A Month in the Country

A Month in the Country is a fiction novel published in 1980 by the British author J.L. Carr, a retired schoolteacher and publisher. The novel tells the deceptively spare tale of Thomas Birkin, a veteran of World War One who, having just returned from overseas, accepts summer employment to restore a mural. Dating back nearly five centuries, the mural adorns the wall of an old country church in northern England. During the weeks he painstakingly restores the mural, which has been carelessly covered by layers of whitewash, Birkin comes to realize the mural, which depicts the Final Judgment, is far more valuable than the church parson who hired him realizes. Birkin finds in the happy isolation of the remote rural community the chance to recover from the considerable emotional toll of his hellish war experiences and the collapse of his marriage.

The novel received the Guardian Prize, awarded annually from 1965 to 1999 by the editors of London’s The Guardian newspaper to the most accomplished work of fiction published in the United Kingdom. In addition, it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, an annual British prize awarded to the finest novel published in the English-language, then as now considered the most prestigious literary award in the United Kingdom. In 1987, the novel was made into a limited release feature film starring future Oscar-winner Colin Firth as Birkin.

This study guide uses the 2000 New York Review of Books Commemorative paperback.

Plot Summary

A Month in the Country is a first-person narrative told by Thomas Birkin, a twenty-something veteran of World War One suffering from combat fatigue and the emotional toll of the collapse of his marriage; his face twitches uncontrollably and at times he stammers. Birkin, with an undergraduate degree in architectural studies completed before he was drafted, has been hired by a small parish in the remote northern Yorkshire town of Oxgodby to restore a massive mural on the church’s main wall. The mural dates back to the Middle Ages and has been carelessly covered by nearly five centuries of whitewash, a solution of lime and water used to sanitize rough surfaces.

Birkin has accepted the employment as a way to get away from London—he knows no one in Oxgodby­­—and as a chance perhaps to reboot his life. His nerves are shot from his experiences in the war, and he views a month in the country as therapeutic.

Although the parish pastor objects, Birkin will live in the church’s belltower while he works on the mural. The first day on the job he meets Charles Moon, a cheerful fellow veteran who has been hired by the church to locate the bones of an ancestor of one of the church’s more eccentric and wealthier parishioners, the recently deceased Adelaide Hebron. As a condition of the church receiving her endowment, her will stipulates that first, the mural must be restored, and second, a good faith effort needs to be made to find the bones of her ancestor, buried she is sure somewhere around the church.

Birkin becomes increasingly involved in his work; the mural depicts the Last Judgment, and he diligently, painstakingly works to reveal each of the figures: the angels, devils, saints, and sinners. He comes to believes the mural is a masterpiece of Medieval church art. He also feels a kinship with the forgotten anonymous painter.

As he works, a young girl, Kathy Ellerbeck, visits Birkin in the church to keep him company. Alice Keach, the beautiful wife of the parson, also visits. Too quickly, Birkin falls under her spell and fantasizes about a romance. Ultimately, however, he does not act on his feelings.

As Birkin works on the mural, he gets involved with the people of Oxgodby. He attends church services, although he is an atheist; he accepts dinner invitations from the Ellerbecks; he helps out at Sunday school; he volunteers to give the Sunday sermon at a nearby church; he meets a young friend of Kathy’s who is dying of consumption; and he helps the church replace its ancient pump organ. One day, Alice innocently asks Birkin as she examines the emerging mural what he thought hell would be like. Only then does Birkin allow himself to think about his war experience at the brutal and chaotic siege of Passchendaele in Belgium, in which more than a half million soldiers died.

As summer comes to an end, Birkin finds out about Moon’s dishonorable discharge from the service and his brief imprisonment over his sexual orientation. That only makes him feel closer to his new friend. Together in the closing days of summer, the two friends unearth the ancient coffin of Hebron’s ancestor. Birkin comes to believe the outcast buried so far from sacred ground was in fact the artist who created the stunning church mural.

It is time for Birkin to leave Oxgodby; a letter from his estranged wife asks that he come home to try their marriage again. He does not even have a chance to say goodbye to Alice. Instead, he heads to the train station, his work completed. In the closing paragraph, Birkin reveals that he is writing this memoir years after leaving Oxgodby and that the town now exists entirely as an undisturbed memory.