Sampled and Foregone: J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country

don't hoard the masterpiece

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I have a theory, often repeated to long-suffering friends, that oysters are the highest culinary experience. They embody a paradox: on the one hand, they’re raw, and therefore the least prepared of all dishes. Yet on the other, they need an expert to get them ready, otherwise they’ll be unpleasant at best and poisonous at worst. The point, I suppose, is that the most impressive thing a cook can do is get out of a flavor’s way. The Wellfleet, that king of oysters, tastes like umami and the cold Atlantic. The role of the kitchen, with a Wellfleet, is to let it be itself, to bring it to us as pure as possible. It takes restraint to do that. It takes experience. It takes taste. And it takes confidence because, apart from a little vinegar and maybe some diced shallot, there’s nothing to hide behind with an oyster: either it is well prepared, or it isn’t.

That same sense of masterful restraint permeates one of the hidden classics of modern literature, J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country. First published in 1980, the book feels like it came from another time. I discovered it by accident on the search for something to distract me over Christmas, and found far more than I’d been looking for. It’s got all the freshness of an oyster and—amazingly—no writerly frills. Carr never once gives in to the temptation to say more than he must. In that refined space, he manages to do a very hard thing: he gets out of the way of his own genius.

The premise is simple: Tom Birkin, recently home from WWI, where he was an advance signaller, comes to the Yorkshire town of Oxgodby to restore a medieval painting of the Last Judgment that has long lay covered in whitewash. Disliked by the local vicar and living in the church’s belfry for the summer, Birkin slowly integrates into the idyllic life of a town “still in the horse age,” makes friends, falls in love, and gradually becomes aware that he’s recovering a lost masterpiece.

“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.”

A Month in the Country is short—less than 150 pages—but it packs in plenty of passages like these. The excruciating nostalgia, the sense of a whole new life sampled then foregone, never really lets up. Each new friend, each church service overheard, each new figure uncovered from beneath the whitewash is rendered with the scintillating clarity of dew burning off a field.