Elegiac, a term I associate with high school literature classes, came to mind as I was reading the beautiful A Month in the Country, a novella by English author J.L. Carr which was published in 1980.

Carr, like many authors, draw upon his own experiences to flesh out his eight short novels. He was born in 1912 into a Wesleyan Methodist family in northern England. Carr became a teacher and spent 1938 as an exchange teacher in South Dakota, of all places. He took the long way back across the Pacific and Asia to England, visiting various countries, and then volunteered for service in the Royal Air Force in World War II.

He married a Red Cross nurse, returned to teaching in Birmingham, and spent 15 years as the headmaster of a primary school, with a break in 1956 to return to teach in South Dakota. He retired from education in 1967, after having novels published in 1963 and 1967. Devoting himself to publishing and writing, he produced and published from his own house a series of small pocket-sized books of English poetry, historical events, and the like with each featuring a lower price for children.

Carr also published a series of English county maps and wrote six more short novels that contain elements of comedy and fantasy, as well as darker passages, based on his varied experiences of life as teacher, traveller, cricketer, footballer, publisher, and restorer of English heritage.

Two of his tales were made into films: A Month in the Country and A Day in Summer.

“All’s grist that comes to the mill” is a phrase he used in his introduction to the former as well as in a lovely interview with writer Annie Dalton back in 1988.

I don’t recall how I found out about A Month in the Country, but it might have been from some list such as this. I had read two prizewinning novels by Thornton Wilder and cleansed my palate with a couple of light Mary Stewart suspense romances and an obscure future dystopia. I was ready to return to “literature” but desired something short after the long slog through the 141,000-word The Eighth Day. I checked the samples I had downloaded onto my Kindle, and Carr’s book beckoned.

I didn’t know until after I had read it that A Month in the Country, which had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Prize, held the impressive rank of 1,353rd greatest book of all time in The Greatest Books meta-analysis, considerably higher than The Eighth Day at 10,696 but lower than Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey at 623. Personally, I’d rate Carr’s book above either of them, and it is wonderfully short at only 20,000 words…a brief but powerful work in which even short scenes exude atmosphere and meaning.

Here is the synopsis from The Greatest Books:

This novel unfolds the story of a World War I veteran who spends a summer in a peaceful Yorkshire village to restore a medieval mural in a local church. As he immerses himself in this tranquil setting, he finds solace and a sense of healing from the traumas of war. The narrative beautifully captures the essence of rural English life, the complexities of human relationships, and the profound impact of art and history on the human spirit. Through his work and interactions with the villagers, the protagonist embarks on a journey of self-discovery, finding a temporary refuge from his tormented past and glimpses of a more hopeful future.

I enjoyed Annie Dalton’s insight that, “The whole story is as much about what doesn’t happen as what does.” Carr jokingly responded, “It’s quite a nice way of writing a novel, writing a novel about something that doesn’t happen. It saves no end of imaginative effort.”

Carr wrote that when starting the work, his “idea was to write an easy-going story, a rural idyll…” but he admitted, “Then again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past.”

That final line struck me as particularly beautiful, and as with several elements in his novel, Carr left just enough unsaid to spark the reader’s speculative imagination without creating frustration at the lack of definition.

For example, an old eccentric Colonel makes one brief in-person appearance in the novella, and the first-person narrator then comments:

I never exchanged a word with the Colonel. He has no significance at all in what happened during my stay in Oxgodby. As far as I’m concerned he might just as well have gone round the corner and died. But that goes for most of us, doesn’t it? We look blankly at each other. Here I am, here you are. What are we doing here? What do you suppose it’s all about? Let’s dream on. Yes, that’s my Dad and Mum over there on the piano top. My eldest boy is on the mantelpiece. That cushion cover was embroidered by my cousin Sarah only a month before she passed on. I go to work at eight and come home at five-thirty. When I retire they’ll give me a clock—with my name engraved on the back. Now you know all about me. Go away: I’ve forgotten you already.

The novella transports you to another time and place, and it is not without humor. I cherish the description of the preaching of the stationmaster Mr. Ellerbeck:

…[He]…had left a village school at fourteen and had become a local preacher in his late teens. Though the mildest, most self-contained of men, once in the pulpit he became his own father who, it appeared, had been a passionately violent and irrational man.

It’s not strictly true that climbing the pulpit stairs transformed him; he was mild enough when announcing hymns and only mildly extravagant in his tediously supplicatory obeisance at his oriental despot’s skirts. But once launched upon the waves and billows of his sermon, he roared and raved like a madman, now and then bashing down his big fist on the podium so that the water decanter leapt. The while, his wretched wife hung her head in shame and only her twitching fingers revealed suffering. Mercifully, once at ground level again, he came-to like one revived from a convulsive fit and not remembering it.

An example of Carr’s skill is when the first-person narrator learns, from an Army sergeant he runs into, the military history of his acquaintance, Charles Moon. He learns that Moon earned a Military Cross for his gallantry in the war, but then a corporal who disliked him led the military police to discover him in bed with his personal servant.

The narrator then recalls how, in their next meeting, Moon somehow already knew that his homosexuality had been revealed. However, that is impossible, and Carr leaves it to the reader to recognize that the narrator unconsciously telegraphed his knowledge, such as by his body language or manner.

Don’t ask how but, from that day, Moon knew that I knew. Next day, for no reason at all, he said, ‘Sex! It’s the very devil. Quite merciless! It betrays our manhood, rots our integrity. Isn’t it, perhaps, the hell you were asking about, Birkin?’ And from that time on, things were never quite the same between us. 

It is so quick, so deft, and so true. The heartbreak of the story is that amidst the war-damaged narrator’s healing in the countryside, in fact a key part of it, is the unspoken and unpursued love that develops between him and his employer’s wife. It only took a paragraph for Carr to invoke the pain:

I should have lifted an arm and taken her shoulder, turned her face and kissed her. It was that kind of day. It was why she’d come. Then everything would have been different. My life, hers. We would have had to speak and say aloud what both of us knew and then, maybe, turned from the window and lain down together on my makeshift bed. Afterwards, we would have gone away, maybe on the next train. My heart was racing. I was breathless. She leaned on me, waiting. And I did nothing and said nothing.

Anyone who has been in such a moment recognizes the anguish of what one might justifiably term a decision or indecision…the wrenching moment that once passed cannot be revisited, except in mind when the scars tenderly ache.

Carr quickly draws his novella to a close:

We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever—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 Oxgodby. 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.

It has been a couple of years since a book hit me this hard. I’ll close with the poem by Herbert Trench that Carr began his tale with:

She comes not when Noon is on the roses—
     Too bright is Day.
She comes not to the Soul till it reposes
     From work and play.

But when Night is on the hills, and the great Voices
     Roll in from Sea,
By starlight and by candlelight and dreamlight
     She comes to me.