A Month in the Country by JL Carr Review

It’s the summer of 1920 and Tom Birkin, fresh from the trenches of World War One and slowly acclimating back into civilian life, arrives in the English countryside town of Oxgodby on a commission to uncover/restore a medieval painting on the wall of the local church. And there’s where he meets the one that got away: Mrs Keach, the Reverend’s wife.

JL Carr’s novella A Month in the Country starts off well and then basically stops without going much further for the rest of the story - it just doesn’t have the legs.

The character moments are good. Birkin and Moon are both survivors of the war and carry their trauma differently with Birkin’s physical twitches and Moon’s secrets. They felt like real people who had lived through that nightmare and that’s to Carr’s credit in writing them that way.

Similarly the Reverend Keach is compellingly written and complex, as is his mysterious wife Mrs Keach. The scene-setting is well-done - not just in describing the (fictional) town of Oxgodby but its residents as well. The framing of the story is Birkin looking back at this time as an old man, so perhaps the idyllic image of this lost era is partly due to nostalgia.

There just wasn’t enough in Birkin and Mrs Keach’s unspoken attraction to sustain the narrative. It lost steam past the setup and never really got going again. Instead I found myself being reminded of a similar story to this but executed much more brilliantly in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.

An older narrator, looking back with regret at a time in the early 20th century, thinking of the love that never was, the spectre of war looming in the background, by a British novelist in the 1980s? That describes both The Remains of the Day and A Month in the Country.

JL Carr’s A Month in the Country isn’t a terrible novella but it does feel like it touches upon great topics - the shell-shocked soldier trying to return to a normal life, forbidden/unrequited love - all too briefly without ever realising their potential. Ishiguro does exactly what Carr doesn’t in his best novel, and I would recommend The Remains of the Day for a vastly more moving and impressive rendering of this similar story over A Month in the Country.