This is a slim book, no more than a novella certainly, but a powerful one. Tom Birkin has come to a small, insular rural community to restore a long-obscured church mural (a doom), bearing the mental and physical scars of service at the Western Front. As he restores the painting through painstaking and intricate work, so he restores his inner life by contact with the beautiful, but married, Kathy Ellerbeck and the also damaged James Moon.
The book is rich with subtle themes, from an idyllic look at country life, to the mystery of marriage, especially other people’s. Everything is done with the deftest touch, just as with the restoration of the painting. The writing is deceptively simple, but elegant. It never becomes showy or pompous.
There is comedy too: a visit to an organ shop and an impromptu rendering of a Wesleyan hymn is brilliantly done.
One is left with a feeling of delicacy, of feeling, of profound sympathy, of a sense of loss, of the pain of what might have been.
No related posts.