#j.l.carr

[red-ibis-red]

I’d seen enough paintings to know beauty when I saw it and, in this out of the way place, here it was before me.

—J.L.Carr, A Month in the Country

[msmarymillspaulos]

There was so much time that marvelous summer. 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. It was a sort of stage-magic.

J.L. Carr

A Month in the Country

[msmarymillspaulos]

“Deep red hollyhocks pressed against the limestone wall and velvet butterflies flopped lazily from flower to flower. It was Tennyson weather, drowsy, warm, unnaturally still.”

J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

Art- William Trost Richards

[writteninsentences]

“Often since that long-ago Sunday, I have wondered why it is that men with large moustaches have this facility of declamatory prayer. For the stationmaster plainly had a fine relationship with his Maker (who he addressed as an old and valued friend): he also had a splendid, free-ranging moustache. Whereas Mr Jagger’s teatime grace was more propriatory, uneasily terser: I seem to recall that his moustache was closely clipped.

          - J.L.Carr, “A Month in the Country”

Tom Birkin, Londoner, shell-shocked from the Great War, arrives, in the summer of 1920, in the village of Oxgodby in the North Riding of Yorkshire; he has been engaged to uncover a medieval wall-painting in the local church.

It is the tone of the book, written from the perspective of 50 years hence, described by Penelope Fitzgerald in the introduction to the Penguin edition as nostalgia, but not straightforward nostalgia, remembering, but not straightforward remembering, that makes it so enjoyable - wry, gentle, at an angle, but with a damaged edge; and often very funny, as here in this description of the non-conformist stationmaster and his guest, the visiting preacher Mr Jagger from Northallerton, as they offer contrasting graces, and moustaches.