I read this novella all in one sitting on the train to Bath, and I haven't been able to stop thing about it. Set in the 1920s, the main character is shellshocked WWI veteran who ventures into the British countryside to restore a mural in an old church. But it feels like more than an anti war novel, its about the end of summer, the passage of time and modernity, finding your place in a changing world. A Month in the Country is a celebration of brokenness — not the suffering of brokenness but, rather, the vulnerability that brokenness brings.
“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.”
