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A Month in the Country

The movie A Month in the Country was based on the book A Month in the Country.

Which one did you like better, the movie or the book?  There are 6 votes for the book, and 6 votes for the movie.

Movie details for A Month in the Country

The movie was released in 1987 and directed by Pat O'Connor, who also directed Circle of Friends (1995). More information on the movie is available on Amazon.com and also IMDb.

Actors on this movie include Colin Firth, John Atkinsons, Jim Carter, Patrick Malahide, Kenneth Branagh, Richard Vernon (II), Tim Barker, Vicki Arundale, Martin O'Neil, Natasha Richardson, Tony Haygarth, Eileen O'Brien, Elizabeth Anson, Barbara Marten, Kenneth Kitson, Judy Gridley, Lisa Taylor, Andrew Wilde, David Gillies and David Garth.

 

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Book details for A Month in the Country

A Month in the Country was written by James Lloyd Carr. The book was published in 1980 by Arrow (A Division of Random House Group). More information on the book is available on Amazon.com.

 

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Any good reader has, well, had it with novels of healing. The culture of confession has given rise to novels that begin with an unspeakable act (graphically described) and end in redemption (this part is usually more vague). That's not how it works in J.L... Read More
Any good reader has, well, had it with novels of healing. The culture of confession has given rise to novels that begin with an unspeakable act (graphically described) and end in redemption (this part is usually more vague). That's not how it works in J.L. Carr's quiet, brief, dreamy A Month in the Country. Writing in 1978, Carr's narrator, Tom Birkin, recalls the summer of 1920. A veteran of the Great War and a cuckold, Tom arrives in Oxgodby to restore a medieval mural in the church. His single season in this town in the north of England passes quickly: he sleeps in the belfry, makes a friend or two, falls secretly in love with the vicar's wife, and, chipping away at plaster and dirt, uncovers a lost masterpiece. These events seem to melt past Tom in the heat of the perfect, fleeting English summer: "The front gardens of cottages were crammed with marjoram and roses, marguerites, sweet William, at night heavy with the scent of stocks. The Vale was heavy with leaves, motionless in the early morning, black caves of shadow in the midday heat, blurring the sound of trains hammering north and south."

Carr devotes many fewer words to Tom's time in the war. The vicar's wife tries to ask him about it. "'What about hell on earth?' she said. I told her I'd seen it and lived there and that, mercifully, they usually left an exit open." His healing consists of not talking about his past--perhaps a revolutionary notion these days. A Month in the Country, with its paean to a lost, good place, oddly recalls Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes. But where that novel was elliptical, Carr's work values clarity and simplicity above all. These are rare enough qualities, but to find them in a novel of romance and healing is a rarer pleasure still. --Claire Dederer