Tom Birkin, the protagonist-narrator is a twitching survivor of the First World War who travels to North Yorkshire to restore a mediaeval wall painting of the Last Judgement in a church, sleeping in the bell-tower. He is welcomed by the villagers, especially the local station-master and his daughter. He falls in love with the vicar's wife. Another outsider, less welcomed, is an archaeologist, another war veteran, who is digging for a missing ancestral grave and living in a tented-over pit in the ground.
Gently, every gently, the novel explores the ways in which society changes and has changed. The great art work that Birkin slowly uncovers, can only be properly interpreted if you realise that the people in those days thought differently; at the same time this is a chronicle of a forgotten time of horse and cart, church and chapel, and the timeless routines of the countryside. But there are changes coming. Birkin is losing his belief in religion, despite attending chapel and helping with its Sunday School. The masterpiece he is restoring shows sinners falling into Hell, but he cannot imagine a hell worse than the one he has endured in the trenches; he cannot equate the polite prayers in chapel with his prayers when under bombardment. And there are the changing attitudes to sex, exemplified in Birkin's own on-off marriage, and in his passion for another man's wife (and in what we learn about the archaeologist); although sex, as such, is a constant in the life of the countryside: "in the country everything had to have a sexual overtone, if it wasn't someone else's wife, it was little girls, boys, or, worse still, animals." (p 22)
The whole story is, like L P Hartley's The Go-Between, told as the reminiscence of the narrator as a much older man, which allows foreshadowing and perspective, and lends the nostalgic narrative the gentle hues of a watercolour.
Selected quotes: (page references refer to the 2000 Penguin Modern Classics edition)
- "Long after he must have become used to my face-twitch, he still talked to someone behind my left shoulder." (p 4)
- "Like all people who give in too easily, he began to grub up a few restrictive clauses to recover face." (p 5)
- "It was the idea of an independent man, a proud spirit, being shut up like an animal in a military prison and having to put up with the ghastly crew who always seemed to grope their way in to run these places - that's what appalled me." (p 70)
February 2023; 85 pages
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1980.
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