20 saturday review Saturday April 9 2022 | the timesRereading A Month in the Country by JL Carr
a centuries-old ancestor buried some-
where on the estate.
JL Carr’s 1980 novella, in which Birkin
looks back on that “sun-ripened summer”
from the wistful vantage of old age, is a
strange and lovely book in which almost
nothing seems to happen and yet, at the
same time, so much of life is in view.
Much of it lightly memorialises a
vanished rural England: the malfunction-
ing church stove that showers ash over
the choir during evensong; the Sunday
singalongs around the organ. Birkin’s
reservations about the locals prove un-
founded — a village woman feeds him
Yorkshire pudding; he’s soon roped into
the Sunday school to help to look after
the “dafties”.
Mixed in with the limpid descriptions of
village life is a Chekhovian awareness that
life is fleeting and cruel. We briefly meet a
girl who has consumption, her death later
referred to only in passing. Birkin falls ago-
nisingly and hopelessly in love with the
vicar’s wife. And always in the background
the war: a chance encounter with a ser-
geant in a nearby town reveals to Birkin
that Moon had been court-martialled
after being discovered with another man;
somewhat awfully, he had previouslyreceived the Military Cross for bravery.
“Advanced signaller, weren’t you?” the ser-
geant says to Birkin. “Not many of you
chaps came through.”
Carr is not exactly forgotten — A
Month in the Country, which was short-
listed for the 1980 Booker prize, was
made into a film; his other novels,
equally, if very differently, delight-
ful, are still in print too — yet he
definitely falls into the neglected
category. A former head
teacher, he set up his own print-
ing press, the Quince Tree Press,
in 1966 to publish hand-drawn
maps and pocket guides to poetry
and history, plus several of his
books. He and his novels embody a
certain resilient, eccentric English-
ness that is now out of fashion.
He has an affinity with the English war
poets, imbuing the fields, blackbirds and
constancy of the countryside with the
same holy significance as Rupert Brooke
or Edward Thomas. He is amusingly alert
to the dangers of romanticism (when Bir-
kin catches himself waxing lyrical over the
ancient cycle of the farming year he asks,
“Am I making too much of this?”); all the
same, his chirpy, matter-of-fact proseI
t’s 1920, at the start of the summer,
and Tom Birkin has just arrived in
“enemy country”, otherwise known as
the north of England. He’s an expert
in medieval church frescoes and has
been hired according to the will of a
recently deceased estate owner to spend a
month restoring a 14th-century painting
discovered under limewash in a Yorkshire
village church. Recently separated from
his wife, Birkin is a veteran of the war,
betrayed by a twitch on the left side of
his face.
But this is not a novel about the war, or
at least not very much. “All that was past
and gone,” Birkin tells himself as he bats
away the occasional inquiring expression
on the face of his fellow vet Charles Moon,
an archaeologist hired by the same eccen-
tric benefactor to search for the bones ofClaire Allfree loses
herself in the strange
loveliness of JL Carr’s
novella set in a
lost rural England
contains flashes of startling poetry. Here is
Birkin on the harvest: “We went back and
forth across the cracked earth in the heat
till midday, when each sheaf’s shadow
was no more than a black tip. Then it was
dinner time (‘T’missus is expecting you
two gents’) and rabbit and potato pie
put fresh heart into us and carried
us on until, at four, ‘th’allooance’
came: greengage pie and scalding
tea in a can.”
A Month in the Country is very
obviously about restoration —
as Birkin loses himself in the job
of bringing the lost painting back
to life, he’s too much of a realist
not to understand that something
similar is happening to him.
More interestingly, though, this
ruefully self-aware novel is about our
relationship to time itself, be it through
what survives of us and endures (a medi-
eval artist’s extraordinary vision; a lover’s
flower pressed into a book) or what, more
often, fades away. “We can’t have again
what once seemed ours forever — that
church, a remembered voice,” Birkin
writes in the closing paragraph of this per-
fect little book. “They’ve gone, and you can
only wait for the pain to pass.”sun-ripened summer
Colin Firth, left, and
Kenneth Branagh in
Channel 4’s A Month
in the Country (1987)The woman
in Thomas
Hardy’s attic
This touching novel is a glimpse into
the toxic, doomed first marriage of
the great writer, says Paula Byrne
J
emima, mother of Thomas Hardy,
once made a strange request to her
four children. Vehemently opposed
to the institution of marriage, and
convinced that the Hardys were
temperamentally unsuited to the state, she
suggested that they remain single, live
together and keep house in pairs: Tom and
Mary in one household, and Henry and
Kate in the other. Three of the children
followed her advice and lived together
without taking a spouse. Thomas Hardy
did not. In later years, he admitted, rue-
fully, that his old mother was always right.
But perhaps not even Jemima could
have anticipated just how wretched the
union between Thomas Hardy and his
first wife, Emma Gifford, would turn out to
be. They met in Cornwall in 1870, when
Hardy, then a 30-year-old architect, came
to help torestore a church building in the
parish of Emma’s brother-in-law. Emma,
who was the same age as Hardy, was wild
and carefree. She had literary talents of her
own and, above all, encouraged the young
architect to follow his dreams and to aban-
don his profession to devote himself to
writing. He did and the rest is history.
Hardy reached giddying heights ofwoman much missed
Emma Gifford in 1865success, lionised by literary London, and
wealthy enough to build a rather hideous
detached house, Max Gate, in his home
town of Dorchester, but his marriage
became deeply unhappy.
Increasingly estranged from Hardy,
Emma moved herself into the attic, where
she led a sad and lonely life, occasionally
venturing downstairs to vent some of her
repressed rage and frustration onto her
indifferent husband, who had more or less
moved the woman who would become his
second wife into the house.
Hardy’s doomed first marriage is the
subject of this beautifully rendered and
deeply poignant novel, The Chosen by
Elizabeth Lowry. The night before herdeath, at the age of 72, Emma had a fierce
quarrel with her husband, one of their
worst ever. By the morning she was dead,
and Hardy stricken with remorse. In the
days that followed, he made the shocking
discovery of her “diabolical diaries”, which
detailed all her misery, fear and contempt
towards her husband.
Lowry’s novel begins in November 1912
with Hardy’s discovery of the unconscious
Emma in her dark and dingy attic room,
then charts the aftermath. The only light
for Hardy in that time was writing the
magnificent Poems 1912-13, a sequence of
18 meditations on their courtship in Corn-
wall, the disintegration of their marriage,
and his sense of loss and grief at her death.They were the farewell he had been unable
to make in life: “Woman, much missed,
how you call to me, call to me.”
Lowry has carefully and thoroughly
woven together the historical facts of the
demise of the Hardy marriage, but such is
the power of this novel that the degree of
biographical veracity hardly matters. All
relationships are complicated, and Lowry
unflinchingly dissects the small tragedies,
the misunderstandings, the betrayals. The
prose is exquisite: a chamber pot under
Emma’s bed winks “its broad amber eye”;
funeral wreaths are “plump life buoys”; his
second wife, Florence, stares at Hardy
with “perpetually bruised eyes”. Hardy
destroyed Emma’s diaries but, daringly,
Lowry recreates them — no mean feat
when we have so little remaining of Emma
Hardy’s authentic voice.
The most striking aspect of The Chosen
is the sympathetic eye that Lowry casts
over all the characters in this common-
place tragedy; there are no villains. With-
out a longed-for child to bind them to-
gether, the Hardys strike out in blind rage
and impotence. Florence, who initially
befriended Emma and acted as the grand
old writer’s secretary, has to confront the
fact that her husband is in love with a
ghost. Kate Hardy, the novelist’s youngest
sister, practical, sensible and often irritat-
ed by her genius brother, is convincingly
drawn, with just enough of her redoubta-
ble mother, Jemima, to leaven the tone.
Above all, Lowry understands the intri-
cacies of the human heart. After reading
Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Emma
wrote: “He understands only the women
he invents; the others not at all.”books
The Chosen
by Elizabeth Lowryriverrun, 304pp; £18.99ALAMYThe Going by Thomas Hardy
Why did you give no hint that night
That quickly after the morrow’s dawn,
And calmly, as if indifferent quite,
You would close your term here,
up and be gone
Where I could not follow
With wing of swallow
To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!