint could only continue to develop as literacy rates crept up, and printing technology made headway in reducing book prices.

By 1700, academic Jeremiah Dittmar estimates that there were around eighty basic varieties of book serving an enlarged, but still modest, book market, where divinity continued to account for half of all sales. Through the next three hundred years, the rate of change gathered pace. The nineteenth century saw the beginnings of children’s literature as its own specific category. The 1950s and 1960s saw early examples of what is now known as YA. Then, into the twenty first century, literacy in large parts of the world had become almost universal. The advent of digital publication offered lower book prices for readers and the opportunity for anyone to be a published writer. The result has been an explosion of genre varieties, so that the current situation in publishing is the opposite of what it once was in 1440. Whereas in the fifteenth century everyone shared the same book, now it’s almost as though everyone expects to have their own book, unique to their own part of life. The bewildering variety of genres reflects the fact that today almost everyone is a potential reader, or writer.

It is of course a great thing that perspectives and viewpoints presented in books have increased out of all recognition. And yet, this new culture is also a fragmented one, with people tending to live increasingly in their own cultural bubbles. Writers write based on their own experience, so it’s inevitable that people similar to themselves are more likely to resonate with their work. Nevertheless, I think in some small way, any writer instinctively harks back to 1440, when there was one book for everyone. Writing has to manage that trick of reflecting its readership, while not confining them. A book should be a means of offering a wider perspective rather than closing the door. After all, a bestseller is by definition a book that crosses divides, appeals to lots of different people, and echoes in a small way that situation right at the beginning of publishing when a book was something that everyone shared in together.

Trio is a 2020 novel by William Boyd, following three characters all linked to a film shoot taking place in Brighton in 1968. Talbot Kydd, the film’s producer, struggles with his sexuality and a treacherous business partner. Anny Viklund, a young American actress tries to cope with sudden stardom and the end of her marriage to a recently convicted terrorist. Novelist Elfrida Wing, wife of the film’s director, is in the throes of alcoholism and writer’s block.

The world of 1960s film making is excellently portrayed. The whole enterprise is beset by chaos and stress, the emotional volatility of new stars, the monstrous egotism of fading stars, cameramen stealing film stock for their own dubious side projects, talent agents who are little better than mobsters. And yet in contrast to all this, there’s a scene where Elfrida, following a drunken collapse, rings the production office and asks them to arrange a doctor for her. This is quickly done, because while the film is shooting, it will sort everything out for you. There are cars and drivers to take you places, lawyers to deal with legal hassles, accountants to provide money if you need it, and doctors on retainer to look after your health. Elfrida thinks how nice this is, and how once the film has wrapped, she will have to go back to organising her own GP appointments.

I was reading about people pushed to the edge in various ways, living in a situation where, as long as this chaos continues, they will be looked after. Picking up the book was like someone calling me a reliable unit car to take me on a trip. The book was so readable and compelling that whilst among its pages, everything would be sorted for me. Halfway through I realised that it would be sad to have to go back to organising my own time.