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

“But I’d crawled from its pit and, here in Oxgodby, life had flooded back, tingling to my finger-tips, a world of new people who only knew as much of what had happened to me as I cared to tell them.”

“Great God! I scrambled down the ladder and ran from the church. Moon had almost reached his tent.
‘He fell,’ I yelled after him, ‘This was his last job. He fell.’
Moon turned and, as it sunk in, he grinned.
‘O.K., he called back. ‘Mind your own step, then.’”

“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!”

“Already I felt part of it all, not a looker-on like some casual visitor. I should like to have believed that men working out in the fields looked up and, seeing me there, acknowledged that I’d become part of the landscape, ‘that painter chap, doing a job, earning his keep.’”

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