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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