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The Summer After the War

[NOTE: I have recently reviewed Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent. In the appendix to the British paperback edition, she lists a number of novels as being especially important to her: I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith), A Month in the Country (J. L. Carr), Jane Eyre, Tess of the Durbervilles, and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. Most of them I have read, but I knew the first two only by reputation. Perry has inspired me to remedy that omission.]

Although brief and charmingly unpretentious, this little novella caught me in a time warp from the very first page, and did not let go until the end. A man gets off a steam train at the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby, carrying an odd assortment of baggage and wearing a prewar coat. Which war? Everything was pointing to 1920 or so; the style, the detail, the off-hand humor of the first-person narration was absolutely that of a memoir of the period, the genuine article. I looked at the copyright: 1980. Something must be wrong; surely the date must refer to some later edition? But no: James Lloyd Carr was only three when war broke out; this novella, though clearly based on some of his real-life experiences, is an extraordinary feat of imagining himself back to an earlier time.

Tom Birkin is a veteran of Passchendaele in WW1, and further reeling from his wife's desertion; a nervous twitch disfigures one side of his face. He has accepted a commission to uncover a medieval mural of the Last Judgement hidden behind layers of whitewash on the apse of a village church, sleeping in the belfry and attending to his needs behind the cowshed. There is one other veteran similarly employed, an ex-captain called Moon, who is searching for the tomb of a disgraced ancestor of the lady of the manor, whose wealth will not be available to the parish until these tasks have been performed. The vicar, Rev. Keach, is a misanthropic skinflint living in a vast decaying rectory; his beautiful young wife, however, takes to visiting the church to watch Tom at work. Another visitor is the young daughter of the stationmaster, who involves Tom in the Sunday life of her father's Wesleyan chapel, which he finds more to his secular taste than the services in the dusty church.

If Birkin was not always an unbeliever, his experiences in the Flanders mud have made him so. Yet religion plays a great part in the novel. Bit by bit, as he works on the apse mural, he sees that it is a masterpiece, executed with a richness of color, eye for detail, and sense of drama that propels it right out of its time. While the side showing the blessed ascending into Heaven is blandly conventional, the part depicting Hell is strikingly personal. Birkin has known his own hell at the front; Moon has been through a hell of his own, but of a different kind; Alice Keach, the vicar's wife, indicates that she may know yet another kind of hell, but this is left for Tom and the reader to surmise. All the same, amid the work at the Church and hymns at the Chapel, a real restoration is taking place. It is not just the painting that comes to life, but Tom Birkin himself. He finds himself making friends, expanding from his solitude into the life of the community, taking a whole day off with Moon, for instance, to help with the harvest. Tom is slowly getting cured. This book stands, I think, with Pat Barker's Regeneration as one of the great novels about first-war shell-shock and the road beyond it.

I have no idea why Carr chose the same title as the famous Turgenev play. Perhaps because both works share the same sense of erotic possibility never entirely realized. But I think it is another of Carr's games with time. You expect four weeks, five at the most. But the endless summer stretches for month after month until one morning, after an overnight storm, Birkin suddenly realizes that summer has gone, autumn too, and that all around him people are preparing for winter. If I had any doubt before, the beauty of Carr's final pages convince me that he was a great writer—not of our time for sure, not even of his own, but heir to the great tradition of English pastoral melancholy, the poetry of A. E. Houseman and autumnal music of Edward Elgar:

It would be like someone coming to Malvern, bland Malvern, who suddenly is halted by the thought that Edward Elgar walked this road on his way to give music lessons or, looking over to the Clee Hills, reflects that Houseman has stood also in that place, regretting his land of lost content. And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart—knowing a precious moment has gone and we are not there.

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, a loved face. They've gone and you only wait for the pain to pass.

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FOOTNOTE 1 : THE MOVIE

I ordered the movie after reading the novel. Made in 1987, it stars the young Colin Firth (Birkin), Kenneth Branagh (Moon), and Miranda Richardson (Mrs Keach). All are perfect in their parts, and the whole thing is beautifully filmed in the Yorkshire countryside. A special feature is the use of existing music (I think I caught Vaughan Williams and some Tallis) that exactly fits subject and period. Any fears that the film might coarsen the quiet understatement of the novel are entirely unfounded. "Understatement" here is itself an understatement; the strongest emotions are conveyed in silence; Miranda Richardson is especially poignant in this regard.

[The one exception (and this surprised me) is the soldier Birkin encounters in the York cafe, who tells him about Moon. In the book, as I recall, it was handled with some subtlety; here, it is merely vindictive and frankly unbelievable.]

Carr's novella is short, but in order to give the movie the space it needs, much has had to be cut. Birkin's relationship with the Chapel folk, for example, is greatly abbreviated, and that final harvesting scene has been omitted. As for the mural Birkin is supposed to be restoring, the painter hired by the film company has done a terrific job, but by the same token, what you see is what you get; you are not left with the idea that this is a work of blazing genius, as is possible when all you have are the author's words.

Be warned, though: there are no subtitles. Given that many of the characters, especially the children, have strong Yorkshire accents, this makes it all but incomprehensible at times. And the pervasive understatement in both Branagh and Firth's delivery makes for a lot of tailing off and murmuring. Not therefore recommended for the hard of hearing!

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FOOTNOTE 2 : THE COVER

New York Review Books are usually so marvelous with their covers that it baffles me how they could have chosen this Bonnard painting for this particular book. It is indeed vibrant and gorgeous, but it gives an entirely wrong idea of the novel. Mediterranean color for Yorkshire rain? Hot passion for understated erotic possibility? An close interior for a book that is spent largely outdoors or in drafty churches? I tried playing with similar covers using an English artist of the period, Stanley Spencer. They don't all work equally well (I would have loved to have found a Spencer painting of a church without other figures in the foreground), but any one of them sets up better expectations than the Bonnard.