BBBC Meeting: Thursday, 2nd November 2017, Flower
and Forrester, Combe Down
Present: Richard, Steve, Neil,
ChrisW, MarkT, MarkW, and new (potential) member, John Hailey. Apols received alongside notes: ChrisB
Carr, J.L.. A Month in the Country (Penguin
Modern Classics)
This was a book which
was enjoyed a lot, by everyone in the group. “What a lovely book”, “a lovely small book”, “an
absolute masterclass of how to use such a few words to cover so much”, “I
really enjoyed it”. “absorbed”.
The enjoyment was for
many reasons.
One was the author’s
style: “he writes beautifully, with no excess of fat”. Many remarked on the fact
that the book was so short – not much longer than some short stories – yet so
much was conveyed. Carr gave wonderful
descriptions – of buildings, countryside, people, machinery. He used lovely
language. His writing had humour (“‘Now,’
he said, ‘… to touch on a delicate topic.’ It apparently was going to be very
delicate, because he lowered his voice”), occasional darkness of tone, but elegiac,
creating a seamless line to a now-long-distant world.
Another was his
ability to evoke the time and the place – many of us felt that we could actually
see Oxgodby; experience the idyllic summer, the English countryside, a reminder
of the era of hay fields, the community camaraderie: all things now lost, our
lives are too fast. There was also the lost idea that people did not travel far
from their birthplaces – many had never met someone from London, most had no
concept of ‘taking a holiday’.
Yet another was his
development of character – mainly Birkin of course (“‘But you would have listened. You do listen. And you know how to be
still. Don’t you know that, when people are with you, they don’t feel they have
to say something? I mean just say anything to fill in silences. Were you always
good at listening? When you were a little boy?’”), but the other characters
are all well-drawn – Alice, Keach, Moon, Kathy Ellerbeck.
Another was his keen insights
and sharp observations into people and places: that people always think that
they will have more time later to look properly at something, that sometimes
people who put on a bold front are actually very shy, and when “caught off-guard, go to pieces”, that
when we eat cuisine from a local area, which gets lost in a developing global
world, we are “eating disposable
archaeology”, that as we age, our memories of who we were and how we
thought about things fade and have to get reconstructed – and sometimes we can’t
quite believe that the person we re-construct could actually have been us.
Yet another was how
short the book was, and yet how satisfying it was – although shorter than some ‘short
stories’, it covered his journey, from trauma to (better) psychological health
and acceptance. The Month in the Country allowed relationships to develop whilst
at the same time creating the circumstances to allow him to heal himself, with
the people and relationships around all being part of the healing – and the
revealing and healing of the painting is a metaphor for the revealing and
healing of Birkin.
We generally enjoyed
the relationship between Birkin and Moon, and the developing relationship between
Birkin and Alice.
We enjoyed the
presence of ‘the War’ – as an undercurrent, clearly hugely important and
damaging, and yet not laboured, not ‘laid on with a trowel’ (although it was
also noted that there seemed to be only one death in the town, and that did not
accord with all of our experiences of going to almost every town or village in
the country and seeing a War memorial with long lists of those who had been
killed in the Great War).
Although all did
enjoy it, there were some who were not totally convinced by all aspects. Birkin was only 23, but seemed very much
older (but maybe the war aged him faster?) But he didn’t seem especially
traumatised – he tells us that he has a facial tick and a stammer, but they
seem very external to him – within himself, he seems rather UN-affected. And it
seemed unlikely that at 23, he could be able to be one of the major experts in church
painting restoration, especially if he had spent some years in the Trenches.
Had he gained all of this knowledge and experience in the 18 months since the
end of the war and him being demobbed? And
what changed him so that he could simply walk away at the end, and not tell the
Times what he had done, when that was such an important pull in the first
place? “I was so excited that only
darkness stopped me from making a start. What luck! My first job … … And I
willed it to be something good, really splendid, truly astonishing. Like Stoke
Orchard or Chalgrove. Something to wring a mention from The Times and a
detailed account (with pictures) in the Illustrated London News.”
There were also many
individual takes on this book.
Richard saw links
between this book, about a medieval painter and people in a more modern age
using it as a way of linking with that long-dead artist, and another book we
have read, which he particularly loved: Ali Smith’s ‘How To Be Both’.
MarkT saw great
similarities with aspects of his own upbringing and experiences – a church-going
upbringing, lay preaching, making first relationships with other young people
within the Church and so on – realising that some pretty religious girls might fall
for not so handsome boys!
John saw that the
book was actually much darker than others had remarked. It was an evocation of the ‘last days of the
horse’. The fantastic and amazingly talented painter falls and dies whilst
paoingitn the picture. Birkin is very damaged by the war (his screams in the
night joining with the screams of the dying animals). The young girl dying of consumption.
Moon being ‘outed’. The huge cold bare house that Keach and Alice rattled
around in. There were many dark sides and dark vignettes running throughout the
book: rural bliss, but with many elekents of darkness (which was probably true
to life, too).
The fact that the
book was enjoyed by all was reflected in the scores given, other than Chris Born’s
one – his comments suggested that he also really enjoyed the book, but whereas
everyone else’s scores ranged between 7.5 and 9.0 (mean 8.43) he gave it a
measly 6.0.
Even with this
relatively lowly score by Chris, this becomes the 2nd highest
scoring book over the past 12 months and the 3rd highest scoring
book since September 2014 (the books scoring even higher were ‘Of Human Bondage’
and ‘Olive Ketteridge’).
Richard Velleman
6th November
2017
