In J. L. Carr’s quietly entrancing A Month in the Country (1980), narrator Tom Birkin gazes back across several decades to the summer of 1920, when he was a penniless, psychologically damaged veteran of the Western Front whose wife has run off with another man. The novel begins with the arrival of the Londoner Birkin at the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby, where he has been hired to restore a 14th-century wall painting in the parish church, whitewashed over for centuries. During his six weeks in the countryside, Birkin forms several relationships. These include the camaraderie of another former soldier conducting an archaeological dig in the churchyard, a warm friendship with a local family, and a near affair with the beautiful wife of the insufferable Anglican priest at Birkin’s church. Most of all, though, he works on that painting.

Birkin’s summer helps heal the trauma he has endured: “Oxgodby’s just about ironed you out,” his fellow veteran remarks late in the narrative, referring first but not only to the face twitch the narrator “caught” at Passchaendaele, one of World War I’s bloodiest battles. But how full and lasting is this healing? We don’t know. Birkin finishes his job, the summer ends, he leaves Oxgodby. Birkin states that he remained “haunted” by the “happiness” of his time in Oxgodby “for many years afterwards,” but that he never returned and never had any further contact with anyone he met that summer. Why not? How has he spent the following decades? What prompts the sustained act of recollection that is the narrative? Again, we don’t know. This reticence is one of the work’s most striking features, as haunting to the reader as his month in the country is to Birkin.

The impact of the novel’s silences and enigmas is amplified by the enigma that is Carr himself. A teacher from the North of England, James Lloyd Carr (1912–94) wrote several novels, but A Month in the Country is the only one still in print—indeed, the only one even in my university’s library. Like A Month in the Country, Carr’s next novel, The Battle of Pollocks Crossing, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, but once I managed to get ahold of a copy I found it entirely lacking in A Month in the Country’s beauty and its resonance. When we try to account for A Month in the Country in terms of the author’s oeuvre—just as when we try to integrate Tom Birkin’s time in Oxgodby into his life as a whole—we are left wondering.

Carr’s novella is offering up an allegory of the historical replacement of religion by art as a source of meaning.

As a short novel by an otherwise obscure author, with few characters and few events, A Month in the Country practically exudes minorness. For me, though, much of the novel’s appeal lies in the way it combines this seeming modesty with an interest in big questions, even Big Questions: What—if anything—gives a life meaning? What makes it worth living? How have the answers to these questions changed over time?

In A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor’s monumental account of modernity, Taylor lists “the meanings of ordinary life” as “the satisfactions of love, of work, the enjoyment of the natural world, the riches of music, literature, art.” This brief catalog captures almost everything Tom Birkin takes solace in while at Oxgodby. Taylor emphasizes that these sources of meaning take on heightened importance in our modern, disenchanted age, when people no longer take for granted the intrinsic meaningfulness of life: “what worried” people in earlier times “was, if anything, an excess of ‘meaning,’ the sense of one over-bearing issue—am I saved or damned?—which wouldn’t leave them alone.”

Despite its tight temporal focus, A Month in the Country is as attuned to this historical shift as Taylor. In fact, A Month in the Country looks back to the premodern past Taylor describes as preoccupied with the question of salvation and damnation—looks back precisely at this preoccupation. For Birkin quickly discovers that the painting he is restoring is a Final Judgment, complete with “St. Michael weighing souls against Sin, Christ in Majesty refereeing and, down below, the Fire that flameth evermore.” Although Birkin has no hesitation in describing Passchaendaele as “hell,” he is quick to distinguish it from “Bible hell,” which is “timeless.” “Theirs was a different hell from ours,” he reflects about the original viewers of the painting, and “it’s not all that easy to find your way back to the Middle Ages.”

Across this chasm, the painting speaks powerfully to Birkin. “Bringing back that long-dead man’s apocalyptic picture into daylight obsessed me,” he recalls, and his work helps bring Birkin himself back into daylight, back to life, as well. It does so not because of its subject matter but because of its artistry. As Birkin uncovers the painting bit by painstaking bit, he comes to realize that “I had a master-piece on my hands,” including, in its depiction of an individual with “a crescent shaped scar on his brow,” “the most extraordinary detail of medieval painting that I had ever seen.” “Whatever else had befallen me during those few weeks in the country,” Birkin reflects on his last day in Oxgodby, “I had lived with a very great artist, my secret sharer of the long hours I’d labored in the half-light above the arch.”

In its understated way, then, Carr’s novella is offering up an allegory of the historical replacement of religion by art as a source of meaning. We might even read its refusal to provide more of a sense of Birkin’s life as a whole as a form of resistance to the lingering hold of the Judgment model, which insists on evaluating a life as a totality. Ultimately, though, what makes A Month in the Country so memorable and affecting is the way it engages with these big questions through its commitment to finding meaning in the “extraordinary detail[s]” of the material world. When Birkin uncovers “Christ in Majesty” at the painting’s apex, for example, he notices that there is “no cinnabar on the lips,” which he takes as “a measure of my painter’s caliber: excitingly as cinnabar first comes over, he’d known that, given twenty years, lime would blacken it.” It is when Birkin is discovering and describing the artist’s craftsmanship that the world is most pregnant with meaning—and he and his narrative most alive.

This dedication to immanent materiality reaches its own apex with Birkin’s discovery of traces of the medieval artist’s own body: “he was fair-headed; hairs kept turning up where his beard had prodded into tacky paint, particularly the outlining in red ochre which he’d based in linseed oil. There was no mistaking it for brush hair which was recognizable from its length, an inch, never more than an inch and a half. Sow’s bristle for the rough jobs, badger’s gray for precision.” Wielding his own badger’s gray brush, Carr shows the distance across centuries being bridged by literally the thinnest of strands. At moments like this, A Month in the Country reminds us that art may not be in the business of saving our souls, but it can salve them, and take our breath away.