J L Carr’s A Month in the Country is an under-appreciated masterpiece. The slightly earlier How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers won the FA Cup shows some of the promise seen in full bloom in the later novella, but has a comedic, not to say comic, premise that holds the author back from revealing his full potential.

The idea of a small village team winning the FA Cup is drawn directly from the pages of virtually every comic for boys ever written (the whole sub-genre is brilliantly caricatured in Viz’s Billy the Fish). Steeple Sinderby features every cliche from the genre going – the washed up ex-pro, the gifted midfielder with a tragic backstory, the unnaturally talented goalie with prehensile abilities, and the mysterious east European tactical genius.

I read once that J K Rowling hated having to write the scenes in her Harry Potter novels describing Quidditch matches (which explains why they were often called off). Carr may have felt trapped by the same logic of his scenario, because as the story progresses and the club proceed relentlessly to the final, the football games themselves become almost a sideshow. There is some fun with parodies of different commentary and reporting styles (In their primal gladiatorial tourney N. Baddesley jousting on their own bailiwick encountered the full and furious blast of Steeple Sinderby’s New Look Lads spearheaded by Sid Swift, long-lost Shooting Star idol of Brum fans a handful of time ago. The Ringers clocked up eleven strikes and only the inexorable march of time muffled a full peal of twelve), but there’s only so many ways you can describe an imaginary match.

But this really isn’t a football story. There are far more interesting things going on in the margins of the narrative, or perhaps along the touchlines. The narrator, Joe Gidner, having “had this trouble and left theological college”, lives in the village schoolmaster’s house, combining the writing of greetings-card verses and looking after his host’s invalid wife. He is also the club’s secretary, and is chosen to write the first draft of the history of the club’s victory, which this novel purports to be. He is an engaging almost whimsical narrator, and proves a helpful guide to the club’s adventures, the players’ and others’ back-stories, and the less than glamorous mid-1970’s setting in which football supporters’ violence is taken for granted.

Steeple Sinderby itself is a stereotypical English village, with all the charm but also all the flaws. Gidner tells us about its inhabitants, its entry in Pevsner’s Buildings of England and its one notable previous inhabitant, the peasant poet Thomas Dadds. The club’s chairman, Mr Fangfoss, is not interested in football but assumes the role because he is used to running everything. He is a bigot but sympathetically portrayed nonetheless, including his unorthodox marital arrangements.

Despite the team’s inevitable victory in the final, the novel ends in a downbeat manner.

“I often wish I could have known the end at the beginning, so that each detail could have been savored as it happened. But then, life isn’t a gramophone record one can play again and again […] It is Now or Never for most of us, and we haven’t the time.”

Everyone leaves either the club or the village, or both, Joe’s attempts to woo a young lady he is attracted to come to naught, and the club is wound up, in recognition that such heights will never be reached again. Joe’s story is one of missed opportunities, and the subtle whimsy of the story is overlaid with what felt like a somewhat manufactured nostalgia – the 1970’s were the present day when the book was written, village life was not really under threat, and football violence and the bigotry of Enoch Powell and the like with which it was often associated is nothing to be nostalgic about. So I was left unconvinced by this novella despite its many charms.