A gorgeous and elegiac novella, I absolutely loved it. It took me a while to figure out what the focus of it was, because I thought that it would be about World War I, and it was, but not in the way I expected. The focus is more on a way of life that is vanishing in the post-war world, and the shell-shocked narrator and the country he observes become sort of fellow casualties of the war, damaged irreparably. The narrator, Tom Birkin, is an archeologist or historian, uncovering a medieval mural in a church in Yorkshire, and along the way he becomes immersed in the local community, even getting shanghaied into trying his hand at some amateur preaching and falling in love with a married woman. I found Tom one of the most charming first-person narrators I've ever read, usually first-person narrators tend to be somehow excluded from the action, to some degree watching from the sidelines, and seem far less interesting than the people they are telling about. But Tom is fully part of the story and he's charming, funny, and intelligent. I also loved the contrast and parallels Carr establishes between the painting of the Last Judgement that Tom is uncovering, with sinners falling into hell, and the war. It's also a bit of a historical detective story (in the best way possible), as Tom finds out that the painter responsible for most of the mural wasn't the one who finished it, and realises by the end that the painter died before the work was completed by falling off the ladder or scaffolding he was standing on. Meanwhile, Tom's friend, Charles Moon, another veteran searching for the body of an old lord, finds out that he had become a Muslim and is one of the people falling into hell on the mural. This gives the novel a satisfying and beautiful sense of all the pieces fitting together, and plays with variations of motifs such as falling: falling from grace, falling into hell, physically falling to death. Even though it's very short, it's a wonderfully complex, nuanced, and gorgeous novel.
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