32. A Month In The Country: Is This The Greatest Novella Ever Written?

How did the First World War affect the British soldier survivors? Is this pastoral novella one of the UK's best books? How did J L Carr's Yorkshire upbringing impact the setting and tone of the story? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of A Month In The Country, the world it was born of, and the novel itself. Download the Klarna app to stay on top of your money, so you can think about, well, anything else. Klarna balance account required to receive cashback points. Limitations, terms, and conditions apply. Exclusions apply. Learn more at https://www.klarna.com/uk/buyer-protection-description/. For analysis, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes, introduced weekly by Tabby or Dominic. Sign up at: https://www.thebookclubhq.com/ Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Lorcan Moullier Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:26Speaker 02

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• 1:29Speaker 03

  Tabby, as I was saying to you the other day, I don't get to do as much daydreaming as I used to. I used to go into these great reveries when I come up with my best ideas. I don't have a chance anymore because I spend so much time doing my life admin. It's the same for you, isn't it?

• 1:42Speaker 02

  You know, I used to spend a lot of time rewriting my favourite book so that I would get the endings that I'd always hoped for.

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  But you know how you can get that time back, Tabby? I've started using Klarna to handle my real world money admin and that gives me the headspace for the more important things, like thinking about books.

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  Because their app lets you view all your finances in one place. You can set budgets, stay on top of reminders and manage your payments. So you don't have to worry about any plot holes.

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• 2:43Speaker 02

  I went across to Moon's tent and we sat on the grass in the evening sunshine.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Well?

• 2:48Speaker 02

  He asked. I've been talking over hell with Mrs. Keach. Do you think about it often? I said. He pursed his lips, wrinkled his nose and studied the back of his hand. Then, and this was unusual, he looked directly at me.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Often, particularly at night. That's the bad time. Your window is open, you must have heard me.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  He knew there'd be neither perfunctory sympathy nor questions.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  But I tell myself it will be better as time passes and it sinks further back. But now we're different. We know we're men apart. Maybe wives know. Yes, of course they must. And people do understand. I met a chap who went back to teaching. Like you, he'd been a signaler out in the middle, out on his own with only a wire trailing back to his battery. He told me that for the first four weeks, if a pupil dropped a desk lid, he'd throw himself on the floor. At first, they used to snigger. Then they didn't laugh anymore, only stared horrified or in pity. Finally, they just pretended not to notice. Me, in the middle of it, I used to think, well, we're in the shadows now,

• 3:59Speaker 03

  but they'll have to blow the whistle someday. And then all at once, it'll be different. We'll, we'll go from this to that. But of course, it couldn't be like that, could it? It has to work itself out. So I keep reminding myself that I'm still a bit round the bend and perhaps always shall be.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  He laughed.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  You too.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  It was a question that he didn't expect to be answered. The side of my face had been clicking away as he talked.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  It's not anything like so bad as when you first turned up, he said.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  I flushed, but he went on.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  I don't suppose you noticed it happening, but ox godbees just about ironed you out. Hello, everybody. So that was From a Month in the Country by J.L. Carr. It was written in the late 70s, published in 1980. It won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It's the shortest book that we've done so far on The Book Club, but one that is absolutely exquisitely written. So it's set in Yorkshire after the First World War. It's a book about grief and trauma, about shell shock, but it's also about nostalgia. It's about the English countryside. It's about loss and memory. It's about the vanishing world of rural England.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  It's about art and the church, the scars of war, different kinds of hell and the kind of fleeting loss chance of love. And it all unfolds in this wonderful bucolic setting. It's a kind of, it's a slight book, but I think an extraordinarily beautiful one, Tabby.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it manages to convey so much in its sort of slender pages. And it also has quite a special place in the lore of The Book Club because about a year ago, our executive producer, Tony Pasta, he handed it to me when The Book Club was but a twinkle in the milkman's eye. And he said, oh, you've got to do this on the show one day. And here we all are. So this, this one's for you, Tony. So I read it about a year ago and I loved it. I thought it was beautifully written, exquisite, and it was very tender and very moving. But coming back to it this time, when I was rereading it this time, I remembered next to nothing about the plot. Because very little happens and actually I could remember very little of the characters themselves, really.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  The mood and the atmosphere, however, clung to my mind. The slightly reticent, slightly sardonic style as well that conveys a great deal while saying not very much. And also, God, the beautiful nature writing. I know that you think very well of this book, Dominic, because you felt that in my notes, I didn't quite, you know, quite do it justice. So justify yourself.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  No, I think you have done it justice in the notes, absolutely. But I think maybe I'm even fonder of it than you are. So yeah, it's 100 pages long. So this really is a book that you can read in an evening because it's very easy to read. It's not a demanding book at all. I totally agree with you, by the way, about that it's the atmosphere and the style and the impressions and the mood that you remember. Because like you, I'd read it before. I couldn't remember the name of the central character. I knew there was something. I knew that it was a story about a bloke who goes and restores a painting in a church and he meets another guy and they sort of hang around in the countryside. This is in the 1920s. But I couldn't remember much more than that.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  But I did remember, you know, this almost poetic sensibility with which the book is written. The landscape, the long summer, the hedgerows, the birds and this sense of something slipping out of reach, something so fleeting.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  There's a great sense of nostalgia. And on that note, I think we should actually say a word on the tone of the novel because the whole thing is told in retrospect by an elderly narrator who is thinking back to this glorious moment in time that is now long gone and imbues the writing with a lovely sad sense of nostalgia. So for instance, ah, those days. For many years afterwards, their happiness haunted me. Sometimes listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of summer, day after day of warm weather, voices calling as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness. And at daybreak, the murmur of corn and the warm smell of hayfields ripe for harvest and being young. So God, God, you get a sense there. First of all, of the beauty of the writing,

• 8:28Speaker 02

  the atmosphere it conjures. But also it's something more complex, I think, than a longing for the past or sentimentality. It's slightly more cynical than that. Rather, there's kind of a sense of regret that runs through everything, a sense of having let something go, but being totally incapable of changing it. And perhaps, well, you know, there's never the option to change it. So what's the point of even considering it? It's different to kind of the sense of remembering that we get in, say, The Go Between or Rebecca. And Carr himself said that when setting out to write the novel, he had wanted the narrator to look back regretfully across 40 or 50 years, recalling a time irrecoverably lost and still feel a tug at the heart. And he succeeds because as Penelope Fitzgerald, who writes the introduction, says, Carr is by no means a lavish writer,

• 9:13Speaker 02

  but he has the magic touch to re-enter the imagined past. But then Carr admits that while he was writing it, he ended up looking through this window onto a darker landscape inhabited by neither past nor present. And again, I think you can feel this. This book is so much about what's going on beneath, beneath the surface.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, about the gaps between what's said and unsaid and about, about what's happening. And the characters are not even admitting it to themselves.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's the way that the trauma of, say, war can dog you because that is important for the context of this novel.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  It is, absolutely, it is. I think it's a beautiful book and I think that passage that you read is a brilliant example of how it captures a particular mood, the summer, the rural rhythms. There's something very Thomas Hardy or A. E. Houseman, which we'll come back to actually, because Thomas Hardy has a definite influence on this book. So maybe a bit of context for people. So we are in 1920.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  The First World War ended two years ago and the whole of the novel unfolds with the memory of the war, like a kind of black cloud, I guess, overhead, metaphorical cloud because it's this long unbroken summer. But two main characters, traumatised by the war, and they meet other people who've lost, you know, sons in the First World War. So much of the story is about reckoning with the scars that you suffered. So our main character is Tom Burke and he's a war veteran. He has got a twitch, we've already heard that mentioned, because of shell shock. His wife has left him and he and his friend, who he, the guy he befriends in the course of the book, Charles Moon, they are really good

• 10:52Speaker 03

  examples of the kind of, the generation of the trenches. And they've come home and this isn't a land fit for heroes. You know, they feel a bit alienated.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  It's that lost generation thing again, isn't it?

• 11:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess it is. Their whole lives have been shaped by the experience of the war and by the suffering and the horror they saw there. A little bit like Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway. I mean, this is a much lower key version of a similar kind of experience. And Burke has come to this remote village in Yorkshire to restore a painting in a church. That's his kind of expertise. And so there's another theme of the book, which is kind of the, well, there are multiple themes. There's art, there's history, and there's also the kind of the decline of religious belief because Burke no longer believes in God. And at one point, as we'll see, he shouts, I don't believe in you, God, you know, and he basically referring to the First World War. So it's not just, you said, a lost generation,

• 11:47Speaker 03

  it's a disenchanted generation that has lost its faith and is groping for something to give meaning to their lives, I guess.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, particularly in pastoral communities like this. You know, you mentioned Thomas Hardy and Thomas Hardy often writes about the encroachment of modernisation upon blissful pastoral English countryside. And that's a big part of this book as well, because you get the sense that this is like a moment in time, but it's the last of a particular age, you know, maybe slightly that wind in the willows thing again, a world on its way out. I mean, you've sort of given us the plot already, but basically when Burke arrives, he's very poor, he's shell shocked by his time fighting in the trenches. He's also been estranged from his wife and he's, you know, carrying the scars from that. He arrives in the pouring rain into Osgodby in Yorkshire. He has a twitch and a stammer,

• 12:38Speaker 02

  and this is brought on by the shell shock, but he bears it stoically. And he makes a living out of restoring medieval wall paintings. And that's why he's come ostensibly, you know, to restore this medieval painting. And then there's this guy, the chilly Reverend Keach, who has hired him, but he's not very happy that he's there. He's basically had to do it because it's a condition of a bequest left to the church. And straight away, he meets another outsider to the village, and this is Charles Moon, who you played in that opening reading, who's also a former soldier, also suffers from nightmares at night. We learn later that he has a chequered war record, a tragically chequered war record, really. And he is there also, thanks to this bequest, because he is there to make reasonable

• 13:22Speaker 02

  efforts to dig up an ancestor of hers from the 14th century, buried in strange circumstances beyond the walls of the church. And he's kind of an archaeologist, he's carrying out a dig, but he doesn't seem particularly invested in the work.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  So when you say her, this is the woman who gave the bequest, both to do the wall painting and to uncover the grave of her ancestor. And this is Miss Hebron, isn't it?

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. And those are kind of the ostensible reasons why both men are there. But we increasingly learn in moments revealed from the past, never emphatically and never in big, you know, sort of overly emotional globules, but increasingly we learn more about them, that they both carry kind of invisible wounds and they're sort of there for the healing afforded by the rural isolation of the countryside. And also, we learn about the lovely rural community in Osgodby. The villages are very welcoming towards Burke and also he meets the vicar's wife, Alice, with whom he forms, and not physical, but

• 14:27Speaker 02

  a sort of a romantic attachment that's never consummated. So I think Natasha Richardson plays Alice Keach in the movie with Colin Firth and

• 14:36Speaker 03

  She does.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Kenneth Branagh.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, Kenneth Branagh, his first, his first film role. And actually, I love the relationship between

• 14:42Speaker 02

  So do I.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  Mrs. Keach and Tom Burke, because it's very understated, it's ephemeral, I mean, but it's very, it's very moving. I think it's this brief moment of connection between these two people who, you know, they never really have a possibility of acting upon it.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Let's get into the man behind it all, because this, this setting, Yorkshire, the landscapes, the communities, this is all would have been very, very familiar to the book's author. And this is J.L. Carr, James Lloyd Carr.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  So born in 1912, he's not one of the world's greatest known novelists, but I think he's greatly underrated. So if you're making a list of, of really, really superb British novelists after the Second World War, I think he's, he's got to be in that list. So he's born into a Methodist family in Yorkshire, and the Methodism and Yorkshire obviously plays a part in this book. There's a family called the Elabecs, who welcomed Tom Burke in, and they're very Methodist, they're very kind of, this is a sort of, they're simultaneously warm, but they're also kind of culturally conservative. And I think that, J.L. Carr said that's kind of, you know, his own family was very like

• 15:54Speaker 03

  that. His own father, like Mr. Elabec, was a station master and a Wesleyan lay preacher. And he went to a village school in the North Riding, J.L. Carr, and then he ended up at Castleford Secondary School, because he'd failed to get into the grammar school. And in fact, the name of the village, Osgodby, echoes the village where J.L. Carr went to school, which was called Osgodby.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  It's a real mouthful, that.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Right, I know. And actually, he didn't want to be a writer. He said later, I can't think of anything worse than to have your breakfast and then to go and sit down and start writing a novel. It would be like death itself. So he's not a professional writer.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  This is how you feel about the notes, isn't it?

• 16:34Speaker 03

  [laughing]

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Just one big treadmill of sitting down to write what is essentially a novel about someone else's novel. So you don't even get the prestigious title of novelist.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  I'm actually going to be honest with the listeners, I don't even have time for breakfast anymore. Like, I'm just

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Oh, boo hoo. Cry me a river.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  He became a teacher and he went to South Dakota as an exchange teacher, which actually found its way into one of his later novels. He, he kind of, he didn't massively take to South Dakota, though he did actually go back and visit afterwards.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  I mean, it must have been very alien.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  Oh, so alien. You go from Yorkshire to, yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. But then it's interesting because it's on his way back, travelling back home across the Pacific, that he hears that the Second World War has been declared.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  Oh, right. And then he joined the RAF, didn't he?

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Yes, he arrives back in England in 1939, and then he joins the RAF in October 1940. But given that he comes from a Wesleyan Methodist family, he doesn't want to kill anyone, he doesn't want to be personally involved in any of the killing. So instead, he's trained as an aerial photography technician and posted to West Africa. And then he served at RAF bases in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Gambia. And then after he comes home, he serves as an intelligence officer. And then in March 1945, he married Gilda Gladys Sexton, and who is known as Sally. And she was a Red Cross nurse. And then they had one son, Robert Carr. And he actually included the second epigraph in my edition of the novel after she died, which I think is quite sweet.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  So there are three epigraphs. There's one by Dr. Johnson, one by Hausmann, and one by Herbert Trench. And he put the Herbert Trench one in as a tribute to his wife.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  So romantic to have Dr. Johnson dedicated to your dead wife.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  So anyway, he, he became a teacher and he became the headmaster of a primary school in Kettering in Northamptonshire. This is personal for me because J.L. Carr lived next door to my grandparents.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  I have to say, that is a lovely fact. It's good to, it's good to have Sandbrook seniors on the show.

• 18:29Speaker 03

  So my granddad, I can remember when I was growing up, used to talk about Mr. Carr, like, because he was the headmaster of the local school and therefore in those days

• 18:36Speaker 02

  That's amazing.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  And therefore, in those days, quite a sort of prestigious figure in what was a small town, you know, the headmaster. Mr. Carr, a very kind of, you know, conservative, reticent man, who also, you know, as in later life, wrote these books that actually turned out to be really good.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  I feel like I know a little bit more of your history. It's nice.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  Thank you. Yeah. Rooted in the soil of Middle England.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, no surprises there.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  He said that he thought bad behaviour at school was encouraged by kids having a lack of self-esteem. And the reason they had lack of self-esteem was because they had a lack of success. And the reason they had a lack of success was they couldn't read and they didn't read enough. So he would have very much approved of this podcast.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  So all those, you know, would be CEOs, you know, looking for success in crypto or Bitcoin. No, no, no. Just come listen to the book club.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  Absolutely right.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  So I think this is one of many things that makes Carr an excellent man.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  Well, he was asked why he wants to be a teacher. And he said, because it leaves so much time for other things, which I think a lot of teachers these days would probably be like, really? I mean,

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Look down upon it. Yeah, exactly.

• 19:44Speaker 03

  But the other things were so lovely, what he used to do.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  So lovely. Yeah, I completely agree. So he published tiny booklets titled The Little Poets. And these would be, which I think are just the kind of thing that children need to get into poetry, whatever, a sample of each poet with lovely illustrations. And then he did monographs, historical maps.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  I mean, less sort of get out of bed for, but draw hand drawings of the countryside.

• 20:09Speaker 03

  And maps of the, maps of the counties and stuff. Yeah.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  I mean, this is the kind of stuff that my dad just starts sort of leaping up and down with enthusiasm over. But I just can't sum up the same.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  But here's the bad thing. How did he do them? He did them from his own bedroom, right?

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So he was not a fan of publishers, you know, any sort of bureaucracy or sort of big corporation. So he thought, well, damble and he started his own press, Quince Tree Press from his guest bedroom. So another excellent thing about Carr. And then on top of that, he charged children less for his small books that he published. Because he wanted to try and encourage them to read. And secondly, he had this quite quirky.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  His quite quirky habit, arguably pissing off butchers over the country far and wide. Where he paid his butcher's bill in these things called remainders. And these were books that he hadn't sold, unsold books, and he would use them to pay his butcher's bill.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  Tabby, you've been, you know perfectly well, because you've seen my bookshelves in my house, not the ones people can see behind me.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Loads of unsold books, honestly.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  The real ones.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Seasons in the sun, seasons in the sun, state of emergency, state of emergency.

• 21:20Speaker 03

  You should get your revenue for this podcast should be paid to you in Dominic Sandbrook.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  In Dominic Sandbrook remainders.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  You'd love that.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  I would actually, I would. I'd feel so emotionally and spiritually enriched.

• 21:30Speaker 03

  Do you want to hear a nice, have a brilliant example of podcasting professionalism? So you talk about spiritual enrichment.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  But actually, he, J L Carr was really interested in spiritual enrichment because he became very interested in churches. Look at that as a link.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  We should build a monument to that segue. It's absolutely fantastic.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  He was a Methodist and then he converted Anglicanism. And in part, that was because he loved church, old Church of England buildings. Actually, my sister in law runs a charity which called the Friends of Friendless Churches, which restores old churches. So again, this is personal for me.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Again, personal for me, which my, my dad is a big fan of.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  Is he?

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  We should literally do a podcast together.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Let's just found a church, the book club cult.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  He started a campaign, didn't he, to restore a church?

• 22:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, he did with his wife. So as you say, it was much more kind of the history of the churches, the building themselves that Carr was drawn to, rather than the dogma of the church. And then when he started this campaign to restore St Faith's, which was threatened by demolition, he did actually come into conflict with a lot of church authorities. And you can slightly see this, this slight disapproval of doctrine and, and the body of the church. But anyway, he did, he did succeed in restoring St Faith's. So he retired early in 1968 and he made his living writing, publishing with his maps, his pocketbooks. He even produced his own dictionaries of, for instance, you know, English cricketers, English kings, which I like.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Between 1963 and 1992, he wrote eight short novels, which included his best beloved masterpiece, which we are discussing here today. And that is A Month in the Country, which he wrote in 1978. And unusually for books done on the book club, it was critically acclaimed, acclaimed straight away.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  Even though it was published by a very small publisher, Harvester. And actually, he was completely out of the loop of the kind of media set and publishing and London and all of that kind of thing. And he had this lovely description. He was asked for a definition of himself. And he described, he described himself as follows. James Lloyd Carr, a back bedroom publisher of large maps and small books, who in old age unexpectedly wrote six novels. Which although highly thought of by a small band of literary supporters and by himself, were properly disregarded by the literary world.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  I just think that's so lovely.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  It's very, you know what it is? It's very hobbity behaviour.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  Bilbo Baggins.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's quite Bilbo Baggins.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  He's very Bilbo Baggins. I mean, I know people, there are people who are already like saying, play a book club drinking game. Every time Tabby mentions the Lord of the Rings.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Tabby, what about Dominic?

• 24:08Speaker 03

  No, no, no, never.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Every time Dominic mentions the great man.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. So anyway, he died in 1994, didn't he? He'd had a diary all his life, but he buried them. So the diaries disappeared. There's a biography of him by Byron Rogers and Byron Rogers says, he went to Carr's funeral. And a friend of his said, I mean, there were so many different people, kind of, you know, sort of strange people at this funeral, that a friend of his said. I've known him for 40 years, but I recognize only two people at this funeral, which I guess tells an interesting story. All right. So that's J L Carr. So a sort of very quiet, in many ways, you might say humdrum life. You know, a long way from the sort of bright lights of literary London.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  But his best known book, A Month in the Country, I mean, I can remember people doing it at school when I was in my teens. Yeah, lots of my friends did it as a sort of set text basically. And it's become, you know, a great Penguin classic, you know, it's regarded as one of the, the loveliest books ever written and all of this.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  How does he go about writing it? Like, what is, what is motivating him?

• 25:11Speaker 03

  We mentioned Thomas Hardy.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  Thomas Hardy is a big influence on the book, isn't he? So it's, Thomas Hardy's books, for those people who don't know, are, you know, late 19th century. They are immersed in the rhythms of the English countryside. I mean, Thomas Hardy's books are often very tragic and very, almost slightly melodramatic in their passions, which this absolutely is not. But it draws on the same sense, perhaps of slight nostalgia for a vanished rural world, for the rhythms of agricultural life, for the English countryside.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Almost mythologized in the perfection of its, you know, the summer is always bright. But then he also plays in some of his novels, not in all of them, in some of his novels, in the contrast of that perfect summer in English countryside, whatever. And then the darkness of the encroaching world, you know, coming forth.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  And so the church, obviously, you can see why he's writing a book about a church because he's in this campaign to restore this church and faiths. And then of course, the war, the, the war element to it. So he's writing about the aftermath of the First World War. But he's somebody who had served in the Second and would have known loads of people whose lives had been scarred by their experiences in the Second World War. So he would be very conscious of the psychological damage that, that war has on men and how difficult they find it to talk about it, as we heard in that introductory reading.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, I mean, speaking of that psychological damage of war, let's get on to the book's narrator. Cause this is Tom Burke and he says of himself, nerves shot to pieces, wife gone, dead broke. And he's determined to isolate himself in this remote countryside setting and escape his troubles. And that's the thing though, none of these troubles are ostensible. He's very much a man of this generation. He is laconically humorous throughout. He very rarely confronts, you know, his woes head on. He has absolutely not a glimmer of self pity about him. And the thing I was so struck by this time, he's actually pretty unknowable, Burke and, which I think there are surely shades of Carr in there.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  He's pragmatic, he is emotionally compartmentalized, he's a very private narrator. He only reluctantly lifts the lid on pieces of his backstory, only reluctantly lets his guard down. For instance, when we learn of his wife's departure or of his experiences with the war. So we learn of that, that he was a veteran, he fought at Passchendaele in Belgium in 1917. We get the strong implication, but again, never stated outright that he suffers from shell shock. Because he says right from the get go that he has a facial tic and a stutter. And it's interesting because when he first meets the vicar, who's quite uptight, quite anal. The vicar's kind of wariness of, of this face tic, he sort of looks down on it and the stutter. You can see that people still didn't really know.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, the vicar's embarrassed.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  He's embarrassed, exactly. How to handle shell shock. Again, think of Mrs. Dalloway, a much, much reduced Mrs. Dalloway.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  And that opening reading, his mate Moon is saying to him, I knew somebody who was like you, who'd been a signaler out on his own. And, and the thing about like when he was.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  People pretended not to notice.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  And people made the noise and he threw himself to the ground and people were embarrassed. They didn't, they pretended not to notice or whatever. But in a way, he finds a kind of redemption, doesn't he, Burke and through his work on this, he's fascinated by history and by art.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, but also a very relatable thing about him and a lovely quirk, I think, is that he draws real comfort from imagining the community that would have looked upon the wall painting, the painter who painted it, who he sort of develops a deep spiritual connection to. And I think that is, that's so relatable, you know, to, to lose your sort of worries in the present, in the contemplation of the past.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, completely. And so he's gone to Oxfordby to try to leave the war behind, to make it, as he puts it. I could forget what the war and the rouse with Vinnie had done to me and begin where I'd left off. This is what I need, I thought, and you start and afterwards maybe I won't be a casualty anymore. But as you say, there's no self pity in the way he talks about that. He's quite, he's quite, I wouldn't say he's hard on himself, but he sees himself clearly.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  I think he's, and he's very Spartan. He's Spartan in the emotion that he indulges in. He's Spartan in the way that he lives, you know, in his dealings with others. But, but then, you know, he's very quiet. He never says what he doesn't need to, which is another lovely detail about him. And he draws real solace, as we say, from this sort of journey that he takes into the past. But actually, there's someone who's really disapproving of what he's doing, Oxfordby, and this is Arthur Keach, the vicar. He's a bit of a bureaucrat. You know, interestingly, he's referred to as J G Keach at another point in the novel. Because Carr hated proofreading. He found it really dull and he often wouldn't do it until the book was actually published.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  I love that.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  He just didn't spot the inconsistency in the naming. Isn't that so funny? I think that's charming.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  But I think the vicar could be called J G Keach, but it could be one of those people who actually ends up being called by another name.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  Do you know what I mean?

• 30:10Speaker 02

  True, yeah, yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  Someone like, well, all these royals who are called Bertie, but actually their name is like George or whatever.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I know. It's like in Rivals or something, someone who's called Lucinda and it's like Muffy. Anyway, I digress. So Arthur Keach, the vicar, he's kind of icily officious, icily, not sweeterly. He has a chilly cooped up look about him. He's hostile towards Burke and the project. He's kind of controlling. He's quite a bureaucrat. He's quite earnest.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  He does this thing because he's uncomfortable with Birkin's twitch and stutter, where he determinately speaks to someone behind Birkin's left shoulder because he can't really meet his eye.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  Also, the very amusing interaction where he says to Birkin, because Birkin's come to the church to work on this mural, basically against the vicar's wishes. He's going to stay in the church. And the vicar says, well, if you need to take a call of nature, you have to go and use this hut that's outside in the graveyard.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  And he's mortified by this, by the way.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then he says, there's a scythe hanging on the wall. You must be careful that the scythe doesn't fall on you. And Birkin says, I don't know whether he was worried about me beheading myself or basically cutting off something else while I was using the loom.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Basically becoming a unit. He has some top 1920s health and safety advice there. The interesting thing is that not even Keats, we're not really invited to hate Keats. You know, he has a bit of redemption too. The only characters that we're never really allowed to give redemption to are the punishers of the next character that we're going to meet. And this is Charles Moon, and this is another former soldier that Birkin meets.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  I love Charles Moon as a character.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you played him brilliantly in the opening reading.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thank you. I think, so Kenneth Branagh plays him in the film, and you can absolutely see in my mind, he really is Kenneth Branagh.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Really? In my mind, he's you.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  That's a compliment.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  I mean, I can see the words in your notes, round-faced, likeable. You're laughing much too much.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  What's there to like about that?

• 32:07Speaker 03

  So for the people who are only listening to this, Tabby's just out of like a stroke, she's laughing so much. Anyway, Moon, he's a wonderful character because he's more confident than Birkin, isn't he? He's breezy, he's a sort of jolly chap.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  He's much posher as well. There's big differences between them.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  But he has a scar of his own. There's a reference, isn't there, a couple of times? Birkin talks about a secret sharer, which is a Joseph Conrad reference, because Joseph Conrad has a short story called The Secret Sharer. And it's Moon and he, they both have secrets. Well, Moon certainly has a secret because it turns out that Moon, who was decorated in the First World War, he won the Military Cross, I think, for his bravery.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  He did.

• 32:47Speaker 03

  But he was discovered in bed with his batman, his sort of manservant, basically because he's gay. And he was court martialed and locked up for the rest of the war. And this is what he carries with him. This is the sort of, this is the scar.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  The secret shame.

• 33:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. And he, Birkin and Moon have this sense of shared trauma and shared suffering. They're marked men. In one case, you know, I mean, Birkin is physically marked by his twitch because of the war.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  And Moon by his nightmares as well.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, Moon has his nightmares and Moon has to carry this shame with him. And people are always whispering about him behind his back.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  But also, you know, they're bonded by the fact that, you know, that shame Birkin carries, the shame of his failed, broken marriage as well.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true. That's true.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  And then this incredible, deep connection that they share. I think there's this really sweet moment, you know, when they're kind of speaking about the war and Birkin says, he knew there'd be neither perfunctory sympathy nor questions. I think that's utterly of that generation. It's like a profound sympathy from someone that really knows without any of the frills or frippery, when sincerity of unnecessary words overdone by like, by someone who doesn't quite understand. I think that's really moving. It's the restraint.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was about to say, that's what's so brilliant about the book, I think. The book is so understated and so restrained. So you could imagine giving this, you know, 10 brilliant writers being given this subject and they would have scenes where characters break down and they're sobbing out the truth and they are wrestling with their demons and all this kind of thing.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Or you focus on them screaming their nightmares in the field or whatever.

• 34:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. But Moon actually just laconically mentions, oh, yeah, you probably heard me screaming at night. And he doesn't, he carries the sort of, the stigma of what happened to him in the war. But actually, you know, his life goes on. He's quite jolly, you know, it's there, but he continues. And I think that's one of the beautifully observed things about the book is that, you know, people are not reduced to kind of melodramatic characters.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  No, and Birkin thinks this wonderful thing. When we dragged ourselves back from the bloodiness, life had seemed brighter than we'd remembered it. We slud off the pals who'd gone down into death, while it was day, that is. At night, in the dark, for a time, they came back, but we wanted no part of what they now were. Theirs was another world, hell, if you care to call it that. How understated is that description of it? And also the nuances of how actually maybe the world could seem brighter, more full of possibility, once you were back from those terrible places.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  He has the connection with Moon. He also has the connection with the vicar's wife, Alice Keats, and she is very beautiful, isn't she?

• 35:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so she's described as looking like Botticelli's Primavera, which is a painting I love. And you can see, you know, it's a very kind, gentle oval face, and she is very kind to Birkin.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  The symbolism in the book is so understated, but there's a lovely example of that when they first meet. So when they first meet, he's watching a butterfly, a red admiral, kind of dancing among that sort of tombstones.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Nabokov is just sweating with excitement.

• 35:46Speaker 03

  I know, Vladimir Nabokov would love this. And he says, the butterfly flew into the air once more. For a moment, it seemed it was settled on the rose in the hat, but it veered off and away into the meadow. And actually, this sense of something so fleeting and then it's gone, is like Alice, his relationship with Alice.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  But also, it goes back to the Keats poem where he talks about butterflies, you know, loving, I'd rather, something like, I'd rather we were butterflies, you know, loving for a day than to not have each other for a whole season, or whatever it is, because butterflies have very short lifespans.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  They forge this intense emotional connection, which again is so understated. Nothing is said out loud. She just likes to spend time in his company.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  It is so, I'm going to betray my soppy side, but it is so touching, their relationship, I think.

• 36:31Speaker 03

  It is. I don't think it's soppy at all. It's meant to be touching.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  And then there's another connection that Birkin forges during his time in Oxfordby. And this is the nameless painter who he learns more and more about through the fact that, you know, he leaves hairs from his beard in the paint and he thinks about what it must have been like day after day on the wall, just as he spends day after day on the wall and that, you know, he did this for life and travelled around. And the one thing that they both leave, you know, a sign of what they can do is this mural. And, you know, they're both temporary visitors to the village, but both are able to leave something lasting.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so he, Moon jokes to him, doesn't he? How are you getting along with your painter? Like, they're friends or whatever. You must know him pretty well. Go on, tell me about him. But actually, what happens is that Birkin, because he's uncovering this wall painting, which is behind the whitewash, he does learn more about the world of this guy and this guy, doesn't he?

• 37:24Speaker 02

  He's not alone, though, is he?

• 37:26Speaker 03

  No, I guess that's.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  Because Moon makes the discovery.

• 37:29Speaker 03

  So Moon is trying to uncover the character who is, who is, is it Piers Hebron, who is buried out there?

• 37:36Speaker 02

  14th century crusader knight. It all gets very Dan Brown.

• 37:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. I mean, you could not think of two writers more different than J.R. Gar and Dan Brown.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  Well, he discovers something about this crusader knight and the reason for his being buried outside of the church, the mysterious reason. And it turns out that, you know, he certainly is not all that he appears and that they too share some sort of a spiritual connection. They too are outsiders to the worlds that they have come back to from, you know, the trials of war. But what that secret is, the secret at the heart of the crusader knight's strange burial, we will be revealing after the break.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  Oh, we have to wait till the break. Oh, gutting. All right, see you then.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Bye. Bye.

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• 40:17Speaker 02

  Welcome back to the Book Club. Now Dominic, you have two very exciting things to tell us, don't you? Two pieces of top information.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  I'll build up to this. So this is the second best bit of information. We have our own dysfunctional, shell-shocked, but ultimately decent and good-natured community of book lovers. And that's people who sign up for our newsletter, Book Club Notes. So basically, if you get Book Club Notes, it comes every Saturday. A lot of you have heard this before, and I apologise that you're having to listen to it again. Basically, it's thoughts about the books, it's amusing whistisms from Tabby, it's like a mural painting in itself, but with words.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  I stand in judgement, Dominic is cast into hell, and you will get a cackle from the sidelines.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  Generally, what it consists of are people saying Dominic's, like, I really agree with Dominic's judgement last week. Tabby's, I don't know what she's talking about.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  Tabby can do better.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you get that every Saturday. It's amazing. And you sign up at thebookclubhq.com. Now, I said that was the second best bit of information. The best bit of information is that Alfie, our assistant producer, whose family roots are intertwined with those of J.L. Carr, he informed me that in his neck of the woods in Yorkshire, there is a Wetherspoons pub with a special J.L. Carr section in it.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  This isn't even branded content. It's just insane.

• 41:36Speaker 03

  I know.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  That is magnificent. WeatherSpoons is going sky-high in my estimation, thanks for that.

• 41:41Speaker 03

  I mean, the tragedy is that Alfie didn't tell us this before, so we could record it on location in the Wetherspoons.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Pointing a cider in hand.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  Exactly. Was that a Yorkshire accent?

• 41:50Speaker 02

  No.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  No, well, it definitely wasn't.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  That was my normal accent, so just...

• 41:54Speaker 03

  Right. So...

• 41:55Speaker 02

  I left you on tenterhooks.

• 41:57Speaker 03

  Anyway, you were going to tell us about the crusader knight who Charles Moon is excavating in the field outside the church, and it's the extraordinary secret held by this knight, and how it relates to the First World War, and indeed, the story of A Month in the Country. Tabby, the floor is yours. I can't wait.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  Thank you. So after digging up this crusader knight, Piers Hebron, Moon and Burke can discover that the knight's skeleton is wearing a crescent pendant on a chain. And Moon speculates that, in fact, he converted to Islam to save, this is a quote, "to save his skin after being captured on crusade, and therefore was excommunicated upon his return, and this is why he was not allowed to be buried in consecrated ground."

• 42:38Speaker 03

  Oh, nice.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  But this opens up lots of unlikely parallels between the knight and Moon, and then also the disillusionment of war suffered by all three. Because Hebron and Moon are both outsiders in their communities. Hebron was buried outside the church, Moon lives in a tent in the same meadow to do his work. Both men are outcast from a society that consider them, in some way or another, heretical, and would see them demonised. The fact is that Moon is whispered about, and he's never welcomed into Oxfodby quite as Burke is, with as open arms. And Burke also realises, in connection to all this, that the man cast into hell in the mural that he's been restoring, which turns out to be a doomed mural with Christ sat in judgement,

• 43:22Speaker 02

  is actually a portrait of Piers Hebron. So it's all connected. It really is Dan Brown.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, the falling man. Exactly, the falling man.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  And this opens up this concept that runs through the book, that hell can exist in many, many different forms in any person's life.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true, isn't it? So Burke and Moon and Hebron have all lived through the hell of war. The hell is their own mind as well, their memories and whatnot.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  The dogs, them.

• 43:49Speaker 03

  Their nightmares. Exactly. And Alice Keats actually asks Burke at one point, "Do you believe in hell?" And he says, "Pasture and ale have been hell, bodies split, heads blown off, grovelling fear, shrieking fear, and speakable fear, the world made mud." But then she says, "But I knew it was Bible hell she had in mind, hell that went on and on, an aching, timeless hell."

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Which is that of the mural.

• 44:10Speaker 03

  Yes, it's that of the mural, exactly. And obviously, this, we only see the First World War very obliquely in this book. It's only hinted at. It's only hinted at in little moments like this, or in memories that sometimes flash up for Burke. But again, this is, he's not like Septima Smith in Mrs. Dalloway. There's no sense of the writer wallowing in it.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Or that it's broken him.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  No, it's something that comes up every now and again, and he tries to push it to the back of his mind. But there are moments where you get a sudden glimpse of just what the war, the horror of the war, that this mechanised, you know, poison gas, trench warfare, mass slaughter, what it means. So a really good example of this, one of the local families, the Sykes family, welcomes Burke in, and he goes for tea with them, and he sees a picture of their son in uniform, I think it is. And they say, "Oh, that's our purse. He was a right, good lad, purse," says this bloke's father. "A real worker, he'd give anybody a hand, they all liked him." And it's clear that he was lost in the war, their son. And it's very moving. You know, we don't learn anything more about him, but then when Burke

• 45:15Speaker 03

  is walking back home, he thinks about this boy who was killed in the war, and he screams and shouts at the heavens, "You bastards, you awful bloody bastards, you didn't need to have started it, and you could have stopped it before you did." And then he shouts, "God, ha, there is no God." And there, it's just a fleeting moment, and you can almost, I mean, you wouldn't miss it if you were reading it, but you'd sort of move past it quite quickly. But it's a hint of the horror, and the trauma, and the tragedy that is always slightly out of focus in this book.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  There's also this sense of disillusionment of it. You know, the First World War, it definitively dispelled that idea of glorious warfare, because it was mechanised, and it was death on a scale never seen before, and it was machine guns and trenches. And it was very different to people's ideals of war that had come before. And so obviously, you can see from that the way that he shouts into the air, how that he does have anger in it. And then you can also see, you know, in the way that Hebron, he went out on a holy wall.

• 46:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, crusade, yeah.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  A crusade, in the name of Jesus, or whatever it may be. And then, you know, he comes back a whole other faith, and to be buried outside of his church, the church that he went on crusade for. So it's different forms of disillusionment that are connecting past and present.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's interesting, the book. So the book, we've made it sound like a war book.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  It's so not, no.

• 46:39Speaker 03

  It's not really a war book, but it's not really any, I mean, that's the lovely thing about it, it's quite unclassifiable. There's a love story, but it's not really a love story. It's a book about pastoral England, I guess. I guess the pastoral England stuff, the mood, is the thing that always lingered in my mind, that it was a beautiful evocation of an English summer, and a sleepy, vanished, nostalgic world.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, that nevertheless affords great solace to him. Because in the present, I mean, Burke is reflecting on that summer with a real sense of wonder. You know, he marvels at that time spent in what Penelope Fitzgerald calls "the last years of the horse-drawn age."

• 47:15Speaker 03

  Oh, this is a lovely bit in the book, Tabby. Do you remember, he goes to like some, it's like the hottest day or whatever, and they go to some, everyone's taking the day off, and they're going to some sort of summer celebration. And he remembers the horses going down the street. And he says, he describes the horses, and he says, "Those great magical creatures, soon to disappear from highways and turning furrow. Did I know it even then? I suppose not, nor anybody else in Oxfodby. From childhood, they'd always known the sound of hooves fitfully beating stable floors in the night hours, and the bitter smell of burning corn at the smithy. How could they foresee that in a few brief years, their fellow sharers of field and road would be gone forever?" And there's your nostalgia, and the sense

• 47:55Speaker 03

  of regret and loss, like he's looking back, and he's remembering this pastoral world that is slipping away, even at the time when he was there, I guess.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think it's so interesting that, you know, he said, when he set out to write this, that he was going to write "an easygoing story, a rural idyll, along the lines of Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree," which is a book that I love. But I would say that this book, A Month in the Country, only resembles that really superficially, in the beauty of the landscape, the simplicity of the way they all live, the cider, the gossipy community. There's far more a sense in this that it's the last hurrah of this age, that it's all dwindling, it's all passing away. It's like Wind in the Willows, but if the wind in the willows was in its final season, you know, in Under the Greenwood Tree, which has the same pastoral tone, there's none of the regret or the painful nostalgia.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  You know, that's a sweet Victorian romance about first love. As you say, it's very hard to know what this is about. I think healing is probably a big part of it.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a book about healing, isn't it, to some degree, about coming to terms with, I don't know, Burke, in this course of the book, comes to terms with the experience of the war, I guess, through doing this painting, through spending the time this summer. I mean, in a way, it's not really a book about any one thing, and that's part of its power, that it's elusive, that it's always slightly out of reach. Although I do think a couple of things. Number one, I mean, I know you're going to talk a bit more about how beautiful the nature writing is. But number two, there's a real sense of texture sometimes. So Burke as a narrator will talk about like, an oil lamp, or a stove, or something. And there's a real love and a relish in the physical details of this world.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  Totally. That massive stove that he first encounters in the church, on the loft where he sleeps. He finds real comfort in tinkering with it, and it almost takes him on identity in his mind. And it's such a satisfying book to read, in the way of its, you know, the smoke, the dawn, the coziness, the endless helpings of Wednesday Dale cheese, and hunky bread, the tea cakes, you know, all of that. It's so idyllic.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  The physicality of it, the physicality of the world. It's one of those books that make you think, gosh, I wish it was summer, and, well, it is summer when we're recording this. But basically, I wish I wasn't doing a podcast, so I would go and like, sleep in a church, and eat hunks of cheese.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Wish I wasn't cursing the heat in my air-conditioned living room.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  But it's so honest. And also, at the beginning, there's this real sense of hope, because he says, "And then God helped me on my first morning, in the first few minutes of my first morning. I felt that this alien northern countryside was friendly, that I turned a corner, and that this summer of 1920, which was to smolder on until the first leaves fell, was to be a propitious season of living, a blessed time."

• 50:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's lovely. And we're talking about the nature writing. There are so many wonderful bits. "The rain had ceased and dew glittered on the graveyard grass. Gossamer drifted down air currents, a pair of blackbirds picked around after insects. A thrush was singing, where I could see him in one of the ash trees, and beyond lay the pasture I'd crossed on my way from the station, then more fields, rising towards dark rim of hills. And as it lightened, a vast magnificent landscape unfolded. I turned away, it was immensely satisfying." And then he fries up some bacon to have his tea.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Thick rashes of bacon.

• 51:25Speaker 03

  And you're like, God almighty, this, I mean, you said Bilbo Baggins, this is like Bilbo Baggins's dream.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And then he says, and he talks about, you know, his food store, "tea, marge, cocoa, rice, a loaf, meths, meth, hmm, rashes of bacon and made a thick sandwich." I mean, this is like heaven for you, minus the foie gras.

• 51:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you. I probably wouldn't have margarine, to be fair.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  But it caused, of course you wouldn't, that would be beneath you.

• 51:48Speaker 03

  Well, also, I don't live in the 1970s anymore, so I mean.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, or do you? That's the question, really.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  But it all calls back to mind, the books, because epigraphs are very important in Carr's books. And his third epigraph, which is Herbert Trench, and this is the one that was added after Carr's wife died. So it's, "She comes not when noon is on the roses, but when the night is on the hills, and the great voices roll from the sea. By starlight and by candlelight and dreamlight, she comes to me." And so it's all about how coming love and peace can only really come in stillness. And like Burke in arriving in Oxfodby, emotionally shattered, miserable in himself, devastated by his wife, this stillness allows him to, in some way, recover the pieces of himself, I guess.

• 52:32Speaker 03

  There's a lovely bit. So his relationship with Alice Keats. It's not so much about what he says to her, it's actually about how he listens to her. She says to him at one point, "You do listen, you know how to be still. Don't you know that when people are with you, they don't have to say something? I mean, just say anything to fill in the silences." He's a sort of comforting presence to her, because she's basically trapped in a marriage with this incredibly chilly vicar.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  She's very beautiful and probably, well, we can only guess at her personality, can't we?

• 52:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true. Because she's quite perfect, isn't she? And also, you see a different side of her, as you do the vicar, when he visits them in their strange, almost fairy tale-like house in the woods, which is gloomy and it has these massive trees around it. And she seems kind of nervous and uncomfortable in a way that she doesn't when she's out in the open with him.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  But then that actually brings us to kind of the church and the chilliness of the church in this book versus the warmth of the community that takes him in. Because Keats is such an unfriendly character. And, you know, the denizens of Oxfoddy welcome Burke into their community with open arms. And again, it's this old fashioned community, like it's full of ploughman's lunches. Think of men taking off their jackets and coats to expose their braces and their tapes and their long wool limit underpants. As Carr himself said, "It's the last of the plough horse and candle to bed age." And then you get Keats, who's a kind of, he's also an outsider. He doesn't really welcome in Burke in, because he doesn't approve his project. Whereas the Alabets bring him into their lives,

• 54:03Speaker 02

  they have Sunday lunch with him, his visit to the Sykes family. And it's almost as though the kind of chilliness of the church versus the warmth of the almost pagan outdoorsiness of the old ways.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess that's, I think that's reflecting J.L. Carr's suspicion of the sort of ecclesiastical authorities, but also authority more generally and kind of organisation and bureaucracy. And Keats is very much, as, I mean, you described him earlier, as a bureaucrat, the vicar. He doesn't really want him there, it means he's probably going to have to fill in some forms.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  Quite a modern man.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's a more modern man. But actually, interestingly, for a book that's set in a church, there are very few scenes of like worship in the church.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  Burke does go off with the Methodists, and he goes to their chapel services. And he's a bit sort of bewildered by it all, and finds it slightly awkward. But actually, he doesn't, we've already said, you know, had him shouting against God. He doesn't believe in God himself, he doesn't have any faith, he's lost his faith. And he says, "I became an unbeliever when I was 18, maybe 17, and it wasn't a momentous decision." You know, that's, you could argue that's, to some degree, if it's time, this is a point when people's certainties have been rocked by the First World War.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  Eroded by two wars, yeah.

• 55:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, they will end up being eroded by two wars.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, in due course, yeah. Because, I mean, I think that probably reflects Carr's.

• 55:21Speaker 03

  But that said, there is a sort of spiritual side to him, because he thinks a lot about hell and about the mural and the last judgment.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he seems to think that judgment is kind of justified, that you would expect in this world, I suppose, where you've seen young men slaughtered on a mass scale. You would expect to see a judgmental, sort of punishing Jesus, rather than an emphatically warm-hearted one.

• 55:44Speaker 03

  Well, that's the Jesus that he uncovers in the mural.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's the Doom mural.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  It's a terrifying Jesus, isn't it? Somebody who he thinks will judge him.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:52Speaker 03

  But we're not, I don't know, is that, is he equating that with the kind of military authorities who judged his friend Moon or something? It's hard to say. Or maybe I'm just, I'm drawing a connection.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  It is hard to say. I did wonder that, though, I did wonder that. But he approves, though, of the Jesus in that mural. And he feels very connected to the mural. It kind of summons up this kind of old England, this old dying spirituality. You know, and for instance, he says, in the season, very early, Mois Saturdays, "Dad used to go off course fishing. He used to stick his head into my bedroom, just off to praise my maker on the riverbank." And that's also kind of, it's almost like the Pan in The Wind in the Willows, like this kind of primal pagan religion rooted in the English countryside that's slowly slipping away.

• 56:33Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I guess you could say this is part of a, this is a very late example of a massive trend in English writing, which is these evocations of the countryside. And they're so often set, they're either written or set around the turn of the 20th century. This is such a long running thing in like English culture, that the First World War is this terrible chasm. And there was a Lost Paradise before, sort of Thomas Hardy novels. And then afterwards, it's all cars and, you know, unemployment, and men in flat caps in soup kitchens and stuff. And I think The Month in the Country, it almost sort of knowingly buys into that, I think. And Burke is quite wry about it. Because there is a sense of

• 57:18Speaker 03

  loss, isn't there? There's a sense of time passing. He says at one point, doesn't he, you know, "It's all, it's all gone." And he thinks that, when he's telling us the story, he would say, "Well, this, of course, was all to go soon." So quite early on, he says, "God, when I think back all those years, it's gone, it's gone. All the excitement and pride of that first job, Oxfodby, Cathy Alabett, Alice Keats, Moon, that season of calm weather, gone as if they'd never been." I mean, that's quite poignant, I think, as a, I mean, when you think about your own life and things that have vanished, never to return.

• 57:52Speaker 02

  Well, because also, that's the thing, though. I mean, it's all, it's all a memory, isn't it? None of it exists anymore. And if you compare that to the hopefulness of when he said, "Oh, and you know, God, that, that day in 1920, when I looked over, I felt like I could shake it all off the past." Because he does leave Oxfodby, he gets a letter from his wife, his estranged wife, saying she wants him back, and he leaves.

• 58:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  And he, there's this really sad bit. And that's why the book is haunted by this kind of uniquely wistful feeling of sadness mingled with a sense of loss. Because he sort of ponders, he says, "If I'd stayed there, would I have always been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow old, or die. And the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. There's now or never, we must snatch a happiness as it flies." Because this is another brilliant thing, I think, about A Month in the Country, that Burke, tempted though he is, he never actually idealises it all. He's wise to the fact that it couldn't have lasted forever. It was just a moment in time. And so he kind of, he sort of resists the allure of nostalgia. So the novel kind of celebrates, but also refuses to indulge in the concept of what could have been.

• 58:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:57Speaker 02

  And the promise of that perfect window in time, he knows it could never have been sustained. It's all about how everything is temporary. All good and beautiful things are temporary, all happiness, they're all passing.

• 59:09Speaker 03

  Well, like the butterfly, right? Remember that?

• 59:11Speaker 02

  The butterfly.

• 59:12Speaker 03

  The thing about the butterfly, it's there for a moment, and then it's gone. And actually, that takes us to, so you mentioned the epigraphs, there's one by A.E. Houseman, a Shropshire lad, great poet who J.L. Carr loved.

• 59:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, his favourite poem.

• 59:23Speaker 03

  And this is a line from a Shropshire lad, "Now for a breath I tarry, nor yet disperse apart. Take my hand quick and tell me what have you in your heart." You've just got a set, a split second, you've just got a moment.

• 59:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  In which to make a profound emotional connection with somebody.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  And as Ingrid Norton said, she was like, she said, "The happiness picked in A Month in the Country is wise and wary, aware of its temporality." And there is nothing that captures that Houseman poem more than Burke's parting with Alice Keats.

• 59:54Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  Because he never even says goodbye.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  I think that's such a, an incredibly moving moment. So they've had this deep connection, which they've never acknowledged. It's not, is it physical? Is it emotional? It's kind of hard to say, but it's, it's absolutely there. There's an electricity. And it's one of their, it's their last meeting. And he says afterwards, "I should have lifted an arm and taken her shoulder, turned her face and kissed her. It was that kind of day, it's why she'd come. Then everything would have been different. My life, hers, we'd have had to speak and say aloud what both of us knew. And then maybe turn from the window and lain down together on my makeshift bed." And then he allows himself to daydream for

• 1:00:39Speaker 03

  a second. Afterwards, we would have gone away, perhaps on the next train. My heart was racing, I was breathless. She leaned on me, waiting. And then this killer line, "And I did nothing and said nothing."

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  So sad.

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  It's so. So sad. And also, it's so interesting because it's kind of the counter. It's the opposite of Thomas Hardy. In Thomas Hardy, they always do do, you know?

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  They always do leaps. So in Under the Greenwood Tree, Fancy takes a chance and they go together. Test the Durbills, Tess and Angel run away. There's always some sort of satisfaction to be had, whether it's in a broken heart or a sense of romantic fulfillment. He doesn't give you any of that in this.

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  No, the butterfly flies away.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  Nothing is tied up neatly because like life isn't.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, they made a brief connection, then they'll never see each other again.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like the book eddies and flows, moments of great intense happiness with no meaning, moments of small deaths. Yeah, and that's what the book captures.

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a, well, I think it's a wonderful book.

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  You're speechless.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  I am speechless.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  You have tears running down your face.

• 1:01:44Speaker 03

  I'm stammering like a man with, yeah, a man from Passchendaele.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  Eating vast quantities of Wensleydale and bread.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  So now, we have to give this book a mark. Tabby, you've suggested bread and Wensleydale sandwiches. The Wensleydales living rent free in your head, by the way.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  I like Wensleydale.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  But I think you missed a massive gift to us in the first half of the book, where a character is described as having a splendidly free range moustache.

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  You, for a man with very little facial hair, your infatuation with the facial hair of other men is suspect.

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  Wow, okay. So I think we should rank this in splendidly free range moustaches. But if you want to do it in Wensleydale cheese, but you might guess.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  You know what I really want to do it in?

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  What do you want to do it in?

• 1:02:25Speaker 02

  Potentially hazardous trips to the loo.

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  Okay, fine, we'll do that. In emasculating scythes. So what are you, who's going to go first, me or you?

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  I'll go first.

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  Go on then.

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  You know what? I'm actually upping my mark. Discussing this book with you. Yeah, discussing this book with you slightly made me change my mind.

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  Okay, wow, so go for it.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  I'm going to give it eight and a half out of 10.

• 1:02:48Speaker 03

  Oh, come on, you've come with a half. It's a while since we had a fraction. I thought you were going to go to nine. I was going to take that as a massive win and now I feel cheated.

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  It's a small win, it's a cheap win. So I just think it is a slender novel, but it is a total gem of a novel. It's lovely, it's beautiful, it's very moving. I felt moved even discussing it during that recording. It affords one an afternoon a total, total joy. It's just lovely, it's just a lovely, lovely book, that nature writing, the emotion that it manages to capture without ever saying things in a straightforward, on the nose, cheap way. Nothing comes cheaply, no character, no feeling, no atmosphere. The only thing about it is, is that it's slipped away from me quite quickly, just as it did the first time. But maybe that is also part of the power of it, you know? It's all about temporality and how things often don't have meaning, they just are.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  So, you know, maybe that's part of the magic of it.

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can see that, actually. I was thinking about that when you said to me about it, that it's like, you know, smoke on the wind or something.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:51Speaker 03

  And how much it's a mood that grips you rather than the characters, because the characters are quite reticent and because we never have a moment of emotional catharsis. You know, when we did Rebecca a few weeks ago and the sort of gigantic, technicolor, melodramatic emotions of Rebecca, this is so kind of understated, restrained by comparison. However, so I'm going to give it nine.

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  I'm going to give it nine actually for similar, I'm docking a mark for similar reason to you, because I think perhaps sometimes it could be, you know, it's so elusive, it doesn't embed itself. However, I think there is such beautiful writing and actually the final lines of the book, I was honoured to read them out because I just think they're so moving. He says, "We can ask and ask, but we can't have again what seemed ours forever. The way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. All this happened so long ago and I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxfordby.

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  So in memory it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless still, ink long dry on a put down pen. But this was something I knew nothing of as I closed the gate and set off across the meadow." Oh, it's so sad, Tabby.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Speaker 03

  Anyway, oh, it's such a moving episode, Tabby.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  Such a moving episode. I'm off to fry up some bacon and think of happier times.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm going to go and dig up a night. Bye bye.

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:05:38Speaker 04

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