A Month in the Country

Despite being a first-person narrator—which usually assumes a level of intimacy between the narrator and the reader—Thomas Birkin only reluctantly shares his backstory. Fleshing out his character is done against his wishes; his story is revealed in bits, at moments when he lets down his guard. Early on, readers learn he is a veteran with an educational background from London Arts College; he mentions the latter detail in passing during a conversation with Alice Keach. When he meets the dying girl Emily Clough, the horrors of the war flash back to him and he declares loudly to a corn field that there is no God. About two-thirds of the way through the novel, he shares with Moon a few memories of his service days, including his participation in the gruesome siege at Passchendaele in Belgium. Birkin suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, known then as “shell shock.” His mental and emotional exhaustion manifest in his facial tic and occasional stutter.

Birkin comes to Oxgodby a casualty. He admits as much: “And afterwards, perhaps I could make a new start, forget what the War and the rows with Vinny 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” (20). It is daunting challenge. He has come to Oxgodby not to recover but rather to forget the past. When he arrives in town to work on the chapel mural, he is an outsider. He volunteers to live in the church’s bell tower away from people. He knows no one in the town and only reluctantly makes friends, first with Moon, then with Kathy, and ultimately with the alluring Alice Keach.

The novel traces Birkin’s spiritual restoration even as he works to restore the chapel mural. In odd moments of candor early on, Birkin admits his loss of hope and his lack of confidence that he will ever recover from the trauma of the war. He is certain that life is in its every form meaningless, death inevitable, and love always ironic. However, he bonds with the community at Oxgodby, sees the pain and emotional sadness in the happy-go-lucky Moon, and sees in Alice Keach the reality that he is not as dead as he feared he might be. Through all these experiences, Birkin recovers what he feared the war had destroyed: his heart. Nobly, he does not act on his emotions for the married Alice—that would have been a catastrophe--and elects to return to London and his own marriage, renewed and ready to try again to make love work. 

Birkin likes Charles Moon right away—he is, Birkin says, “his own man” (24). The happy-go-lucky veteran has been hired, improbably enough, to find a 500-year-old skeleton buried presumably around the fields that encircle the parsonage. Unlike the emotionally wounded Birkin, Moon seems happy; he laughs, makes jokes, and is ready to embrace even this crazy bone-hunt project with diligence and care. It is as if, Birkin observes, “he has taken root” (24). As Moon tells Birkin, “we’re survivors” (28). Against Birkin’s existential despair, Moon is a romantic; he encourages Birkin to pursue the beautiful parson’s wife, certain that she must be lonely in her marriage. Moon is also self-reliant and confident in ways that Birkin is not, thus providing Birkin with emotional support. Their morning teas allow Birkin to gradually reclaim his social skills, and Moon’s discovery of the skeleton in the closing days of summer provides Birkin with the closure he needs to finish restoring the mural.

But there is far more to Moon’s character than his resilient courage as a survivor of the war. The key to Charles Moon’s complex character does not come to Birkin until his trip to help the Ellerbecks pick out a new organ. There, Birkin finds out from an old army buddy that Moon was dishonorably discharged from the army. He was jailed after being caught in bed with a male orderly assigned to him: “They really shat on him at the Court-Martial. Crucified him” (111).

One lesson of Moon’s character is that no one escapes tragedy. But it is how tragedy is handled that defines character. Moon never mentions anything about the episode to Birkin. He tosses off his war experience with a flip joke. Birkin, by contrast, is devastated by the experience of the war and then by the duplicity of his wife. He retreats into a shell and comes to Oxgodby to escape his emotional devastations. Moon shows him the uselessness of running from oneself. Nothing in Moon’s character suggests the war he went through or the disgrace and humiliation of his trial. There is a hungry emptiness in his heart, and a yearning that British society disgraces through arrest and imprisonment.

In this, Moon suggests the model for what Ernest Hemingway, in his novels of men and women reeling from the experiences of World War One, termed as grace under pressure. It is the ability not to give in to misfortune and emotional suffering. It is the ability to do what Moon does every morning: boil himself a cup of tea, stretch awake in the morning sun, and relish the company of his new friend.

Kathy Ellerbeck is the first person in Oxgodby to come see what Birkin is doing in the church. Her visit just days after he arrives gives Birkin the first faint pleasure of at last stepping outside his agonies and outside himself. The blue-eyed freckled child represents the innocence of childhood—the name “Katherine” is Greek for pure—yet this innocence is lost now to Birkin because of the war. She helps to restore Birkin’s tender faith in others, lost to him because of the betrayals of his wife. Kathy, Birkin decides from the start, understands him and recognizes that sometimes adults just want to talk, easy and carefree without purpose or agenda. He relishes the times the two chatter while Birkin is up on his scaffolding. In Kathy, he finds what he calls his kindred spirit: “She had the sense to know a kindred spirit wasn’t going to be on hand for ever and ever and that she must catch the fleeting moment e’er it fled” (35).

Kathy is like the angels that hover sweetly above the figures being cast down into Hell in the mural. If Birkin begins the novel damned, it is Kathy who gently and lovingly directs him toward redemption. She also insists that Birkin is an artist. He dismisses his work-for-hire job, calling himself a glorified contractor merely cleaning up after the real artist. But Kathy sees in the mural project what Birkin does not: The work of restoration is a difficult and tricky art, whether working on a five-centuries old moral or repairing his traumatized heart. Kathy intuitively understands how lonely Birkin is; she brings him a gramophone to ease the silence of the bell tower; she invites him to her family’s Sunday lunches and brings him food during the week; and she involves him in her church’s ad hoc committee to purchase a used organ. In short, she is instrumental in easing Birkin out of the soft prison of his self and opening him up to the ministrations of others. She does not care about his experiences in the war, and she does not care about his marriage. Drawing on the Christianity that means so much to her—she plays a mean pump organ and sings hymns with genuine unaffected gusto—she empathizes with the lonely misfit from the moment she sees him arrive at the station all alone, carrying all his belongings in a single satchel and wearing that ill-fitting herring-bone tweed jacket. Here, she says, is a soul worth saving.