32. A Month In The Country: Is This The Greatest Novella Ever Written?

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1:04Dominic Sandbrook: Tabby, as I was saying to you the other day, I don't get to do as much daydreaming as I used to. I used to go into these great reveries when I'd come up with my best ideas. I don't have a chance anymore because I spend so much time doing my life admin. It's the same for you, isn't it? You know, I used to spend a lot of time rewriting my favourite books so that I would get the endings that I'd always hoped for. But you know how you can get that time back, Tabby? I've started using Klarna to handle my real-world money admin, and that gives me the headspace for the more important things like thinking about books.

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2:18I went across to Moon's tent and we sat on the grass in the evening sunshine. Well? He asked. I've been talking over hell with Mrs Keech. Do you think about it often? I said. He pursed his lips, wrinkled his nose and studied the back of his hand. Then, and this was unusual, he looked directly at me.

2:38Dominic Sandbrook: Often. Particularly at night. That's the bad time. Your window's open, you must have heard me. He knew there'd be neither perfunctory sympathy nor questions. 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. Maybe wives know. Yes, of course they must. And people do understand. I met a chap who went back to teaching. Like you, he'd been a signaler out in the middle, out on his own, with only a wire trailing back to his battery. He told me that for the first four weeks, if a pupil dropped a desk lid, he'd throw himself on the floor.

3:19Dominic Sandbrook: At first, they used to snigger. Then they didn't laugh anymore, only stared horrified or in pity. Finally, they just pretended not to notice. Me? In the middle of it, I used to think, well, we're in the shadows now, but I'll have to blow the whistle someday, and then all at once it'll be different. We'll go from this to that. But of course, it couldn't be like that, could it? It has to work itself out. So I keep reminding myself that I'm still a bit round the bend, and perhaps always shall be. He laughed. You too. It was a question that he didn't expect to be answered. The side of my face had been clicking away as he talked.

3:57Dominic Sandbrook: It's not anything like so bad as when you first turned up, he said. I flushed, but he went on. I don't suppose you noticed it happening, but Ox Godbiz just about ironed you out. Hello, everybody. So that was from A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr. It was written in the late 70s, published in 1980. It won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It's the shortest book that we've done so far on the book club, but one that is absolutely exquisitely written. So it's set in Yorkshire after the First World War. It's a book about grief and trauma, about shell shock, but it's also about nostalgia.

4:40Dominic Sandbrook: It's about the English countryside. it's about loss and memory it's about the vanishing world of rural England it's about art and the church the scars of war different kinds of hell and a kind of fleeting lost chance of love and it all unfolds in this wonderful bucolic setting it's a kind of it's a slight book but I think an extraordinarily beautiful one Tabby yeah I mean it manages to convey so much in its sort of slender pages. And it also has quite a special place in the lore of the book club, because about a year ago, our executive producer, Tony Pasta, he handed it to me when the book club was but a twinkle in the milkman's eye.

5:29And he said, oh, you've got to do this on the show one day. And here we all are. So this one's for you, Tony. So I read it about a year ago and I loved it. I thought it was beautifully written, exquisite, and it was very tender and very moving. But coming back to it this time, when I was rereading it this time, I remembered next to nothing about the plot because very little happens. And actually I could remember very little of the characters themselves, really. The mood and the atmosphere, however, clung to my mind. The slightly reticent, slightly sardonic style as well that conveys a great deal while saying not very much.

6:05And also, God, the beautiful nature writing. I know that you think very well of this book, Dominic, because you felt that in my notes, I didn't quite, you know, quite do it justice. So justify yourself.

6:18Dominic Sandbrook: No, I think you have done it justice in the notes. Absolutely. But I think maybe I'm even fonder of it than you are. So yeah, it's 100 pages long. So this really is a book that you can read in an evening because it's very easy to read. It's not a demanding book at all. I totally agree with you, by the way, about that it's the atmosphere and the style and the impressions and the mood that you remember. Because like you, I'd read it before. I couldn't remember the name of the central character. I knew there was something. I knew that it was a story about a bloke who goes and restores a painting in a church and he meets another guy and they sort of hang around in the countryside.

6:59Dominic Sandbrook: This is in the 1920s. But I couldn't remember much more than that. But I did remember, you know, this almost poetic sensibility with which the book is written. The landscape, the long summer, the hedgerows, the birds, and this sense of something slipping out of reach, something so fleeting. There's a great sense of nostalgia. And on that note, I think we should actually say a word on the tone of the novel, because the whole thing is told in in retrospect, by an elderly narrator who is thinking back to this glorious moment in time that is now long gone and it abused the writing with a lovely, sad sense of nostalgia.

7:38So for instance, ah, those days, for many years afterwards, their happiness haunted me. Sometimes listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of summer, day after day of warm weather, voices calling as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness and at day break, the murmur of corn and the warm smell of hayfields ripe for harvest and being young. So God, God, you get a sense there. First of all, the beauty of the writing, the atmosphere it conjures. But also, it's something more complex, I think, than a longing for the past or sentimentality. It's slightly more cynical than that.

8:13Rather, there's kind of a sense of regret that runs through everything, a sense of having let something go, but being totally incapable of changing it. And perhaps, you know, there's never the option to change it. so what's the point of even considering it? It's different to kind of the sense of remembering that we get in say the go-between or Rebecca and Carr himself said that when setting out to write the novel he had wanted the narrator to look back regretfully across 40 or 50 years recalling a time irrecoverably lost and still feel a tug at the heart and he succeeds because as Penelope Fitzgerald who writes the introduction says Carr is by no means a lavish writer but he has the magic touch to re-enter the imagined past.

8:52But then Carr admits that while he was writing it, he ended up looking through this window onto a darker landscape inhabited by neither past nor present. And again, I think you can feel this. This book is so much about what's going on beneath the surface.

9:05Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, about the gaps between what's said and unsaid and about what's happening. And the characters are not even admitting it to themselves. Yeah, the way that the trauma of, say, war can dog you because that is important for the context of this novel. It is, absolutely. It is. I think it's a beautiful book. And I think that passage that you read is a brilliant example of how it captures a particular mood, the summer, the rural rhythms. There's something very Thomas Hardy or A.E. Hausman, which we'll come back to actually, because Thomas Hardy has a definite influence on this book. So maybe a bit of context for people.

9:39Dominic Sandbrook: So we are in 1920. The First World War ended two years ago. and the whole of the novel unfolds with the memory of the war like a kind of black cloud I guess overhead metaphorical cloud because it's this long unbroken summer but two main characters are traumatized by the war and they meet other people who've lost um you know sons in the first world war so much of the story is about reckoning with the scars that you suffered so our main character is tom burkin and he's a war veteran um he has got a twitch we've already heard that mentioned because of shell shock uh his wife has left him and he and his friend who he the guy he befriends in the course of the book charles moon they are really good examples of the kind of the generation of the trenches and they've come home and this isn't a land fit for heroes you know they feel a bit alienated.

10:37It's that lost generation thing again, isn't it?

10:39Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, I guess it is. Their whole lives have been shaped by the experience of the war and by the suffering and the horror they saw there. A little bit like Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway. I mean, this is a much lower key version of a similar kind of experience. And Birkin has come to this remote village in Yorkshire to restore a painting in the church. That's his kind of expertise. And so there's another theme of the book which is kind of the well there are multiple themes there's art there's history and there's also the kind of the decline of religious belief because Birkin no longer believes in God and at one point as we'll see he he shouts I don't believe in you God you know and he basically referring to the first world war so it's not just that you said a lost generation it's a disenchanted generation that has lost its faith and is groping for something to give meaning to their lives, I guess.

11:30Yeah, particularly in pastoral communities like this. You know, you mentioned Thomas Hardy and Thomas Hardy often writes about the encroachment of modernization upon blissful pastoral English countryside. And that's a big part of this book as well, because you get the sense that this is like a moment in time, but it's the last of a particular age, you know, maybe slightly that wind in the willows thing again, a world on its way out. I mean, you've sort of given us the plot already, but basically when Birkin arrives, he's very poor, he's sort of shell-shocked by his time fighting in the trenches.

12:02He's also been estranged from his wife and he's carrying the scars from that. He arrives in the pouring rain into Oxgodby in Yorkshire. He has a twitch and a stammer and this is brought on by the shell shock, but he bears it stoically. And he makes a living out of restoring medieval wall paintings and that's why he's come ostensibly, you know, to restore this medieval painting. and then there's this guy the Chile Reverend Keech who has hired him but he's not very happy that he's there he's basically had to do it because it's a condition of a bequest left to the church and straight away he meets another outsider to the village and this is Charles Moon who you played in that opening reading who's also a former soldier also suffers from nightmares at night we learn later that he has a checkered war record a tragically checkered war record really and he is there also thanks to this bequest because he is there to make reasonable efforts to dig up an ancestor of hers from the 14th century, buried in strange circumstances beyond the walls of the church.

13:05And he's kind of an archaeologist. He's carrying out a dig. But he doesn't seem particularly invested in the work.

13:10Dominic Sandbrook: So when you say her, this is the woman who gave the bequest, both to do the wall painting and to uncover the grave of her ancestor. And this is Miss Hebron, isn't it? Yes, exactly. and those are kind of the ostensible reasons why both men are there but we increasingly learn in in moments revealed from the past never emphatically and never in big you know sort of overly emotional globules but increasingly we learn more about them that they both carry kind of invisible wounds and they're sort of there for the healing afforded by the rural isolation of the countryside. And also we learn about the lovely rural community in Oxgodby.

13:52The villagers are very welcoming towards Birkin. And also he meets the vicar's wife, Alice, with whom he forms a not physical, but a sort of a romantic attachment that's never consummated. So I think Natasha Richardson plays Alice Keach in the movie with Colin Firth. She does. And Kenneth Branagh. Yeah, Kenneth Branagh, his first film role.

14:14Dominic Sandbrook: And actually, I love the relationship between Mrs. Keech and Tom Birkin because it's very understated. It's ephemeral. I mean, but it's very moving. I think it's this brief moment of connection between these two people who, you know, they never really have a possibility of acting upon it. Let's get into the man behind it all because this setting, Yorkshire, the landscapes, the communities, this is all would have been very, very familiar to the book's author. And this is J.L. Carr, James Lloyd Carr. So born in 1912, he's not one of the world's greatest known novelists, but I think he's greatly underrated.

14:56Dominic Sandbrook: So if you're making a list of really, really superb British novelists after the Second World War, I think he's got to be in that list. So he was born into a Methodist family in Yorkshire, and the Methodism and Yorkshire obviously plays a part in this book. There's a family called the Elabeks who welcomed Tom Birkin in and they're very Methodist. They're very kind of, they're simultaneously warm, but they're also kind of culturally conservative. And I think that, Kjell Carr said that's kind of, his own family was very like that. His own father, like Mr. Ellerbeck, was a station master and a Wesleyan lay preacher.

15:35Dominic Sandbrook: And he went to a village school in the North Riding, Kjell Carr. And then he ended up at Castleford Secondary School because he'd failed to get into the grammar school. and in fact the name of the village Oxgodby echoes the village where JL Carwood School which was called Osgodby. It's a real mouthful that. Right I know and actually he didn't want to be a writer he said later I can't think of anything worse than to have your breakfast and sit down and start writing a novel it would be like death itself so he's not a professional writer. This is how you feel about the notes isn't it? One big treadmill of sitting down to write what is essentially a novel about someone else's novel.

16:15So you don't even get the prestigious title of novelist.

16:19Dominic Sandbrook: I'm actually going to be honest with the listeners. I don't even have time for breakfast anymore. Oh, boo-hoo. Cry me a river. He became a teacher and he went to South Dakota as an exchange teacher, which actually found its way into one of his later novels. He didn't massively take to South Dakota, though he did actually go back and visit afterwards. I mean, it must have been very alien. Oh, so alien. You go from Yorkshire to, yeah. Yeah, but then it's interesting because it's on his way travelling back home across the Pacific that he hears that the Second World War has been declared. Oh, right.

16:51Dominic Sandbrook: And then he joined the RAF, didn't he? Yes, he arrives back in England in 1939, and then he joins the RAF in October 1940. But given that he comes from a Wesleyan Methodist family, he doesn't want to kill anyone. He doesn't want to be personally involved in any of the killing. So instead, he's trained as an aerial photography technician and posted to West Africa. and then he served at RAF bases in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Gambia. And then after he comes home, he serves as an intelligence officer. And then in March 1945, he married Gilda Gladys Sexton, who is known as Sally, and she was a Red Cross nurse.

17:27And then they had one son, Robert Carr, and he actually included the second epigraph in my edition of the novel after she died, which I think is quite sweet.

17:35Dominic Sandbrook: So there are three epigraphs. There's one by Dr. Johnson, one by Haussmann, and one by Herbert Trench. and he put the Herbert Trench one in as a tribute to his wife. So romantic to have Dr. Johnson dedicated to your dead wife. So anyway, he became a teacher and he became the headmaster of a primary school in Kettering in Northamptonshire. This is personal for me because Jail Carr lived next door to my grandparents. I have to say that is a lovely fact. It's good to have Sandbrook seniors on the show. So my granddad, I can remember when I was growing up, used to talk about Mr. Carr because he was the headmaster of local school.

18:11Dominic Sandbrook: That's amazing. And therefore, in those days, quite a sort of prestigious figure in what was a small town, the headmaster, Mr. Carr, a very kind of conservative, reticent man who also, as in later life, wrote these books that actually turned out to be really good. I feel like I know a little bit more of your history. It's nice. Thank you. Yeah, rooted in the soil of Middle England. Yeah, well, no surprises there. He said that he thought bad behavior at school was encouraged by kids having a lack of self-esteem. And the reason they had lack of self-esteem was because they had a lack of success.

18:48Dominic Sandbrook: And the reason they had a lack of success was they couldn't read and they didn't read enough. So he would have very much approved of this podcast. So all those, you know, would-be CEOs, you know, looking for success in crypto or Bitcoin. No, no, no. Just come listen to the book club. Absolutely right. So I think this is one of many things that makes Carr an excellent man. Well, he was asked why he wants to be a teacher. He said, because it leaves so much time for other things, which I think a lot of teachers these days would probably be like, really? I mean, look down upon. Yeah, exactly. But the other things were so lovely, what he used to do.

19:22So lovely. Yeah, I completely agree. So he published tiny booklets titled The Little Poets. And these would be, which I think are just the kind of thing that children need to get into poetry or whatever. a sample of each poet with lovely illustrations and then he did monographs historical maps I mean less sort of get out of bed for but hand drawings of the countryside

19:44Dominic Sandbrook: and maps of the counties and stuff yeah I mean this is the kind of stuff that my dad just starts sort of leaping up and down with enthusiasm over but I just can't sum up the same but here's the bad thing how did he do them? he did them from his own bedroom right? yeah exactly so he was not a fan of publishers, you know, any sort of bureaucracy or sort of big corporation. So he thought, well, damn you all. And he started his own press, Quince Tree Press, from his guest bedroom. So another excellent thing about Carr. And then on top of that, he charged children less for his small books that he published because he wanted to try and encourage them to read.

20:23And secondly, He had this quite quirky habit, arguably pissing off butchers over the country far and wide, where he paid his butcher's bill in these things called remainders. And these were books that he hadn't sold, unsold books. And he would use them to pay his butcher's bill.

20:44Dominic Sandbrook: Tabby, you know perfectly well because you've seen my bookshelves in my house. Not the ones people can see behind me. You have loads of unsold books, honestly. The real ones. Seasons in the sun. Seasons in the sun. State of emergency, state of emergency. You should get your revenue for this podcast should be paid to you in Dominic Sanbrook. In Dominic Sanbrook Remainders. You'd love that. I would, actually, I would. I'd feel so emotionally and spiritually enriched. Do you want to hear a nice, have a brilliant example of podcasting professionalism? So you talk about spiritual enrichment. Yes. But actually he, JL Carr, was really interested in spiritual enrichment because he became very interested in churches.

21:19Dominic Sandbrook: Look at that as a link. We should build a monument to that segue. It's absolutely fantastic. He was a Methodist and then he converted to Anglicanism. And in part, that was because he loved church, old Church of England buildings. Actually, my sister-in-law runs a charity called the Friends of Friendless Churches, which restores old churches. So again, this is personal for me. Again, personal for me, which my dad is a big fan of. Is he? Yeah. We should literally do a podcast together. Yeah. Let's just found a church. The book club cult. He started a campaign, didn't he, to restore a church? Yeah, he did with his wife.

21:57So as you say, it was much more kind of the history of the churches, the building themselves that Carl was drawn to rather than the dogma of the church. And then when he started this campaign to restore St. Faith, which was threatened by demolition, he did actually come into conflict with a lot of church authorities. And you can slightly see this, this slight disapproval of doctrine and the body of the church. but anyway he did he did succeed in restoring St. Faith so he retired early in 1968 and he made his living writing publishing with his maps his pocketbooks he even produced his own dictionaries for instance you know English cricketers English kings which I like between 1963 and 1992 he wrote eight short novels which included his best beloved masterpiece which we are discussing here today and And that is A Month in the Country, which he wrote in 1978.

22:49And unusually for books done on the book club, it was critically acclaimed straight away.

22:54Dominic Sandbrook: Even though it was published by a very small publisher, Harvester. And actually, he was completely out of the loop of the kind of media set and publishing and London and all of that kind of thing. And he had this lovely description. He was asked for a definition of himself. And he described himself as follows. James Lloyd Carr a back bedroom publisher of large maps and small books who in old age unexpectedly wrote six novels which although highly thought of by a small band of literary supporters and by himself were properly disregarded by the literary world I just think that's so lovely yeah it's very you know what it is it's very hobbity behaviour Bilbo Baggins yeah he's quite Bilbo Baggins he's very Bilbo Baggins I mean I know people there are people who are already like saying play a book club drinking game every time Tabby mentions of the Lord of the Rings.

23:41Tabby, what about Dominic?

23:42Dominic Sandbrook: No, no, never. Every time Dominic mentions the great man. Yeah. So anyway, he died in 1994, didn't he? He'd had a diary all his life, but he buried them. So the diaries disappeared. There's a biography of him by Byron Rogers, and Byron Rogers says he went to Carr's funeral. And a friend of his said, I mean, there were so many different people, kind of, you know, sort of strange people at this funeral that a friend of his said, I've known him for 40 years, but I recognize only two people at this funeral, which I guess tells an interesting story. All right, so that's J.L. Carr. So a sort of very quiet, in many ways, you might say humdrum life, you know, a long way from the sort of bright lights of literary London.

24:26Dominic Sandbrook: But his best known book, A Month in the Country, I mean, I can remember people doing it at school when I was in my teens. Yeah, lots of my friends did it as a sort of set text, basically, and it's become, you know, a great Penguin classic, you know, It's regarded as one of the loveliest books ever written and all of this. How does he go about writing it? What is motivating him? We mentioned Thomas Hardy. Thomas Hardy is a big influence on the book, isn't he? So it's Thomas Hardy's books, for those people who don't know, are late 19th century. They are immersed in the rhythms of the English countryside.

24:57Dominic Sandbrook: I mean, Thomas Hardy's books are often very tragic and almost slightly melodramatic in their passions, which this absolutely is not. But it draws on the same sense, perhaps, of slight nostalgia for a vanished rural world, for the rhythms of agricultural life, for the English countryside. Almost mythologized in the perfection of its, you know, the summer is always bright. But then he also plays in some of his novels, not in all of them, in some of his novels, in the contrast of that perfect summer in English countryside or whatever. And then the darkness of the encroaching world, you know, coming forth.

25:34Dominic Sandbrook: And so the church, obviously, you can see why he's writing a book about a church, because he's in this campaign to restore this church and faith. And then, of course, the war, the war element to it. So he's writing about the aftermath of the First World War, but he's somebody who had served in the Second and would have known loads of people whose lives had been scarred by their experiences in the Second World War. So he would be very conscious of the psychological damage that war has on men and how difficult they find it to talk about it, as we heard in that introductory reading. Yeah. So, I mean, speaking of that psychological damage of war, let's get on to the book's narrator, because this is Tom Birkin.

26:13And he says of himself, nerves shot to pieces, wife gone, dead broke. And he's determined to isolate himself in this remote countryside setting and escape his troubles. and that's the thing though none of these troubles are ostensible he's very much a man of this generation he is laconically humorous throughout he very rarely confronts you know his woes head on he has absolutely not a glimmer of self-pity about him and the thing I was so struck by this time he's actually pretty unknowable Birkin which I think there are surely shades of car in there he's pragmatic he is emotionally compartmentalized He's a very private narrator.

26:53He only reluctantly lifts the lid on pieces of his backstory, only reluctantly lets his guard down. For instance, when we learn of his wife's departure or of his experiences with the war. So we learn of that, that he was a veteran. He fought at Passchendaele in Belgium in 1917. We get the strong implication, but again, never stated outright that he suffers from shell shock because he says right from the get-go that he has a facial tick and a stutter. And it's interesting because when he first meets the vicar, who's quite uptight, quite anal. The vicar's kind of wariness of this face tick. He sort of looks down on it and the stutter.

27:27You can see that people still didn't really know

27:30Dominic Sandbrook: how to handle. He's embarrassed, exactly. How to handle shell shock. Again, think of Mrs. Dalloway, a much, much reduced Mrs. Dalloway. And that opening reading, his mate Moon is saying to him, I knew somebody who was like you who'd been a signaller out on his own. And the thing about when he was... People pretended not to notice. And people made the noise and he threw himself to the ground and people were embarrassed. They pretended not to notice or whatever. But in a way, he finds a kind of redemption, doesn't he, Birkin, through his work on this. He's fascinated by history and by art. Yeah, but also a very relatable thing about him and a lovely quirk, I think, is that he draws real comfort from imagining the community that would have looked upon the wall painting, the painter who painted it, who he sort of develops a deep spiritual connection to.

28:18and I think that is that's so relatable you know to lose your sort of worries in the present in the

28:25Dominic Sandbrook: contemplation of the past yeah completely and so he's gone to Oxgodby to try to leave the war behind to make it as he puts it I could forget what the war and the rouse with Vinnie had 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 but as you say there's no self-pity in the way he talks about that. He's quite, I wouldn't say he's hard on himself, but he sees himself clearly. I think he's, and he's very Spartan. He's Spartan in the emotion that he indulges in. He's Spartan in the way that he lives, you know, in his dealings with others.

28:59But then, you know, he's very quiet. He never says what he doesn't need to, which is another lovely detail about him. And he draws real solace, as we say, from this sort of journey that he takes into the past. But actually, there's someone who's really disapproving of what he's doing, Ox Godbeard. This is Arthur Keech, the vicar. He's a bit of a bureaucrat. You know, interestingly, he's referred to as J.G. Keech at another point in the novel because Carl hated proofreading. He found it really dull and he often wouldn't do it until the book was actually published. I love that. He just didn't spot the inconsistency in the naming.

29:33Isn't that so funny? I think that's charming.

29:37Dominic Sandbrook: But I think the vicar could be called J.G. Keech, but it could be one of those people who actually ends up being called by another name. Yeah, true. Do you know what I mean? True, yeah, yeah. Like sort of somewhat like one of these royals who are called Bertie, but actually their name is like George or whatever. Oh, yeah, I know. It's like in Rivals or something, someone who's called Lucinda and it's like Muffy. Anyway, I digress. So Arthur Keech, the vicar, he's kind of icily officious. Icily, not sweatily. He has a chilly, cooped up look about him. He's hostile towards Burke and the project.

30:07He's kind of controlling. He's quite a bureaucrat. He's quite earnest. Yeah. He does this thing because he's uncomfortable with Birkin's twitch and stutter, where he determinedly speaks to someone behind Birkin's left shoulder because he can't really meet his eye.

30:22Dominic Sandbrook: Also, the very amusing interaction where he says to Birkin, because Birkin has come to the church to work on this mural, basically against the vicar's wishes. He's going to stay in the church. And the vicar says, well, if you need to take a call of nature, you have to go and use this hut that's outside in the graveyard. And he's mortified by this, by the way. Yeah. And then he says, there's a scythe hanging on the wall. You must be careful that the scythe doesn't fall on you. And Birkin says, I don't know whether he was worried about me beheading myself or basically cutting off something else while I was using the loo.

30:51Basically becoming a unit. Yeah. Some top 1920s health and safety advice there. The interesting thing is that not even Keech, we're not really invited to hate Keech. He has a bit of redemption too. The only characters that we're never really allowed to give redemption to are the punishers of the next character that we're going to meet. And this is Charles Moon. And this is another former soldier that Birkin meets.

31:15Dominic Sandbrook: I love Charles Moon as a character. Yeah, well, you played him brilliantly in the opening reading, I thought. Thank you, thank you. I think, so Kenneth Branagh plays him in the film and you can absolutely see in my mind, he really is Kenneth Branagh. Really? In my mind, he's you. Oh my God. Oh, wow. That's a compliment. I mean, I can see the words in your notes, round faced, comma, likeable. you're laughing much too much at that so for the people who are only listening to this tabby's just out of like a stroke she's laughing so much anyway moon i he's a wonderful character because he's he's more confident than birkin isn't he he's breezy he's a sort of jolly chap he's much posher as well there's big differences between them but he has a scar of his own there's a reference in a couple of times birkin talks about a secret sharer which is a joseph conrad reference because Joseph Conrad wrote a short story called The Secret Sharer.

32:09Dominic Sandbrook: And it's Moon and he, they both have secrets. Well, Moon certainly has a secret because it turns out that Moon, who was decorated in the First World War, he won the military cross, I think, for his bravery. He did. But he was discovered in bed with his Batman, his sort of manservant, basically because he's gay. And he was court-martialed and locked up for the rest of the war. And this is what he carries with him. This is the sort of, this is the scar. The secret shame. Yeah, and he, Birkin and Moon, have this sense of shared trauma and shared suffering. They're marked men. In one case, you know, I mean, Birkin is physically marked by his twitch because of the war.

32:54And Moon by his nightmares as well.

32:56Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, Moon has his nightmares and Moon has to carry this shame with him. And people are always whispering about him behind his back. But also, you know, they're bonded by the fact that, you know, that shame, Birkin carries the shame of his failed broken marriage as well. Yeah, that's true. That's true. And then this incredible deep connection that they share. I think that's this really sweet moment, you know, when they're kind of speaking about the war. And Birkin says he knew there'd be neither perfunctory sympathy nor questions. I think that's utterly of that generation. It's like a profound sympathy from someone that really knows without any of the frills or frippery or insincerity of unnecessary words.

33:33overdone by someone who doesn't quite understand. I think that's really moving. It's the restraint.

33:38Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. I was about to say, that's what's so brilliant about the book, I think. The book is so understated and so restrained. So you could imagine giving this, you know, 10 brilliant writers being given this subject and they would have scenes where characters break down and they're sobbing out the truth and they are wrestling with their demons and all this kind of thing. Or you focus on them screaming their nightmares in the field or whatever. Yeah, but Moon actually just laconically mentions, oh yeah, you probably heard me screaming at night. And he carries the stigma of what happened to him in the war.

34:10Dominic Sandbrook: But actually, his life goes on. He's quite jolly. It's there, but he continues. And I think that's one of the beautifully observed things about the book is that people are not reduced to melodramatic characters. No, and Birkin thinks this wonderful thing. When we dragged ourselves back from the bloodiness, life had seemed brighter than we'd remembered it. We slud off the pearls who'd gone down into death. While it was day, that is, at night in the dark for a time they came back. But we wanted no part of what they now were. Theirs was another world. Hell, if you care to call it that. How understated is that description of it?

34:46And also the nuances of how actually maybe the world could seem brighter, more full of possibility once he were back from those terrible places.

34:52Dominic Sandbrook: He has the connection with a moon. He also has the connection with the vicar's wife, Alice Keech, and she is very beautiful, isn't she? Yeah, so she describes it as looking like Botticelli's Primavera, which is a painting I love. It's a very kind, gentle, oval face, and she is very kind to Birkin. The symbolism in the book is so understated, but there's a lovely example of that when they first meet. So when they first meet, he's watching a butterfly, a red admiral, kind of dancing among that sort of tombstones. Nabokov is just sweating with excitement I know, Vladimir Nabokov would love this and he says the butterfly flew into the air once more for a moment it seemed it would settle on the rose in the hat but it veered off and away into the meadow and actually this sense of something so fleeting and then it's gone is like Alice his relationship with Alice but also it goes back to the Keats poem where he talks about butterflies you know loving I'd rather something like we would rather we were butterflies you know loving for a day than not have each other for a whole season, whatever it is, because butterflies have very short lifespans.

35:53Dominic Sandbrook: They forge this intense emotional connection, which again is so understated. Nothing is said out loud. She just likes to spend time in his company. It is so, I'm going to betray my soppy side, but it is so touching, their relationship, I think. It is. I don't think it's soppy at all. It's meant to be touching. And then there's another connection that Birkin kind of forges during his time in Oxgodby. And this is the nameless painter who he learns more and more about through the fact that, you know, he leaves hairs from his beard and the paint. And he thinks about what it must have been like day after day on the wall, just as he spends day after day on the wall.

36:25And that, you know, he did this for life and traveled around. And the one thing that they both leave, you know, a sign of what they can do is this mural. And, you know, they're both temporary visitors to the village, but both are able to leave something lasting.

36:41Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, so he, a moon jokes to him, doesn't he? How are you getting along with your painter? Like they're friends or whatever. Yeah. You must know him pretty well. Go on, tell me about him. But actually what happens is that Birkin, because he's uncovering this wall painting, which is behind the whitewash, he does learn more about the world of this guy and this guy, doesn't he? He's not alone though, is he? No, I guess that's... Because Moon makes the discovery. So Moon is trying to uncover the character who is, you know, is it Piers Hebron, who is buried out there. 14th century crusader knight. It all gets very Dan Brown.

37:16Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. I mean, you could not think of two writers more different than J.R. Gar and Dan Brown. Well, he discovers something about this Crusader Knight and the reason for his being buried outside of the church, the mysterious reason. And it turns out that, you know, he certainly is not all that he appears and that they too share some sort of a spiritual connection. They too are outsiders to the worlds that they have come back to from, you know, the trials of war. but what that secret is the secret at the heart of the Crusader Knight strange burial we will be revealing after the break oh we have to wait until the break yeah gutting alright see you then bye

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39:02Dominic Sandbrook: Hi there. I am fully charged and here to tell you Toy Story 5 is now on Disney+. Woody! It's been too long, cowboy. Woody, Buzz, and Jesse are back for a brand new adventure with some seriously cool new tech. What? Holy butterscotch! You said it, Jesse. So, save your batteries and watch the global phenomenon at home. And the best part? It's perfect for the whole family. Power up your movie night and watch Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5, now streaming on Disney Plus, rated PG.

39:37welcome back to the book club now dominic you have two very exciting things to tell us don't

39:42Dominic Sandbrook: you two pieces of top information i'll build up to this so this is the second best bit of information we have our own dysfunctional shell-shocked but ultimately decent and good natured community of book lovers and that's people who sign up for our newsletter book club Notes. So basically, if you get book club notes, it comes every Saturday. A lot of you will have heard this before, and I apologize that you're having to listen to it again. Basically, it's thoughts about the books. It's amusing witty-sisms from Tabby. It's like a mural painting in itself, but with words. I stand in judgment. Dominic is cast into hell, and you will get to cackle from the sidelines.

40:18Dominic Sandbrook: Generally, what it consists of are people saying, I really agree with Dominic's judgment last week. Tabby's done on what she's talking about. Tabby can do better. Yeah. So you get that every Saturday. It's amazing. And you sign up at thebookclubhq.com. Now, I said that was the second best bit of information. The best bit of information is that Alfie, our assistant producer, whose family roots are intertwined with those of JL Carr, he informed me that in his neck of the woods in Yorkshire, there is a Wetherspoons pub with a special JL Carr section in it. This isn't even branded content. It's just insane.

40:55Dominic Sandbrook: I know. That is magnificent. Weather students have gone sky high in my estimation, thanks for that. I mean, the tragedy is that Alfie didn't tell us this before, so we could record it on location in the weather spoons. Pointing a cider in hand. Exactly. Was that a Yorkshire accent? No. No, it definitely wasn't. That was my normal accent. Right. I left you on tenterhooks. Anyway, you were going to tell us about the Crusader Knight who Charles Moon is excavating in the field outside the church. and it's the extraordinary secret held by this knight and how it relates to the First World War and indeed the story of a month in the country.

41:29Dominic Sandbrook: Sabi, the floor is yours. I can't wait. Thank you. So after digging up this crusader knight, Piers Hebron, Moon and Birkin discover that the knight's skeleton is wearing a crescent pendant on a chain. And Moon speculates that in fact, he converted to Islam to save, this is a quote, to save his skin after being captured on crusade and therefore was excommunicated upon his return. And this is why he was not allowed to be buried in consecrated ground. Oh, nice. But this opens up lots of unlikely parallels between the night and Moon. And then also the kind of the disillusionment of war suffered by all three.

42:07Because Hebron and Moon are both outsiders in their communities. Hebron was buried outside the church. Moon lives in a tent in the same meadow to do his work. Both men are outcasts from a society that consider them sort of in some way or another heretical. and would see them demonized. The fact is that Moon is whispered about and he's never welcomed into Elks Godby quite as Birkin is with as open arms. And Birkin also realizes in connection to all this that the man cast into hell in the mural that he's been restoring, which turns out to be a doom mural with Christ sat in judgment, is actually a portrait of Piers Hebron.

42:45So it's all connected. It really is Dan Brown.

42:48Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, the falling man. Exactly. Exactly. The falling man. And this opens up this concept that runs through the book, that hell can exist in many, many different forms in any person's life. Yeah, that's true, isn't it? So Birkin and Moon and Hebron have all lived through the hell of war. The hell is kind of their own mind as well, their memories and whatnot. The dogs them. Yeah. Exactly. And Alice Keach actually asks Birkin at one point, do you believe in hell? And he says, Pastrendale had been hell. Bodies split, heads blown off, groveling fear, shrieking fear and speakable fear. The world made mud.

43:22Dominic Sandbrook: But then she says, but I knew it was Bible hell she had in mind, hell that went on and on, an aching, timeless hell. Which is that of the mural. Yes, it's that of the mural, exactly. And obviously this, we only see the First World War very obliquely in this book. It's only hinted at. It's only sort of hinted at in little moments like this or in memories that sometimes flash up for Birkin. But again, he's not like Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway. No. There's no sense of the writer wallowing in it. Or that it's broken him. No, it's something that comes up every now and again, and he tries to push it to the back of his mind.

43:56Dominic Sandbrook: But there are moments where you get a sudden glimpse of just what the war, the horror of the war, this mechanised, you know, poison gas, trench warfare, mass slaughter, what it means. So a really good example of this, one of the local families, the Sykes family, welcomes Birkin in and he goes for tea with them, and he sees a picture of their son in uniform, I think it is, and they say oh that's our purse he was a right good lad purse says this bloke's father a real worker give anybody a hand they all liked him and it's clear that he was lost in the war their son and it's very moving you know we don't learn anything more about him but then when Birkin is walking back home he thinks about this boy who was killed in the war and he screams and shouts at the heavens you bastards you awful bloody bastards you didn't need to have started it and could have stopped it before you did.

44:47Dominic Sandbrook: And then he shouts, God, ha, there is no God. And there, it's just a fleeting moment. And you can almost, I mean, you wouldn't miss it if you were reading it, but you'd sort of move past it quite quickly. But it's a hint of the sort of the horror and the trauma and the tragedy that is always slightly out of focus in this book. There's also this kind of sense of the disillusionment of it. You know, the First definitively dispelled that idea of glorious warfare because it was mechanized and it was death on a scale never seen before and it was machine guns and trenches and it was very different to people's ideals of war that had come before and so obviously you can see from that the way that he you know shouts into the air how he does have anger in it and then you can also see you know in the way that hebron he went out on a holy wall yeah crusades yeah a crusade for you know in the name of Jesus or whatever it may be.

45:41And then, you know, he comes back a whole other faith or, you know, and to be buried outside of his church, the church that he went on crusade for. So it's different forms of disillusionment that are connecting past and present.

45:54Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. And it's not, it's interesting, the book. So the book, we've made it sound like a war book. It's so not, no. It's not really a war book, but it's not really any, I mean, that's the lovely thing about it. It's quite unclassifiable. There's a love story, but it's not really a love story. It's a book about pastoral England, I guess. I guess the pastoral England stuff, the mood, is the thing that always lingered in my mind, that it was a beautiful evocation of an English summer and a sort of sleepy, vanished, nostalgic world. Yeah, exactly, that nevertheless affords kind of great solace to him.

46:23Because in the present, I mean, Birkin is reflecting on that summer with a real sense of wonder. You know, he marvels at that time spent in what Penelope Fitzgerald calls the last years of the horse-drawn age.

46:35Dominic Sandbrook: Oh, this is a lovely bit in the book, Tubby. Yeah. Do you remember he goes to like some, it's like the hottest day or whatever, and they go to some, everyone's taking the day off and they're going to some sort of summer celebration. Yes, yeah. And he remembers the horses going down the street. And he says, he describes the horses and he says, those great magical creatures soon to disappear from highways and turning furrow. Did I know it even then? I suppose not, nor anybody else in Oxgodby. From childhood, they'd always known the sound of hooves fitfully beating stable floors in the night hours and the bitter smell of burning corn at the smithy.

47:06Dominic Sandbrook: How could they foresee that in a few brief years their fellow sharers of field and road would be gone forever? And there's your kind of nostalgia and the sense of regret and loss. Like he's looking back and he's remembering this pastoral world that is slipping away even at the time when he was there, I guess. Yeah, and I think it's so interesting that, you know, he said when he set out to write this that he was going to write an easygoing story, a rural idyll along the lines of Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree, which is a book that I love. But I would say that this book, A Month in the Country, only resembles that really superficially in the kind of the beauty of the landscape, the simplicity of the way they all live, the sort of the cider, the gossipy community.

47:53There's far more a sense in this that it's the last hurrah of this age, that it's all dwindling, it's all passing away. It's like Wind in the Willows, but if the Wind in the Willows was in its final season, you know, in Under the Greenwood Tree, which has the same pastoral tone, there's none of the regret or the painful nostalgia. You know, that's a sweet Victorian romance about first love. As you say, it's very hard to know what this is about. I think healing is probably a big part of it.

48:19Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, it's a book about healing, isn't it? To some degree, about coming to terms with, I don't know, Birkin in the course of the book comes to terms with the experience of the war, I guess, through doing this painting. through spending the time this summer. I mean, in a way, it's not really a book about any one thing, and that's part of its power. But it's elusive that it's always slightly out of reach. Although I do think a couple of things. Number one, I mean, I know you're going to talk a bit more about how beautiful the nature writing is. But number two, there's a real sense of texture sometimes.

48:50Dominic Sandbrook: So Birkin as a narrator will talk about like an oil lamp or a stove or something. And there's a real love and a relish for the physical details of this world. Tosi, that massive stove that he first encounters in the church on this sort of loft where he sleeps. He finds real comfort in kind of tinkering with it. And it almost takes him an identity in his mind. And it's such a satisfying book to read in the way of it. You know, the smoke, the dawn, the coziness, the endless helpings of Wednesdaydale cheese and like hunky bread, the tea cakes, you know, all of that. it's so idyllic the physicality of it the physicality of the world it's one of those books that make you think gosh I wish it was summer well it is summer when we're recording this but basically I wish I wasn't doing a podcast so I would go and like sleep in a church and eat hunks of cheese wish I wasn't cursing the heat in my air-conditioned living room exactly but it's so honest and also at the beginning there's this real sense of hope because he says and then God helped me on my first morning in the first few minutes of my first morning I felt that this alien northern countryside was friendly, that I turned a corner, and that this summer of 1920, which was to smolder on until the first leaves fell, was to be a propitious season of living, a blessed time.

50:10Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, it's lovely. And we're talking about the nature writing. There were so many wonderful bits. The rain had ceased and dew glittered on the graveyard grass. Gossamer drifted down air currents, a pair of blackbirds picked around after insects. a thrush was singing where I could see him in one of the ash trees and beyond lay the pasture I'd crossed on my way from the station then more fields rising towards a dark rim of hills and as it lightened a vast and magnificent landscape unfolded I turned away it was immensely satisfying and then he fries up some bacon to have his tea some thick rashes of bacon and you're like God almighty I mean you said Bilbo Baggins this is like Bilbo Baggins his dream yeah exactly and then he says and he talks about you know his food store tea, marge, cocoa, rice, a loaf, meth, rashes of bacon and made a thick sandwich.

51:00I mean, this is like heaven for you, minus the foie gras.

51:02Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, thank you. I probably wouldn't have margarine, to be fair. But it caused, of course you wouldn't, that would be beneath you. Well, also, I don't live in the 1970s anymore. So, I mean. Yeah, or do you? That's the question, really. Yeah, that's fair. But it all calls back to mind the books, because epigraphs are very important in Carr's books. and his third epigraph which is Herbert Trench and this is the one that was added after Carl's wife died so it's she comes not when noon is on the roses but when the night is on the hills and the great voices roll from the sea by starlight and by candlelight and dreamlight she comes to me and so it's all about how coming love and peace can only really come in stillness and like Burke in arriving in Oxgodby emotionally shattered miserable in himself devastated by his wife this stillness allows him to in some way recover the pieces of himself, I guess.

51:52Dominic Sandbrook: There's a lovely bit. So his relationship with Alice Keech, it's not so much about what he says to her. It's actually about how he listens to her. She says to him at one point, you do listen, you know how to be still. Don't you know that when people are with you, they don't have to say something. I mean, just say anything to fill in the silences. He's a sort of comforting presence to her because she's basically trapped in a marriage with this incredibly chilly vicar. She's very beautiful and probably, well, we can only guess at her personality, can't we? Yeah, it's true. because she's quite perfect, isn't she?

52:22And also you see a different side of her as you do the vicar when he visits them in their strange, almost fairy tale-like house in the woods, which is gloomy and it has these massive trees around it. And she seems kind of nervous and uncomfortable in a way that she doesn't when she's out in the open with him.

52:39Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, exactly. But that actually brings us to kind of the church and the chilliness of the church in this book versus the warmth of the community that takes him in because Keech is such an unfriendly character. And, you know, the denizens of Oxbody welcome Birkin into their community with open arms. And again, it's this old-fashioned community. Like it's full of ploughman's lunches. Think of men taking off their jackets and coats to expose their braces and their tapes and their long, more limited underpants. As Carr himself said, it's the last of the plough horse and candle to bed age. And then you get Keech, who's a kind of, he's also an outsider.

53:15he doesn't really welcome in Birkin because he doesn't approve of his project whereas the Elabeks bring him into their lives they have Sunday lunch with him his visit to the Sykes family and it's almost as though the kind of chilliness of the church versus the warmth of the almost pagan outdoorsiness of the old ways

53:35Dominic Sandbrook: yeah I guess that's I think that's reflecting J.L. Carr's suspicion of the sort of ecclesiastical authorities but also authority more generally and kind of organisation and bureaucracy. And Keech is very much, I mean, you described him earlier as a bureaucrat, the vicar. He doesn't really want him there. It means he's probably going to have to fill in some forms. Quite a modern man. Yeah, he's a more modern man. But actually, interestingly, for a book that's set in a church, there are very few scenes of like worship in the church. Yeah. Birkin does go off with the Methodists and he goes to their chapel services and he's a bit sort of bewildered by it all and finds it slightly awkward.

54:10Dominic Sandbrook: But actually, he doesn't, we've already said, had him shouting against God. He doesn't believe in God himself. He doesn't have any faith. He's lost his faith. And he says, I became an unbeliever when I was 18, maybe 17, and it wasn't a momentous decision. You know, you could argue that's to some degree of its time. This is a point when people's certainties have been rocked by the First World War. Eroded by two wars, yeah. Yeah, well, they will end up being eroded by two wars. Yeah, in due course, yeah. Because, I mean, I think that probably reflects cars. But that said, there is a sort of spiritual side to him because he thinks a lot about hell and about the mural and the last judgment.

54:48Yeah, and he seems to think that judgment is kind of justified that you would expect in this world, I suppose, where you've seen young men slaughtered on a mass scale. You would expect to see a judgmental sort of punishing Jesus rather than an emphatically warm-hearted one.

55:04Dominic Sandbrook: Well, that's the Jesus that he uncovers in the mural. Yeah, it's the doom mural. It's a terrifying Jesus, isn't it? Somebody who he thinks would judge him. But we're not, I don't know, is he equating that with the kind of military authorities who judged his friend Moon or something? It's hard to say, or maybe I'm just, I'm drawing a connection. It is hard to say. I did wonder that though. I did wonder that. But he approves though, of the Jesus in that mural. And he feels very connected to the mural. It kind of summons up this kind of old England, this old dying spirituality. You know, and for instance, as he says in the season very early, most Saturdays, dad used to go off course fishing.

55:40He used to stick his head into my bedroom, just off to praise my maker on the riverbank. And that's also kind of, it's almost like the pan in The Wind and the Willows, like this kind of primal pagan religion rooted in the English countryside that's slowly slipping away.

55:53Dominic Sandbrook: Well, I mean, I guess you could say this is part of a, this is a very late example of a massive trend in English writing, which is these evocations of the countryside. and they're so often set, they're either written or set around the turn of the 20th century. This is such a long running thing in like English culture that the First World War is this terrible chasm and there was a Lost Paradise before sort of Thomas Hardy novels and then afterwards it's all cars and you know, unemployment and men in flat caps in soup kitchens and stuff. And I think the month in the country, it almost sort of knowingly buys into that, I think.

56:35Dominic Sandbrook: And Birkin is quite wry about it. Because there is a sense of loss, isn't there? There's a sense of time passing. He says at one point, doesn't he, you know, it's all gone. And he thinks that when he's telling us the story, he would say, well, this, of course, was all to go soon. So quite early on, he says, God, when I think back all those years, it's gone. It's gone. All the excitement and pride of that first job. Ox Season of calm weather, gone as if they'd never been. I mean, that's quite poignant, I think. I mean, when you think about your own life and things that vanish never to return. Well, because also that's the thing, though.

57:13I mean, it's all a memory, isn't it? None of it exists anymore. And if you compare that to the hopefulness of when he said, oh, and you know, God, that day in 1920 when I looked over, I felt like I could shake it all off the past. Because he does leave Oxgodby, gets a letter from his wife, his estranged wife, saying she wants him back and he leaves. and there's this really sad bit and that's why the book is haunted by this kind of uniquely wistful feeling of sadness mingled with a sense of loss because he sort of ponders he says if I'd stayed there would I have always been happy? No, I suppose not people move away grow older, die and the bright belief that there will be another marvellous thing around each corner fades there's now or never we must snatch a happiness as it flies because this is another brilliant thing I think about a month in the country that Birkin tempted though he is he never actually idealizes it all.

58:02He's wise to the fact that it couldn't have lasted forever. It was just a moment in time. And so he kind of, he sort of resists the allure of nostalgia. So the novel kind of celebrates, but also refuses to indulge in the concept of what could have been. And the promise of that perfect window in time, he knows it could never have been sustained. It's all about how everything is temporary. All good and beautiful things are temporary, all happiness, they're all passing.

58:29Dominic Sandbrook: Well, like the butterfly, right? Remember that thing about the butterfly? It's there for a moment and then it's gone. And actually that takes us to, so you mentioned the epigraphs. There's one by A.E. Houseman, a Shropshire lad, great poet who J.L. Carr loved. Yeah, his favourite poem. And this is a line from Shropshire Lad. Now for a breath I tarry, nor yet disperse apart. Take my hand quick and tell me what have you in your heart. You've just got a split second. You've just got a moment in which to make a profound emotional connection with somebody. And as Ingrid Norton said, she said, the happiness depicted in a month in the country is wise and wary, aware of its temporality.

59:07And there is nothing that captures that Houseman poem more than Birkin's parting with Alice Keech. Because he never even says goodbye.

59:16Dominic Sandbrook: I think this is such an incredibly moving moment. So they've had this deep connection, which they've never acknowledged. It's not, is it physical? Is it emotional? It's kind of hard to say, but it's absolutely there. There's an electricity and it's their last meeting. And he says afterwards, I should have lifted an arm and taken her shoulder, turned her face and kissed her. It was that kind of day. it's why she'd come then everything would have been different my life hers we'd have had to speak and say aloud what both of us knew and then maybe turn from the window and laying down together on my makeshift bed and then he allows himself to daydream for a second afterwards we would have gone away perhaps on the next train my heart was racing I was breathless she leaned on me waiting and then this killer line and I did nothing and said nothing oh so sad it's so sad and also it's so interesting because it's kind of the counter.

1:00:17It's the opposite to Thomas Hardy. In Thomas Hardy, they always do do, you know, they always do leap. So in Under the Greenwood Tree, Fancy takes a chance and they go together, test the devils, test an angel, run away. There's always some sort of satisfaction to be had, whether it's in a broken heart or a sense of romantic fulfillment. He doesn't give you any of that in this.

1:00:39Dominic Sandbrook: No, the butterfly flies away. Nothing is tied up neatly because life isn't. Yeah, they made a brief connection, then they'll never see each other again. Yeah, it's like the book eddies and flows, moments of great intense happiness with no meaning, moments of small deaths. Yeah, and that's what the book captures. Yeah, well, I think it's a wonderful book. You're speechless. I am speechless. You have tears running down your face. I'm stammering like a man from Passchendaele. Eating vast quantities of Wednesdaydale and bread. So now we have to give this book a mark. Tabby, you've suggested bread and Wensleydale sandwiches.

1:01:16Dominic Sandbrook: The Wensleydale's living rent-free in your head, by the way. I like Wensleydale. But I think you missed a massive gift to us in the first half of the book where a character is described as having a splendidly free-range moustache. You. For a man with very little facial hair, your infatuation with the facial hair of other men is suspect. Wow. Okay. So I think we should rank this in splendidly free-range moustaches. But if you want to do it in Wensleydale cheese, but you might guess. You know what I really want to do it in? What do you want to do it in? Potentially hazardous trips to the loo. Okay, fine.

1:01:48Dominic Sandbrook: We'll do it in that. In emasculating scythes. So what are you, who's going to go first? Me or you? I'll go first. Go on then. You know what? I'm actually upping my mark. Discussing this book with you. Yeah, discussing this book with you has certainly made me change my mind. Okay, wow. So go for it. I'm going to give it eight and a half out of ten. Oh, come on. You've gone with a half. It's a while since we had a fraction. I thought you were going to go to nine I was going to take that as a massive win and now I feel cheated It's a small win, it's a cheap win So I just think it is a slender novel but it is a total gem of a novel It's lovely, it's beautiful, it's very moving I felt moved even discussing it during that recording It affords one an afternoon of total, total joy It's just lovely It's just a lovely, lovely book That nature writing The emotion that it manages to capture without ever saying things in a straightforward, on-the-nose, cheap way.

1:02:45Nothing comes cheaply. No character, no feeling, no atmosphere. The only thing about it is that it slipped away from me quite quickly just as it did the first time. But maybe that is also part of the power of it, you know. It's all about temporarily and how things often don't have meaning, they just are. So, you know, maybe that's part of the magic of it.

1:03:04Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, I can see that, actually. I was thinking about that when you said to me about it, that it's like, you know, smoke on the wind or something. and how much it's a mood that grips you rather than the characters because the characters are quite reticent and because we never have a moment of emotional catharsis. You know, when we did Rebecca a few weeks ago and the sort of gigantic, technicolor, melodramatic emotions of Rebecca, this is so kind of understated, restrained by comparison. However, so I'm going to give it nine. I'm going to give it nine actually for a similar reason. I'm docking a mark for a similar reason to you, because I think perhaps sometimes it could be, you know, it's so elusive.

1:03:46Dominic Sandbrook: It doesn't embed itself. However, I think there is such beautiful writing. And actually the final lines of the book, I was honored to read them out because I just think they're so moving. He says, we can ask and ask, but we can't have again what seemed ours forever. The way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass All this happened so long ago And I never returned, never wrote Never met anyone who might have given me news of Ox Godby So in memory it stays as I left it A sealed room furnished by the past Airless still, ink long dry on a put down pen But this was something I knew nothing of As I closed the gate and set off across the meadow Oh it's so sad Tubby Yeah Yeah.

1:04:35Dominic Sandbrook: Anyway. Oh, it's such a moving episode, Tabby. Such a moving episode. I'm off to fry up some bacon and think of happier times. Okay, I'm going to go and dig up a night. Bye-bye. Bye.

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