Lynn Rachel’s Reviews > A Month in the Country > Status Update

“And this steady rhythm of living and working got into me, so that I felt part of it and had my place, a foot in both present and past; I was utterly content. But I didn’t know this until, one day, Alice Keach said, “You’re happy, Mr. Birkin. You’re not on edge any more. Is it because work is going well?”

Not much to say so here’s a recap of themes I’ve noticed:

Tom becomes aware early on that he has come to Oxgodby as a personal therapy, not just as a job. He views himself as trying to regain something through his relationship with Oxgodby, Charles, and the unknown medieval artist he works with.

Alice has a very different relationship with Oxgodby. She finds depression, but I’m running out of characters bye-

“I mean to say, almost everything has some purpose.”

“Truthfully, I was fascinated because it had never occurred to me that too big a house might have the same appalling drawbacks as too small a one, and only the reflection that I’d no home at all, except the precarious tenancy of a belfry, shielded me from black depression.”

“But then, inevitably, as happens to most of us, first through Saturday umpiring, later Sunday chapel, I was drawn to the changing picture of Oxgodby itself. But, oddly, what happened outside was like a dream. It was inside the still church, before its reappearing picture, that was real. I drifted across the rest. As I have said—like a dream. For a time.”

“I mean to say—the pride of Uffizi walking abroad in, God help us, Oxgodby!”

There’s an awful lot of romantic tension between these two men 🤔

“Are you here to try to crawl back into the skin you had before they pushed you through the mincer?”

“As far as I’m concerned he might just as well have gone round the corner and died. But that goes for most of us, doesn’t it? We look blankly at each other. Here I am, here you are. What are we doing here? What do you suppose it’s all about?… Yes, that’s my Dad and Mum over there on the piano top. My eldest boy is on the mantelpiece…. Now you know all about me. Go away: I’ve forgotten you already.”

“This is what I need, I thought—a new start and, afterwards, maybe I won’t be a casualty anymore.

Well, we live by hope”