A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics)

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This limited edition uses the revised version of the text that Carr himself would publish the following year at his Quince Tree Press. 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. Another collection, Still Further: New Poems, 2000–2019, will be published by the Uhlanga Press this year.

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 . Keach, the minister of the church in which Birkin is working, feels the uncovering of the wall painting is a nuisance – a waste of time and money, tolerated solely to satisfy the requirements of his late parishioner’s will. In due course, as was Carr’s wont – because he thought little of most commercial publishers – he bought back the rights and published it under his own imprint of the Quince Tree Press, from which (blessedly) copies are still available (as are Carr’s seven other novels). Due to the small budget of the film, Blake agreed "in lieu of a reasonable fee" to retain the copyright to his music. A lovely tight clean copy which appears to be unread, presented in a clear removable protective sleeve.But last week, on a balmy summer’s afternoon as the bees hummed around the lavender in the garden, I finally read it in one glorious gulp.

The two stories merge in the last pages of the novel: the ‘falling man’ in the painting who is going down into the fires of Hell is almost certainly a portrait of the man whose bones Moon (helped by Birkin) finds in the dust of his shroud. To compensate for the lack of budget, a very tight shooting schedule was planned over 28 days, during which Kenneth Branagh was only available for two weeks and was on the stage nightly in London. That they have no preconceptions of, and that is short enough to be entirely consumed in one sitting. A Month in the Country is a celebration of brokenness — not the suffering of brokenness but, rather, the vulnerability that brokenness brings. Out of their meeting, comes a deeper communion and a catching up of the old primeval rhythms of life so cruelly disorientated by the Great War.Le lecteur passe un excellent moment à la lecture de ce court roman qui dégage un charme bien particulier.