Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm
Cold Comfort Farm tells the story of recently orphaned Flora Poste, whose parents were scarcely part of her life anyway, and who ends up staying with some distant relations in the south of England on the farm of the book’s title. Said farm is populated by a cast of ridiculous (and ridiculously named) characters, led by the mysterious Aunt Ada Doom, who stays in her room all but two days of each year and refers ad nauseum to the time when she was a little girl and “saw something nasty in the woodshed!” Aunt Ada keeps all her relations tied to the farm, threatening to go mad if any should leave, so everyone on the farm is horribly repressed in some way – most romantically or sexually, but some in other ways.
Gibbons was parodying the romantic rural novels of the time period, most of which have been forgotten even as her novel has remained popular, with Flora herself referring to them and joking about fearing finding two cousins with names like Seth and Reuben when she gets to the farm, which, of course, turns out to be the case. Gibbons even took aim at one of the leading lights of the literary establishment: the simpering, sex-obsessed Mr. Mybug stands in for D.H. Lawrence, seeing phallic symbols everywhere he looks and, of course, falling hopelessly for Flora without any provocation on her part.
The introduction to the current edition of Cold Comfort Farm features an introduction by Lynne Truss that does an excellent job of breaking down the novel’s power to amaze even readers who aren’t familiar with the saccharine novels Gibbons was satirizing:
Flora finds at Cold Comfort Farm a group of people who have been reduced to novelistic clichés – rather like the curvy cartoon-figure Jessica Rabbit in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, who famously drawled her existential plight, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”Flora helps each character out of his or her difficulties and they quickly find happiness. She is a character in a novel who reads the other characters as characters and rewrites them as people. It’s the ultimate narrative miracle
Think of it as a precursor to Jasper Fforde*, where, instead of the protagonist ‘jumping’ into a novel, she simply lives it, and takes the stock characters she meets and gives them each a third dimension (or, in the case of Seth, simply discovers it and opens it up to the world), working as an extension of the novelist within the book.
*Gibbons even dabbles a little in Ffordian futurism (if you’ll excuse the chronological error) in the book, continuing the parallel with Fforde, setting the book about 15-20 years after the year in which it was published, mentioning video-phones and air mail and and an Anglo-Nicaraguan war in 1946.
As Flora fixes or fills out each character, Gibbons exposes the stereotypes or just flimsy drawings through humor. The ancient Adam Lambsbreath is supposed to be simple and rustic, cleaning (“clettering”) dishes with a twig, and yet Flora wins him over by treating him as more than a prop. Even the farm’s bull, Big Business, is just looking for a bit of a release, and gets it in a passage where Gibbons seems to be having fun with us by channeling her own inner Mybug/Lawrence. And when someone finally replies to Aunt Ada’s cries of “I saw something nasty in the woodshed!” … well, I won’t spoil the book’s funniest line, a brilliant four-word riposte that turns the old bat’s story on its head.
Next up: Almost done with Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day
is the first in the “Mobile Library” series of pseudo-detective novels, but wasn’t good enough to get me to attack the second book (which one of you mentioned in the comments on the last post was unreadable anyway). The story revolves around sad-sack librarian Israel Armstrong, a Jewish vegetarian from London who takes a librarian job in a rural Irish town, sight unseen, only to find that the job has changed to one overseeing a mobile library, and that all fifteen thousand books have gone missing. This leads Israel to play detective – badly – to try to find them.
, part of the Bloomsbury 100, is an overlooked work from the playwright behind the movies Rope (famous for director Alfred Hitchcock’s use of long takes with disguised cuts) and Gaslight, a psychological novel of a different sort: The protagonist is suffering from what we’d now call dissociative identity disorder*, and one of his personalities wants to murder the woman his other personality loves.
while in Arizona; is anyone still reading it, or should I post a writeup with some discussion questions for those who already did? I’ve since moved on to Richard Yates’ 
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the poor man’s 
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is his lone entry on the Bloomsbury 100, yet more evidence that as much as critics agree that Greene was a great novelist, they can’t seem to agree on what his best work was. Modern Library had The Heart of the Matter on their top 100; Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo put both that work and The Power and the Glory on theirs; the Guardian put The Quiet American; and I believe I’ve seen similar praise (that I can’t locate) for The End of the Affair. And for all of that, I loved the half-serious/half-satirical Our Man in Havana*.
last night.
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containing two of his other novels, Living and Party Going, and since I enjoyed the first novel I decided to try the other two. (Incidentally, these latter two novels don’t appear to be copyrighted in the U.S., at least not according to the cover page that indicates that Loving is copyrighted in this country.)
. No, I’ve never read it before.
is on the Guardian 100 and served as the inspiration for the excellent early Hitchcock film of the same name, although Hitchcock, as was his wont, rewrote a good chunk of the plot, including the meaning of the title phrase, so if you’ve seen the film much of the book will still be new to you. It’s a straight-up spy story with an emphasis on action: The protagonist finds himself privy to an international plot and by the start of the second chapter is on the lam from both the authorities and the nefarious plotters seeking to destabilize Europe and spark a world war.
, holds that honor). It’s a good airplane read or just the solution for a dreary day, as an unnamed man quoted in the book’s introduction put it: “It was one of those days when the only thing to do was read John Buchan.”
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is, one assumes intentionally, ironic, as the story is not simple, and isn’t even a story; it is, in fact, two stories in four volumes, the first two of which constituted a first draft of the novel that was never published. The first part is a somewhat classic if oddly set romance of the period, mixing serious material with witty banter, but the second part is a dramatic statement on social mores of the day, especially those that pertained to women’s roles and treatment.
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