A Month in the Country

“The graveyard wall was in good repair; although, surprisingly, the narrow gate’s neck was smashed and it was held-to by a loop of binder twine”

For the first half of the novel, nothing Birkin does is not shaded by his awareness of death. Without drawing attention to his war service and combat fatigue, Birkin reveals the impact of the war because he can never entirely locate himself within the moment without thinking about death. Here in his architectural inventory of the ancient gate of the church’s graveyard, Birkin reveals his preference to deal with machines because they are more reliable and logical than people. When they break, they can be fixed, unlike people.

“Indeed I looked like an Unsuitable Person likely to indulge in Unnatural Activities who, against [Keach’s] advice, had been unnecessarily hired to uncover a wall-painting he didn’t want to see, and the sooner I got it done and buzzed off back to sin-stricken London the better.”

This quick self-assessment of Birkin’s appearance, a lame joke, suggests his critical over-judgmental frame of mind—he does not think much of himself. He arrives at Oxgodby unable to make peace with himself, dogged by his war experiences, and savaged by his wife’s infidelities. He is broken and conceives of himself—and his mission to recover the church mural—as pointless, and his life as adrift in existential despair. 

“You might as well know here and now your employment has not my support. But no doubt, you guess that.”

The parson expresses his dislike for Birkin’s mission. He does not believe churches need such ornamentation. In this brief encounter the parson reveals he is more concerned about the money being wasted on the project and his own dislike for bringing in an outsider to work on the church wall. This encounter sets the initial tone for Birkin’s stay: hostility. He is an outsider and the parson makes sure he understands that.

“By nature we are creatures of hope, always ready to be deceived again, caught by the marvel that might be wrapped in the grubbiest brown paper parcel.”

Here, Birkin reveals the impact of his war experience. He shares few specific moments about his time in Europe; his mind is too shattered to bring himself to such bald and immediate revelations. Instead, readers are given a sense of the impact of the war by these sorts of indirect comments that reveal how a man still in his early 20s, still with most of his life ahead of him, has surrendered hope and accepted cynicism and irony. 

“And, afterwards, perhaps I could make a new start, forget what the War and the rows with Vinny has done to me and begin where I’d left off. This is what I need, I thought—a new start and, afterwards, maybe I won’t be a casualty anymore.”

This sentence gains momentum as Birkin gets caught up in his own wish fantasy. He has just arrived in Oxgodby. The game plan sketched out here for Birkin’s life is an improbable, if-wishes-could-come-true hope—tidy and easy. At this point, the remark measures Birkin’s cynicism and his existential despair. That something very like this is exactly what happens at Oxgodby, he will appreciate only years later. 

“And besides, it’s like old times: I developed a great affection for holes. You up your ladder, me down my hole…we’re survivors.”

Moon, reflecting on his sense of survival through existential joy rather than despair, makes a clever joke about their shared war experiences. He specifically notes the harrowing life of trench warfare and their occupations at the church. His glib and clever observation is his way of expressing how he handles his war memories. Only much later, when Birkin is told about Moon’s time in the brig and his dishonorable discharge over charges of attraction to a member of the same sex, does Moon’s true heroism emerges. Birkin will learn he must not give in to despair; at this point he is a survivor in name only. 

“Here I was, face to face with a nameless painter reaching from the dark to show me what he could do, saying to me as clear as any words, ‘If any part of me survives from time’s corruption, let it be this.’”

Birkin, over the course of his month in the country, opens up to others; that is how he triumphs over the past. One of the most intricate and important bonding experiences for Birkin is his growing attachment for the nameless painter whose mural he is recovering. If Birkin is correct about the bones of Piers Hebron, then the bonding he feels underscores his sense of his post-war status. He understands the misfit status of the artist, his own precarious separation from his family and his culture, his lonely life without friends and without love, and ultimately his refuge in art. 

“Her neck was uncovered to her bosom and, immediately, I was reminded of Botticelli—not her Venus—the Primavera. It was partly her wonderfully oval face and partly the easy way she stood. I’d seen enough paintings to know beauty when I saw it.”

To Birkin, Alice Keach is at once a woman who needs to be loved, a dutiful and committed wife, and a muse for Birkin’s recovering heart. From the first time Birkin sees her, he is conflicted. The Botticelli reference suggests he immediately sees her as a sensual creature—one who is strikingly physical, not pure and spiritual. But the reference comes through Birkin’s background in art—thus, Alice Keach is at once immediate and distant, a woman and a work of art.

“But oddly what happened outside was like a dream. It was inside the still church, before its reappearing picture, that was real. I drifted across the rest. As I have said—like a dream. For a time.”

This moment, roughly halfway through the novel, marks Birkin’s low emotional point. He has come to Oxgodby to retreat from the world until he is strong enough to re-engage the world. He immediately throws himself into the mural project and in the process drifts into that fantasy world, safe from the vicissitudes and uncertainties of a world he will, in the end, make his peace with. The most telling words here are those last three.

“It was only a cat. But it was the largest cat and certainly the fiercest looking animal that I ever saw in my life. It had a fluttering song-thrush clamped in its bloody jaw and glared through the window, malevolently eyeing each of us in turn.”

Birkin wants Alice to be his muse, his salvation, and his lover, but the novel works to resist that. Getting involved emotionally or physically with the wife of a parson in a village he is only passing through would be an emotional catastrophe. Moreover, his heart is not ready for such a liaison. Quietly, Birkin’s recollections of the summer counter Alice’s potential as his lover. Here, when Birkin first begins to feel the loneliness in Alice as an invitation for his involvement, he spies this cat. The image is a warning: if Alice is the predatory cat, then the artist Birkin is the dead songbird.

“But one thing is sure—I had a feeling of immense content and, if I thought at all, it was that I’d like this to go and on, no-one going, no-one coming, autumn and winter always loitering around the corner.”

Birkin, in his emotional wounding, keeps hoping that retreat will be his answer. He knows the project with the mural is a summer position, and that when autumn arrives he must return to the world he fled. Here, he immerses himself in the unnatural contentment of escape. To stay in this remote little village is not a healthy option. It is more a reflection of his anxiety and trauma. He hopes for stasis in a world he knows never stays still.

“‘We were in the cleaning business.’”

Birkin comes from a long line of cleaners. This is a rare moment of revelation in which Birkin shares something of his family and their cleaning business. The reference to his family’s cleaning suggests Birkin’s work on the mural, cleaning off five centuries of dirt and whitewash, and his movement to restore his soul.

“And, at the next gathering around that organ, [Mrs. Ellerbeck] mercifully offered me redemption. ‘Oh, Mr. Birkin…we did enjoy that tune you gave us. Can’t you change the words round a bit?’”

This apparently throw-away anecdote—Birkin gets caught up in a Saturday night singalong at the church and contributes an entirely inappropriate, if lively, drinking song from his war days—suggests exactly why Birkin cannot stay in Oxgodby. In a single moment, the novel suggests Birkin’s road to recovery is not in the town. He is given a second chance, but he must change: The next time he sings the song, which is the real crowd-pleaser, he changes the word “ale” for the word “tea.” He cannot be himself and be in Oxgodby at the same time. To be himself, he must return to London.

“Two demons with delicately furred legs clutched him, one snapping his right wrist whilst his mate split him with shears.”

As the mural reveals more figures, here Birkin fixates on what he sees as a singularly detailed figure among those being cast down into hell. Such figures, he observes, are routinely sketched with few details. This one figure represents visually how Birkin feels. The figure is being pulled apart by two dark angels, suggesting Birkin is torn by his feelings for the married Alice and his memories of his marriage.

“And now I found it pleasantly disturbing to consider the possibility of wandering off with her to some quiet room, eating supper, taking her hand, touching her, kiss…Well, we have our dreams.”

Birkin fantasizes about physical involvement with the married Alice. The dream here is a manifestation of his desperate loneliness and tormented heart. He yearns for the comfort of another, but that comfort, he knows in his conscience, is no real answer. Everyone has their dreams, he acknowledges. Alice cannot be the answer.

“There can’t have been too many of us who thought we’d need to worry about growing old…We’re here on borrowed time, and I take what’s to come as it comes.”

Birkin understands that too many soldiers died in the war not to think of his life as a second chance. But he struggles to live knowing he should have died. Birkin begins to tap into a strategy for authentic survival. Here, he starts to find his way back to the world. He is tightlipped about the past, only edging toward admitting memories into his recovery, but he expresses a hardy code for living in a world revealed by the war and by Vinny to be unpredictable, harrowing, and emotionally devastating. The drama of unfolding events, the urgent now, alone sustains.

“‘Oh, you bastards! You awful bloody bastards! You didn’t need to have started it. And you could have stopped it before you did. God? Ha. There is no God.’”

This is a cleansing and cathartic moment for the repressed and taciturn Birkin. Returning from the afternoon with the family of the young man who died in the war, Birkin releases his anger, regret, and pain. He is alone walking home through a field. He addresses the sky itself, knowing that the complete lack of any answer testifies to God’s irrelevance. Salvation will not come from God.

“Now that was a thought! Hell? Passchendaele had been hell! Bodies split, heads blown off, groveling fear, shrieking fear, unspeakable fear! The world made mud! But I knew it was Bible hell she had in mind.”

“What is Hell?” is an innocent enough query. Alice, examining the mural depicting the Last Judgment and the wild tumble of the damned into hell, asks Birkin how he conceives of hell. The answer represents the only time Birkin acknowledges the battle itself—and reveals in fragments the memories of that long, bloody, and pointless siege that has now become a symbol of war’s mass slaughter and absurd brutality.

“But I tell myself it will be better as time passes and it sinks further back. But now we’re different. We know. We’re men apart.”

Moon offers Birkin the only advice he needs to ensure his emotional and spiritual recovery: Time. The novel suggests as much with its narrative frame: Birkin writes years after this summer, a testimony to his own recovery in time. Moon understands that for now the two of them are spiritually alienated, but that time will heal this.

“But there are times when man and earth are one, when the pulse of living beats strong, when life is brimming with promise and the future stretches confidently ahead like that road to the hills. Well, when I was young.”

This is the spiritual confidence that Birkin seeks to recover. This summer of his past, when he first fell in love with Vinny before he was drafted, represents the self he wants so desperately to recover. He wishes to feel again the oneness with the energy and power of nature, and the hope in what is ahead. It is too much to ask a month in the country to accomplish, but Birkin begins this journey.

“If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy?...People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.”

Birkin has learned the first lesson of his recovery. A person cannot live by not living; they cannot recover apart, and they cannot retreat forever. He now understands what he did not comprehend before, when he considered that perhaps he might stay in Oxgodby indefinitely.

“And Alice Keach. I was sure that she was a deeply religious woman: marriage for her really did mean ‘let no man put asunder.’”

At last, Birkin gets it. To intrude on Alice Keach’s marriage would be selfish and, worse, morally destructive. This moment begins his own movement toward emotional recovery: He thinks about another person. The next day, he receives word from his wife to come home to her.

“My heart was racing. I was breathless. She leaned on me, waiting. And I did nothing and said nothing.”

If the novel was about the narrowest definition of love, more should happen right now. Birkin appears to be a coward, backing down from his moment alone with Alice. Their moment approaches; their moment passes. From a cinematic standpoint, the climax of Birkin and Alice’s relationship is hardly climactic at all. Nothing happens. That is what makes it heroic. Alice does not violate her marriage; Birkin does not violate the sanctuary-space of another man’s wife.