Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy

In the foreword to A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr notes, “During any prolonged activity, one tends to forget original intentions. But I believe that, when making a start on A Month in the Country, my idea was to write an easy-going story, a rural idyll along the lines of Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree.” So when I finished Carr’s novel last weekend I decided to read Hardy’s next.

While Carr places his story in a village where tradition and social propriety are important and where the local vicar seems to wonder about whether he’d be better off with another assignment, his story is a melancholy look back at a summer when two war veterans, still processing their recent experiences, come to live and work in a village. They each harbor wounds from their personal lives, too, and the book turned out to be less a rural idyll than an examination of a changing society, seasoned with the tension of two young men whose futures are uncertain, and the temptation each feels in attractions that are forbidden to them (Birkin is briefly but dangerously drawn to the vicar’s young wife and Moon is homosexual at a time when that could land him in jail).

Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree is truly a rural idyll — one of his “Wessex” novels. It’s a much gentler story, of a young man in a village, Dick Dewy, who is in love with the school mistress, Fancy Day. Dick is from a large family and follows his father into tranter work (transportation or peddling from a horse carriage), and also sings in the “quire” with him and other village men, accompanied by various stringed instruments. Fancy comes from a slightly better family and is educated, so their relationship is endangered by her father’s aspirations for a better match and a couple of rival suitors.

The details of the social fabric of Hardy’s fictional village are vivid, and the characters are interesting. He covers some of the same ground as Jane Austen and George Eliot in this novel, with domestic and social drama at the center. Hardy takes on including people who are somewhat outside the norms in his story,  including Fancy’s step mother who seems to be what we’d identify as obsessive compulsive today and Leaf, a developmentally disabled man. But he treads some of the same topics, showing Fancy caught up in keeping a secret from Dick and also for a little while, appearing undecided about whether or not she loves him.

The book is written in colloquial language that slowed me down a bit. I enjoyed the side plot about whether to have organ or strings and voices accompany the congregation’s hymn singing. It was entertaining, and interesting to read and to contrast with A Month in the Country.

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A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr

In more than one article where he’s asked about favorite books, Michael Ondaatje cites J.L. Carr‘s A Month in the Country.  That was more than enough endorsement for me to add it to a list of books to look for . . . and then I found it on our ramble through the used bookshops of Portland at the beginning of the summer. I read it today and it was just the balm I needed after a tough couple of weeks of hard thinking at work about my research project and the new semester and at home about my project for my final year of grad school.

It was also the perfect book to read after The Secret Lives of Color. In A Month in the Country, the main character, Mr. Birkin, is a WWI veteran who arrives in 1920 in a northern English village called Oxgodby, where he’s been hired to uncover a medieval painting whitewashed over centuries earlier in the local church. As he works he notes various pigments, like ultramarine and hematite and verdigris, and as he commented on their richness, colorfastness, scarcity, or cost, I understood.

Both Birkin’s work and that of his fellow veteran and “southerner” Mr. Moon are funded by the recently deceased Adelaide Hebron, whose last wishes include hiring someone to uncover the artwork and to find the tomb of her ancestor Piers, who was excommunicated and so isn’t buried in the churchyard. Moon, an archeologist, suspects the meadow also holds even more ancient remains and the foundation of a much earlier church, dating back to the 7th century. He stays in a tent (and a hole he’s dug under it), Birkin stays in the bell tower, and between them they work and observe the locals and discuss the vicar, Rev. Keach and his lovely young wife, Alice, who seem mismatched. Which of course provides room for speculation, but there’s no sappy or simple love story here. Just tension, well told.

Birkin ends up being absorbed into village life as he is pressed into officiating local cricket matches and looked after by the stationmaster, Mr. Ellerbeck, and his family. As their teenaged daughter Kathy notes, “Mam says you’re over-much on your own and traipse around like a man in a dream and need to be got into company.” They are “chapel” rather than church people, and out of appreciation for their kindness and their generosity (Mrs. Ellerbeck feeds him regularly) Birkin ends up attending their Wesleyan services and helping with Sunday school. He even takes an uncomfortable turn at preaching in a nearby chapel when Ellerbeck is overextended, and helps his new friends shop for an organ for the chapel in the nearby town, in scene which is a hilarious send-up of sectarian snobbery.

The humor, the portrait of village life, the commentary on post WWI England’s cultural, social, and religious landscape, and the mysteries of Birkin’s and Moon’s work are all delightful. The story is certainly entertaining, but the deeper threads about healing from war wounds visible and invisible, and finding one’s way in a world that seems both completely changed in some ways and very much what it’s always been in others, make for a thoughtful read that explores the kind of “big T” truths that I enjoy in fiction.

Moon tells Birkin, as summer draws to a close and their work is nearly done, “You can only have this piece of cake once; you can’t keep munching away at it. Sad, but there it is! You’ll find that, once you’ve dragged yourself off round the corner, there’ll be another view; it may even be a better one.” Later than evening, Birkin reflects on this and thinks, “And he was right — the first breath of autumn was in the air, a prodigal feeling, a feeling of wanting, taking, and keeping before it is too late.”

That’s what A Month in the Country is about — that feeling, and how we respond to it. Birkin has decisions to make. Moon has plans. The story ends without our knowing precisely what they intend to do, but with a delicious sense of “a precious moment gone” as Carr writes. This is a book I’ll read again, and one that I picked up at just the right time.

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