I spent a few idle hours this week reading A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr’s wonderful – and wonderfully short – novel of a Great War veteran who spends the summer of 1920 uncovering an artwork on the wall of a village church. I had never heard of Carr or the book before, which was just a perfect situation – I turned the first page and had absolutely no idea what was coming my way.
It’s a lovely, restorative, slightly haunted book, and it left me thinking about rather a lot of things. One of them, weirdly, was a videogame, which seems on the surface to be an odd response to a bucolic novel about a forgotten way of life. But the videogame it left me thinking of was Pentiment, so maybe it isn’t that odd.
Pentiment already comes with a book attached. It’s impossible to play this late-medieval mystery of art and village life without thinking of The Name of the Rose, a novel it self-consciously cleaves to, and, at times, carefully subverts. Andreas in Pentiment, much like William in The Name of the Rose, is a privileged outsider snooping around a monastery where a murder has been committed. Both stories revolve around art and medieval politics and the intricate secrets of monastic life. Both are examinations of the way that meaning is constructed and wielded.
But Pentiment lingers on something that The Name of the Rose only dallies with – the passage of time. It’s an important aspect to the novel – Adso is looking back on things that happened in his youth – but it’s still left outside of the text for the most part. Pentiment, however, gives us a medieval murder mystery and then keeps on going, teasing out the many ways that events like this can continue to shape the years and decades that follow.