A Month in the Country

In these pages, Birkin, under the coaxing encouragement of his new friends in Oxgodby, begins imperceptibly to emerge from his own protective whitewashing. He says, “I told [Alice] that [the mural] would be like a jigsaw—a face, a hand, a shoe, here a bit and there a bit. And, imperceptibly, it would come together” (43).

Set against Birkin’s explanation to Alice of his work, the novel reveals how from the beginning of his month in the country, Birkin himself will emerge. He will be restored a bit at a time—or more specifically a single small encounter at a time. The parallel between Birkin the burned-out ex-soldier and the church mural suggest that, like the mural, which turns out to be a stunning masterpiece, Birkin himself is an unsuspected work of art.

In these pages, Birkin begins to move out of his retreat. If he has come to a remote village in search of isolation and anonymity, the town of Oxgodby and its residents simply will not permit him to hide. They know little about this stranger, save that he has been hired to work on the mural, yet they refuse to allow him to stay apart, alone in the bell tower. He needs others, they show him; they reveal in all but words: he needs community.

In this, Birkin’s commentary on the mural and his reaction to the figure of the Christ is instructive. The Christ who stands at the apex of the mural dispensing justice in those apocalyptic last moments—Birkin calls the figure the Oxgodby Christ—is temperamental and uncompromising, with menacing, even cruel eyes. He is a “wintry hard-liner” (33), there to render justice “but not mercy” (33). This is the Christian God Birkin lives with and which justifies his sense of his moral failings, his surrender to the overwhelming evil of the war, and his failure in his marriage. He is a broken man and a fallen man—later he will compare himself to the mural figure he terms the falling man tumbling into Hell—waiting the judgment that will gratefully dispatch him to perdition. “What about Tom Birkin,” he asks rhetorically, “nerves shot to pieces, wife gone, dead broke” (34). By any measure, Birkin sees himself a failure.

The slow work of the townspeople, however, will reveal the beautiful masterpiece beneath such perception. This will allow Birkin to gradually ease back into the community of others and to find in that interaction a reviving sense of his own worth. That restoration begins with Kathy Ellerbeck. She brings first the gift of herself and the reassuring chatter of idle conversation. She refuses to let Birkin stay alone. She brings music to ease his solitude. She invites him to their house for Sunday dinner. She convinces him—against his better judgment—to help out teaching Sunday school. And perhaps most importantly, she gets Birkin to meet the dying Emily Clough—it is a difficult moment for Birkin as he has come to the north country to think about anything but death. When their eyes meet, Birkin feels his humanity stirred. He is not as dead as he thinks he is; he is not a fallen as he believes he is.

Meanwhile, Alice Keach presents a particular problem for Birkin. In these pages, readers find out she is beautiful—"Botticelli beautiful,” a reference to the famous painting “The Birth of Venus” by Sandro Botticelli. Alice is lonely, given that her husband dedicated to his parish. The parsonage where they live is cavernous, stripped of its furniture, and gives Birkin a feeling that it is a haunted house. His own marriage in ruins because of Vinny’s multiple infidelities, Birkin initially sees in Alice a woman who needs to be rescued. To him, she is a beautiful, lonely woman who needs to fall recklessly in love and who needs to feel passion—specifically, with Birkin. He is encouraged by Moon who expresses outrage that a cold-hearted, passionless preacher could have ever married such a woman. At this point, Birkin sees Alice as an opportunity to interfere with others, not to interact with them. His perceptions of the minister’s wife are narrow and uninformed, and ultimately he will reject these perceptions.

It is a measure of how far Birkin still needs to go to complete his own restoration that at this point, some two weeks into his summer project, the town of Oxgodby is becoming irrelevant to him—“like a dream” (47). For him, the world inside the church is “real” (47); that is the artificial world of his art, safe from any interactions with others. Something, however, is amiss. In a telling moment as he prepares to depart the parsonage after Alice’s tour, Birkin notices the flat iron and the washing machine sharing a corner in this “wilderness of a house” (60). He sees the two “huddled together for the comfort of each other’s company” (60). Even machines, he tells himself although he is not ready to listen, need one another.