A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics)

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It starts that way, but, as Birkin recognizes at the end of his time, he “lived with a very great artist, my secret sharer of the long hours I’d labored in the half-light above the arch. Both Birkin and Moon whose name is Charles were in the Great War, both injured, Moon still carrying shrapnel in his leg, Birkin a face-twitch, the result of shell shock. When he arrives in Oxgodby, he’s going through the motions of what he has to do, almost an automaton.

Only after several months it was found that Channel 4 still owned the rights, and the film was eventually released on a limited-edition Region 2 DVD in late 2004. Just before he leaves Oxgodby for ever, he goes to look at the painting again and knows that, ‘whatever else had befallen me during those few weeks in the country, I had lived with a very great artist . It is a war-novel set in peace-time, full of the horror and unspeakable fear of war-memories, which can’t be spoken about. A Month in the Country Archived 17 January 2009 at the Wayback Machine at the British Film Institute. L. Carr’s exquisite short novel A Month in the Country, Moon finds the missing 400-year-old grave where, all along, he knew it would be.

Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain. And the novel brings us a vanished English country life in deep sunshine – haymaking, sleeping outdoors, Sunday School, rabbit pies, scythes, “ditches and roadside deep in grass, poppies, cuckoo pint, trees heavy with leaf, orchards bulging over hedge briars”. Desmond Ryan of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote "Rarely has the impossibility of love been more wrenchingly presented than in the scenes of dashed hope between Firth and Richardson. Being assigned this book as a college assignment, I wouldn't lie if I said I was a little wary of this book in the beginning--after all, assigned books can really be a hit or miss, with even the instructor's readings playing an important part in the enjoyment of such books. Their patient unravelling of centuries old mysteries with some shocking revelations makes for further excitement and anticipation though out this multi layered work.

Quickly grabbing it, paying for it, and nestling it into my bag, I scurried home intending to read it there and then. Tom Birkin is still suffering the after-effects of shell-shock as a result of his experiences at Passchendaele.I explained that I loved the film and I thought the choral/orchestral music worked brilliantly but it was very big and rich and I felt a score would have to emerge from it and be very pure and expressive and quite small — and that I could only hear this in my head as done by strings only.