The Reading Group Reads...
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
"THE EDUCATION BESTOWED ON FLORA POSTE BY HER PARENTS had been expensive,
athletic and prolonged; and.. in her twentieth year, she was discovered to
possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living." Thus
begins the classic tale of how flora travels to Howling in deepest Sussex and
begins the civilisation of the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm.
Many of the group had previously read this book; some had even encountered it as a set book at school, as it is now considered to be a modern classic. It is also full of marvellously quotable phrases; most people know "I saw something nasty in the woodshed", but there are many other gems, "'Tes all one,""one o'they Ford vans""and my own favourite "it was a black day for me when I took up with Agony Beetle". It is essential to remember when reading this comic novel, that it is a parody of the rural novels of Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence and, in particular, Mary Webb. (It is alleged that Stella Gibbons, who was then a journalist, was motivated to begin Cold Comfort Farm on being given yet another novel by Mary Webb to review.) As it is a parody, most of the characters are stereotypes. There were some who felt that this belittled the "peasants", but the Town, Literary and County characters are equally succinctly-summed up; Flora's assessment of the young Squire, Richard Hawkmonitor for example, is that as he is a member of the hunting gentry, "Like most other ideas, the idea [of seducing Elfine] would simply not have entered his head."
Stella Gibbons was born in 1902 and brought up in a family that temperamentally was not too dissimilar from her fictional Starkadders, which probably explains the deeply heartfelt passage:
"Storms were what they liked; plenty of rows, and doors being slammed, and jaws sticking out, and faces white with fury, and faces brooding in corners, and faces making unnecessary fuss at breakfast, ... Oh, they did enjoy themselves! They were the sort that went trampling all over your pet stamp collection, or whatever it was, and then spent the rest of their lives atoning for it. but you would rather have had your stamp collection."
Above all, the book is tremendous fun, from the wonderfully apposite names of the characters, human and animal, to the towering passages of purple prose (kindly indicated by the author with one, two or three stars) which descend abruptly into bathos whenever the primitive, passionate Starkadders attempt to browbeat the coolly civilised, and frankly disinterested Flora.