Flora Poste, a recently orphaned socialite, moves in with her country relatives, the gloomy Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, and becomes enmeshed in a web of violent emotions, despair, and scheming, until Flora manages to set things right. (GR)
Author: Stella Gibbons
Pages: 256
Published: 1932
Bottom Line: Highly recommended. Full of humour, wry social commentary, and larger-than-life characters.
Cold Comfort Farm is an utterly delightful confection of a book that was nearly impossible to put down.
The world of Cold Comfort Farm is populated by a cast of richly imagined and comically flawed characters.
Our heroine, Flora Poste, is a most enjoyable character who handles every obstacle with a mix of stolid good sense, determination, and an unflinching adherence to and knowledge of the laws of propriety, elegance and The Higher Common Sense. She is a lovely young busybody with the sort of disposable free time that any modern girl wishes she possessed.
Unshaken by the sheer state of chaos at Cold Comfort Farm, Flora takes it in hand to, quite simply, fix everything. Everything meaning the feral faerie Elfine, hell-obsessed preacher Amos, manic-depressive Judith, sex pervert Seth, and old Aunt Ada Doom who “saw something nasty in the woodshed” when she was a young’un and has never been quite right since (among other hilariously colourful characters).
Little is ever explained in full, niggling mysteries are often left unsolved, and yet everything is wrapped up so neatly that one simply cannot dwell on pesky questions. Though perhaps resolutions come too quickly and too easily, the novel keeps up a brisk and lively pace that is sure to engage the reader. Without resorting to spoilers, I will also mention that Cold Comfort Farm has the perfect ending for staving off a pesky dragging denouement.
The true strength of this novel is the perfectly airy style of prose that Ms. Gibbons employs – it is simply saturated in wit, humour and the sort of bright, larger-than-life characters that every author wishes they could create. Cold Comfort Farm is punctuated by a delightfully wry social commentary worthy of Jane Austen herself. Though written almost 80 years ago, the novel’s humour is quite timeless and led me to laugh aloud many times as I read it.
Written as a parody of gloomy, pastoral historical novels (Wuthering Heights), Stella Gibbon’s novel is a light, often hilarious, and pleasantly silly read. Definitely a recommended novel for the discerning reader who has a taste for Jane Austen-esque humour and social commentary – compressed and contemporized to the 1930’s.*
(* The novel is actually supposed to be set in a confusing, alternate universe that is never truly specified. The only clues given are that it is set after a 1946 “Anglo-Nicaraguan War” and that there is a smattering of futuristic technology. This only becomes apparent after careful reading and is, I believe, not terribly important.)
THE NOVEL NEMATODE 