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. We don't know how those themes will be treated, what attention to detail we will find or if the language will delight us or otherwise. From the window, he beheld "the hills heaving like the back of some great sea-creature, dark woods washing down its sides into the Vale.

Don’t let the bland cover or blurb lead you to think this is just the charming story of the healing effect of a bucolic month in a quiet village. As a human, an artist of sorts, an estranged husband, and war veteran, we see Birkin’s hardened attitude towards his life and the hopeful contentment he feels towards his future. As Birkin uncovers patches of gilt and cinnabar up on his scaffold, Moon digs his pits outside the church walls; both of them are striving for some sort of, if not restoration, then freedom from their past, and for Birkin, at least, his stay at Oxgodby is a time of healing. He was excited by the prospect of uncovering and restoring a recently discovered medieval wall-painting in the village church.We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever – the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, a loved face. Perhaps It is this simplicity and normality that affects Birken the most profoundly, for his life has been shredded by the war. Why did she care about why her forebear was not buried in the churchyard, and where he was laid to rest?

I've waited for a week before writing a review because I did not have much to say and, as I am typing, I realize I still don't. In the closing paragraph, Birkin reveals that he is writing this memoir years after leaving Oxgodby and that the town now exists entirely as an undisturbed memory. Thanks to my friend Lisa whose recent review reminded me that this book has been on my list for way too long. A month in the country tells of the insignificant piece of time in Tom Birkin’s life when he passed by the provincial town of Oxgodby.And when we went back inside she brought me into her room, for the first time since I'd arrived, to say goodbye. The grave outside the churchyard wall was suggested by Tintagel, where a number of early graves were encountered at Trecarne Lands and excavated. And what a masterful performance of Carr, especially because of the parallel between Tom's meticulous work, exposing layer upon layer of the masterpiece in the church, and his slow discovery of what is valuable in his life, also exposed layer upon layer. I tried to make the point that the healing journey of Tom Birkin is universal, timeless, that it applies to all of us.

Tom Birkin is a young man from the London area who has served an apprenticeship in the craft (and art) of restoring wall paintings in old churches. Carr argues that the past, if you look at its art carefully, can give us precious tools to deal with pain and loneliness and despair. Kathy Ellerbeck, the pesty, but lovable teenage daughter of the Station master brings music and invitations to the family’s Sunday dinner . There are some sad lines here, about what Tom thinks God looks like in the small town where he's working: “uncompromising.In 1938 he took a year out from his teaching career to work as an exchange teacher in Huron, South Dakota in the Great Plains. At the end of his year in the USA Carr continued his journey westward and found himself travelling through the Middle East and the Mediterranean as the Second World War loomed. Deep red hollyhocks pressed against the limestone wall and velvet butterflies flopped lazily from flower to flower.

My Review: A few, a precious few only, moments in life are trapped in the diamond facets of unforgettability. For what it is worth, I followed up my reading of this novel by watching the remarkable rendering of it into film. In the final paragraphs Carr tries to shift the focus from the vicar’s wife to the sustaining noblesse of artistic aspiration but it felt a bit forced. Employed to recover a concealed medieval painting on the wall of the local church, Thomas believes that a change of scenery will soothe the scars the bloodbath of war and a shattered marriage have imprinted on him.Most of all, Tom identifies with the unknown painter who put his whole life into a mural of God judging Saints and Sinners many centuries before.