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Oct 29, 2020wyenotgo rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
This little gem was quite a delightful discovery for me. Tom Birkin, in his early 20’s, demobbed, shell-shocked, drifting after a marital break-up, falls into what I can best characterize as a hiatus, a summer intermezzo at a Yorkshire village church, tasked with uncovering a large late medieval wall painting. We are taken along on his idyllic sojourn as he slips into the easy pastoral life of the town and its people; and his troubled spirit begins to heal. The atmosphere, the pace of life, the personalities are reminiscent of Thomas Hardy. Reading this was like spending a quiet summer afternoon in an English garden, indulging in reveries that are interrupted only by the arrival of tea and scones. Carr peppers his cozy narrative with the sort of droll humor that only the English seem capable of concocting. Men of the cloth seem especially suitable as targets, whether they be “church” or “chapel”. For example, the vicar, a deliciously fussy fellow, expresses his objections about a stove: “It rumbles,” he said impatiently, “… and disturbs the hymns: empty-headed children seem to find it funny. And then there’s the blow-back and, when this …. Well, blows back, it erupts. Smoke, sparks, ash … yes, ash, it showers ash on the congregation. I have had several complaints.” Likewise, a Wesleyan lay preacher, “the mildest, most self-contained of men” in his daily life takes on an entirely different persona in the pulpit: “It’s not strictly true that climbing the pulpit stairs transformed him, he was mild enough when announcing hymns …. But once launched upon the waves and billows of his sermon, he roared and raved like a madman, now and then bashing his big fist on the podium so that the water decanter leapt. The while, his wretched wife hung her head in shame and only her twitching fingers revealed suffering. Mercifully, once at ground level again, he came-to like one revived from a convulsive fit and not remembering it.” This was exactly the kind of novel I needed just now, in the midst of a pandemic that refuses to abate and a continuous stream of disturbing news from all quarters. Escapism? You bet!