A Month in the Country

In Birkin’s mind, people are dangerous, unreliable, and unpredictable, while machines are safe and reliable. When he checks out the church where he will be working for the summer, he is drawn first to the church’s ancient stove. It is a point of contention with the Reverend Keach that, because Birkin insists on staying in the bell tower, the church will have to provide heat, an expense not covered in their original contract. Even as Keach drones on about the insurance risk, Birkin admits, “I was examining the stove with great attention” (10) before spending two pages detailing the mechanism itself. “Mechanical things,” he admits, “fascinate me” (10).

Later when the Ellerbecks invite him to Sunday dinner, Birkin focuses away from the dinner table and concentrates his attention on a great oil lamp that hangs above the dining room table. He calls it “the room’s chiefest glory” (50), with its four brass chains, double knobs, “pink cut-glass paraffin reservoir,” and “encircling opaque globe” (50).

In lavishing such detail on mechanical objects, Birkin symbolizes the impact of combat fatigue. Gadgets are his moat and his sanctuary. His mind in recoil and his nerves shot, he cannot bring himself to engage in the complications of others. The war and his shattered marriage were striking and terrifying examples of what people can do. He finds comfort in studying the elements of a stove or a lamp because the more you study lamps and stoves the more they makes sense. Wives cheat; lamps provide light. Young men aim rifles at each other; stoves provide controlled heat. Light that wick or flip that switch, Birkin understands, and the machine will do exactly what it is designed to do. And most important for Birkin, when a machine breaks, it can be fixed, as he shows when he helps the congregation with its ancient organ. However, the summer respite will encourage Birkin to turn away from the solace of machines and ease back into relationships with unpredictable, unreliable, and unfathomable people. 

A Month in the Country is a remembered narrative. It is a story related in the first-person by Birkin years after the summer of Birkin’s recovery. The frame is not intrusive, but it is there—Birkin mentions every so often how he is now looking back on those weeks. The close of the novel, however, brings the frame into definite perspective: “All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, 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” (135).

The frame is not needed—the story of Birkin’s summer would have made an absorbing story. The frame, however, gives Birkin’s restoration parable its authenticity by providing perspective. Remove the frame, and the ending leaves open questions about Birkin’s recovery. The frame allows Birkin the privilege and the space to assert that the month in the country was in fact restorative. Many questions are left unanswered by the frame because they are the irrelevant narrative points of Birkin’s life. What is relevant is that whatever happens to him, and whatever turns his life might take as he leaves Oxgodby, he engages that life with all its shocks, surprises, and heartaches.

In a novel in which art plays such an elemental part in Birkin’s emotional and psychological restoration, music also figures in that recovery. Kathy brings the gramophone and stacks of records of hymns to help ease Birkin’s loneliness. From his room in the belfry, Birkin listens to the Sunday services and the hymns being played on the church’s harmonium. At the piano and organ warehouse, he listens to hymns played to test the organs for sale. But it is Kathy, with her sweet “fruity contralto” (39), who introduces Birkin to the unsuspected power of Christian music to move the spirit and restore the soul.

Kathy introduces Birkin to one hymn in particular, “The Lost Chord,” which she plays for him, her “moon face glowing” (38). She says, “I could play you some records. Sacred songs and solos” (39). As she works her way through a stack of wax recordings, it is the iconic Arthur Sullivan hymn that arrests and haunts Birkin the most. Its melody makes him think of the angels he is slowly recovering from the mural.

“The Lost Chord” is among the most storied hymns in British religious music. Its composer, known for his work in light opera as part of Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote the melody while he tended to his brother in his dying days. The poem, which Sullivan found in a magazine, told of a composer who dreams a chord so beautiful, it sounded like the “great Amen,” the last song anyone would need. The chord “quieted pain and sorrow” and thus promised “one perfect peace” to any who heard its gorgeous construct. The problem was, when the composer awoke he could not reconstruct the chord he heard, and such miraculous healing was lost. The composer decides he must wait for the Judgment to hear that perfect chord again.

For Birkin, the story told in the hymn offers special resonance. He is haunted by the war, shattered by his marriage, and adrift in existential despair. His interaction with the mural, and his tapping into the determination, courage, and idealism of the artist, begins his recovery. The dream of the composer in which he hears this great chord symbolizes Birkin’s own summer of recovery. As he departs Oxgodby, he is no longer haunted by his experience. He is guardedly hopeful now. He has felt the peace that is still possible and felt the reanimation of his heart. As he confesses in the closing paragraphs, he never returned to Oxgodby. It is lost to him—like that magical chord that could give peace—but its impact has stayed with him and left him stronger.