A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics)

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It is a great novel and will be read long after some of the detritus acclaimed these days has been flushed away by our blessed ally, Time.

Quickly grabbing it, paying for it, and nestling it into my bag, I scurried home intending to read it there and then. Sadly this is almost unobtainable A Month In The Country [DVD] [1987 ]I did find a copy on an auction site and have enjoyed watching the dvd, it is as good as it can be a representation of the mood of the book. Looking back on it now, I am struck by how much emotion Carr managed to pack into such a slim little book; the narrative is rather affecting, especially towards the end. His wife is young and beautiful, and Birkin gradually comes to fall in love with her, but in a romantic rather than a passionate sense, almost as an obligatory part of a summer idyll.Like the wall-painting, the pleasures of the story are revealed steadily and slowly, and by the end you can only stand back and admire. Back to the Future: The Fall and Rise of the British Film Industry in the 1980s - An Information Briefing" (PDF). And the novel brings us a vanished English country life in deep sunshine – haymaking, sleeping outdoors, Sunday School, rabbit pies, scythes, “ditches and roadside deep in grass, poppies, cuckoo pint, trees heavy with leaf, orchards bulging over hedge briars”. Birkin soon fits into the remote village's slow-paced life, and over the course of a summer uncovering a painting, begins losing his trauma-induced stammer and tics.

After a lifetime of teaching English literature, I have accumulated a private and rather eclectic pantheon of great (mainly modern) novels, in which J. Their patient unravelling of centuries old mysteries with some shocking revelations makes for further excitement and anticipation though out this multi layered work. Helpfully it was quickly accessible for for being straightforward and actually explained the mystery more clearly than the book.

With the peaceful and idyllic countryside setting providing a backdrop as he slowly finds solace and meaning amidst the ruins of his past. Funding for the film was scarce, and it eventually fell to Euston Films (a subsidiary of Thames Television) and Channel Four Films, who had had some success with low budget features such as My Beautiful Laundrette.

Many of the incidents in the novel are based on real events in Carr's own life, and some of the characters are modelled on his family. At the same time, Charles Moon - a fellow damaged survivor of the war - has been asked to locate the grave of a village ancestor. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvellous thing around each corner fades.

The plot concerns Tom Birkin, a World War I veteran employed to uncover a mural in a village church that was thought to exist under coats of whitewash. Slim as it is, this is a tender and elegant novel that seemingly effortlessly weaves several strands together. Birkin had been a ‘forward signaller’, sent out beyond the trenches to direct artillery fire; very few of them survived for long. Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times praised O'Connor's direction, suggesting it lent the film "a strong sense of yearning, as well as a spiritual quality more apparent in the look of the film than in its dialogue.

It is written from Birkin’s perspective, looking back as an old man to a golden summer of his youth, an interlude between the horrors of war and the resumption of his real life; a brief period of suspended time given to him to heal his mind and perhaps his soul. His father Joseph, the eleventh son of a farmer, went to work for the railways, eventually becoming a station master for the North Eastern Railway. The constancy of Sunday worship, Chapel or Church; the tradition of food served to a family and guests sitting dutifully together, heads bowed, saying Grace. And, standing before the great spread of colour, I felt the old tingling excitement and a sure- ness that the time would come when some stranger would stand there too and understand . They put on an excellent season of films based on books and, where possible, asked people associated with it to attend for some questions afterwards.Le lecteur passe un excellent moment à la lecture de ce court roman qui dégage un charme bien particulier. He discovered that the film had appeared as part of the National Film Theatre's Branagh season in May 1999, and that the film's American distributors, Warner Bros. Jonty) Driver has written novels, memoirs, biographies and seven collections of poems, the latest of which is Before (2018). Birkin and Moon both had their different skills and it was fascinating to watch them at work and to admire their professionalism. I really feel that it is a particular skill in an author to be able to tackle these themes and leave behind a book that still feels healing to read.