42 pages • 1 hour read
A Month in the Country
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The Difficult Process of Restoration/Reclamation
The massive project that Birkin undertakes—to recover from nearly 500 years of neglect a church mural depicting the Last Judgment—symbolizes his efforts that summer to restore his shattered psyche. He is a war-weary soldier, suffering from combat fatigue and afflicted with a facial tic and a stammer. He is burned out and suffering from the psychological impact of what he witnessed on the battlefield, unable to forget the death and certain now that no matter what a person does, mortality is the inevitable end. In addition, his broken marriage—and the infidelities of the woman he remembers loving—have left him wary of others, suspicious of emotions, and retreating into a shell. As Birkin carefully restores the mural, “cleaning down the years to the painting itself” (45), he also experiences his own sort of restoration, coming around slowly with the help of Moon, and then Kathy, and ultimately Alice. As the summer dwindles down, Birkin decides, “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 on and on” (61). The realization that he cannot stay there in perpetual retreat will complete his restoration.
As the mural gradually discloses itself as an unsuspected masterpiece, so does Birkin come to reveal himself in the end. The war has not destroyed his humanity, heart, and spirit. As he bonds with the spirit of the master painter who first created the mural, he feels emotions he thought dead. He opens up to others by accompanying the organ committee to Ripon even though he knows nothing about organs; he mourns the death of the young village girl afflicted with consumption; he never judges Moon and instead shares in his triumphant dig; he refuses to compromise Alice’s religious faith and steps back from pursuing what would be a catastrophic affair; and ultimately he returns to the woman he loved before he went off to war. The line he refuses to cross with Alice restores his own sense of morality, which was so badly upended by the experience of the war and his wife’s betrayal.
In Birkin’s all-too brief interlude in the summer, he moves from a burned-out misfit to a restored man ready to live and love again. It is hardly a happy ending—that would be hokey and, given the experiences Birkin has endured, unconvincing—but as Birkin heads to the train station to return to his life in London, it is the very best he could hope for: a happy-enough ending.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: The Psychological Wounds of War
When he visits Lucy’s house and sees the portrait of her brother who died in the war, Birkin knows he is one of the lucky ones. He returned from the war. This is a novel about post-traumatic stress disorder, and about how war emotionally and psychologically impacts those who survive it.
When Kathy takes a reluctant Birkin to visit her friend Emily Clough, dying of consumption, for the briefest moment his eyes meet those of the doomed young girl. Birkin knows death when he sees it and at that point cannot offer even the smallest gesture of consolation or hope. He leaves without saying a word. Only weeks into the summer, Birkin evinces how deeply the experience of the war can shatter those fortunate enough to survive.
To use the psychological terminology of his era, Birkin is “shell-shocked” from the experience of the battlefield. At the siege at Passchendaele in Belgium, more than a half million soldiers died in a prolonged military action, made infinitely more difficult because of bad weather, a breakdown in supply chains, and poor command decisions. Contemporary readers in the 1970s recognize what is today termed post-traumatic stress disorder: Birkin’s symptoms include difficulty sleeping, haunted dreams, stammering, obsession with death, feelings of alienation, anger that expresses itself at odd moments, a facial tic, and a fear of opening up. After all, he is a first-person narrator who shares his deepest traumas only reluctantly).
Birkin’s attempts to keep his emotional devastation under control are tested most by his brief meeting with the family of the young organist he meets after standing in for Reverend Keach. The young lady invites Birkin to have tea with her family, and there he notices the framed photo of a young soldier. He knows without the parents telling him that their son had not returned. Only on his way home does he give into his emotions. Alone, beside a corn field, he yells, “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” (89). That repressed anger, sorrow, anxiety, and hopelessness define what the novel suggests is the devastating impact of war on those ironically fortunate enough to survive.
The Healing Power of Others
If the novel is a parable of restoration, the restoration of Birkin’s broken soul, shattered heart, and lonely spirit is achieved only by a community of others, the strangers in a town where initially Birkin knows no one.
No one greets Birkin when he first arrives at Oxgodby. Determined to be resourceful, independent, and self-sustaining, Birkin resolutely shoulders his suitcases and his folding camp-bed. When the stationmaster kindly offers an umbrella for Birkin’s walk in the rain to the church, Birkin declines the offer: “I expect I will dry out when I get there” (4). He pretends to disdain the help of others. Kathy, the wise-beyond-her-years teenager, understands Birkin’s problem: “It must be a miserable job working all day on your own up there, no one to talk to or nothing” (37). He tosses off the implications of her observation. He arrived at Oxgodby determined to pretend to be someone he was not, and to control and contain his authentic self and his devastation over his time in Europe. If he begins the novel struggling to be what he is not, under the coaxing and non-judgmental influence of the community of Oxgodby, Birkin comes to make peace with the fact that being himself is the only way to authentic healing. Recall when, pitching in for Reverend Keach at the service in Barton Ferry, Birkin finally stops pretending that he knows how to deliver a sermon and honestly admits, “I’m just filling in and, as I’ve not preached before and certainly shan’t again, I’m going to tell you what I’m doing in Oxgodby” (87). He then shares with them the story of work with the mural. That honesty and sincerity impresses the tiny congregation, and Birkin succeeds.
The ministration of others restores Birkin. This occurs through this friendship with the beguiling and precocious Kathy; his tea-time confidentials with Moon; his modest flirtation with Alice Keach; and his gentle sympathy for the dying Emily. Collectively, the town helps bring Birkin out of his emotional stupor, encouraging himself to find his way to the difficult trick of trust once again. They, the collective, ease Birkin back, giving him what he had most despaired of: a second chance. He departs ready to live and love again, rescued by the healing intervention of others.
The Healing Promise of Art
For the profound good the neighbors in Oxgodby achieve in their bonding with the stranger Birkin, perhaps the most curious and therapeutic bonding takes place not between Birkin and the townspeople of Oxgodby. Rather the most therapeutic healing comes as Birkin comes to fall under the spell of the mural and, in turn, gradually under the spell of the artist, the original muralist. Dead for 500 years, the artist’s care becomes so apparent to Birkin that he understand what that forgotten figure understood: the healing promise of art.
In determining that Addie Hebron’s outcast ancestor was the muralist himself, Birkin sees parallels between this artist and his own life—his broken spirit, his sense of isolation, and his feeling of being lost. If Birkin’s conjecture is true, Piers Hebron was a gallant and heroic Christian who went off to the Crusades—like World War One another interminable and bloody continental-wide war fought for ideals that became over time increasingly less and less clear—only to return after finding his spiritual strength in Islam. That courageous decision, however, made him an outcast in his own world—thus the symbolic crescent scar in his forehead. In alienating him from his family, he found comfort in creating the vast mural that depicted judgment as the right only of God, not men. If Birkin’s supposition is correct, the artist placed his own figure in the mural: He is the bearded falling man being pulled by two dark angels: Christianity and his adopted religion.
That figure of the artist who finds his solace and redemption through art parallels Birkin’s summer of redemption through his dedication to restoring the mural. In the closing episode when, with the help of the divining rod, Moon and Birkin dig up the elaborate stone coffin of Piers Hebron, the two enact a kind of ritual resurrection that, just days later, Birkin himself will reenact as he packs his gear and prepares to leave Oxgodby. His soul restored and his heart reanimated, Birkin is resurrected at least in part through the experience of art.
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