Recently the subject of Cold Comfort Farm cropped up in a cyber-conversation with another Ciaoist, who asked me what I thought of the book. "It's very funny," I found myself replying without much thought, "but rather appalling."

Afterwards, I wondered whether the judgement was a bit too glib. I hadn't, come to think of it, read the book for about forty years. Better read it again, I thought, to check. So I did.

* The book *

Cold Comfort Farm is a spoof. First published in 1932 it mercilessly lampooned the "rustic melodrama" school of novel-writing that was enjoying a vogue at the time. The immediate target was Mary Webb, the Shropshire-based writer whose work is ironically now more or less forgotten whilst Cold Comfort Farm lives on. But beyond Webb, there are echoes of DH Lawrence, Hardy and the Brontë sisters. Indeed, the Brontë sisters come in for direct reference in Cold Comfort Farm.

A big best-seller from the moment it appeared, Cold Comfort Farm has never entirely faded from public awareness and has enjoyed intermittent revivals in popularity, usually following adaptations for radio or screen. The most recent, in 1995, was a star-studded film for TV, directed by John Schlesinger, which was extremely successful in capturing the flavour and humour of the original, whilst discarding some of its more irritating anachronisms. Unusually for me, I enjoyed seeing the film quite as much as I enjoyed rereading the book, and I would whole-heartedly recommend it. But it is the book that is the subject of this review.

* The plot *

Flora Poste, a level-headed young lady only recently out of boarding school, finds herself suddenly orphaned and much shorter of money than she had expected. In deciding how to face the future, she discovers that her relatives, the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm in the village of Howling in Sussex, consider themselves as being under an unspecified obligation to her, on account of some nameless wrong once done to her father.

She therefore goes to stay at Cold Comfort Farm, and finds herself immersed in a festering morass of family resentments and rivalries, all in a setting of near-mediaeval backwardness. Flora's ancient Aunt Ada Doom rules the roost from her upstairs lair, while her numerous descendents below are terrified of upsetting her by reminding her of the traumatic moment in her childhood when she "saw something nasty in the woodshed". Anything they might do by way of modernising or leaving the farm is understood to be likely to upset her.

This leaves the running of the farm in the hands of Amos, who is much more committed to preaching hellfire to the sect of the Quivering Brethren, and his wife Judith, who is unhealthily obsessed with their younger son Seth, the local Lothario. Seth, however, despite doing more than his fair share of mollocking with maidens and non-maidens alike in spring when the sukebind is in bloom, is only really interested in the cinema. His brother Reuben, a true son of the soil, would actually like to set the farm to rights, but is frustrated by the indifference or hostility of those around him. Sister Elfine spends her days in bucolic rhapsody, greeting the dawn on the downs and writing poetry, while nurturing an incomprehensible passion for the son of the manor, the decent but dim Richard Hawk-Monitor. This passion is, for better or worse, unrequited and even unnoticed; "like most ideas, the idea would simply not have entered his head," as we are tellingly told.

The farm is also infested with numerous other Starkadders boasting forenames like Micah, Urk, Ezra and Harkaway. One could draw a family tree, although the connections between some branches might be obscure, but who would want to? There are also supernumerary retainers, like Adam Lambsbreath, who spends his time clettering dishes with a birch-twig, and Meriam Beetle, the hired girl, who succumbs to the springtime scent of the sukebind with seasoned regularity and has sundry ill-accounted-for offspring to prove it. And, of course, there are the farm animals: cows with names like Feckless and Graceless, the bad-tempered cart-horse Viper, and Big Business, the bull.

With breath-taking poise and pushiness - one might call it effrontery - Flora takes this ill-assorted crew in hand and sets about tidying up their lives. Any overt suggestion of hers for change is, of course, resisted with umming, aahing and the all-embracing objection that "there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm", a fact that apparently precludes any novelty. Her response is to ride blithely over the resistance, when all else fails calling in the cavalry in the form of her numerous social contacts from the capital, and other convenient acquaintances.

And does she triumph in the end? Well, perhaps I've told you enough of the plot already.

* Language and style *

When she chooses, Gibbons writes prose of a crisp and humorous clarity. The plot unfolds with pace and the dialogue is sharp and often amusing.

All the inmates of Cold Comfort Farm - with the possible exception of the animals - speak in an archaic rural dialect as muddily glutinous as the farmyard itself. Ostensibly Sussex, its real-life forebears are to be found further west, but much of it is unashamedly invented. In this, Gibbons was again guying Mary Webb, whose supposedly Shropshire folk spoke in essentially Somerset accents. This reference is of course now of little relevance, but as cod-rustic the language is entertaining in its own right, especially when the sentiments expressed in it are at their darkest: "Ay, 'tes all the same. Cold Comfort stock ne'er finds a buyer. Wi' the Queen's Bane blighting our corn, and the King's Evil laying waste the clover and the Prince's Forfeit bringin' black ruin to the hay and the sows as barren as come-ask-it - ay, 'tes the same tale iverywhere all over the farm…." Get the picture?

Of course, the reader isn't meant to take all this straw-sucking language seriously. It is leavened by narrative prose which is generally light and only subtly mocking. Flora Poste is depicted as an admirer of Jane Austen ("She liked everything to be tidy and pleasant about her, and so do I. Unless everything is tidy and pleasant and comfortable about one, people cannot even begin to enjoy life. I cannot endure messes."), and in this one suspects she is reflecting not only the tastes but also the stylistic aspirations of the author.

In this context one can only assume that the overwritten purple passages that are inserted like gritty, granary grains into the lightly risen dough are intended satirically. One hopes so, anyway. The reader knows when they are coming because they are asterisked; for example "**Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns."

Perhaps, with the likes of Mary Webb being widely-read at the time, these passages seemed funny then. Fortunately, the rest of the book still seems funny now.

* "Very funny" *

There are a few witty one-liners to be found scattered around Cold Comfort Farm, but the humour is more of character and situation than of epigram or repartee.

The main characters are, of course, all caricatures, but finely drawn, credible caricatures, not mere cardboard cutouts. Some are truly memorable: the impassioned preacher Amos (who could ever forget the "there'll be no butter in hell" sermon, so brilliantly delivered by Ian McKellen in the film?); the smoulderingly sensual hunk Seth; the manipulatively mad matriarch Aunt Ada; the sex-obsessed visiting intellectual Mr Mybug who takes a fancy to Flora. All have great entertainment value.

Similarly, the comedy of situation is handled with a consummate professionalism. The "stage management" is carefully crafted, and even the most chaotic scenes around the farm flow naturally, their essential elements having been economically established and prepared for in advance. The narrative is not allowed to linger too long on any one incident, however hilarious. As a result, the reader is too engaged in the story, and amused by its unveiling, to be much bothered too much by its underlying lack of credibility, or by the less sympathetic qualities of its heroine.

* "Rather appalling" *

As you will have gathered, I like this book, but I have a problem with it in that I really do dislike its heroine.

When I first read it all those years ago, I took it as much as a satire on the interfering arrogance of the likes of Flora Poste as on the primeval rusticity of Cold Comfort Farm. Thoroughly modern Flora is sublimely self-assured. She never has the slightest doubt about her mission, nor any concern that her values might be anything other than universal, or that her interference will bring anything but good. Like most doubts, self-doubt would simply not have entered her head. It would all be horribly New Labour, except that the well-connected Flora is socially conservative.

Highly intelligent though anti-intellectual (to call her "thick as a Poste" would unfortunately be inappropriate), she finds reinforcement for her preconceptions by reading "The Higher Common Sense" by the Abbé Fausse-Maigre's. This book too I always assumed to be a satirical invention, especially as the learned Abbé's name translates, more or less, as "fake skinny".

Alas, I have since discovered that the Abbé and his book are all too real, just as I have since discovered that though Gibbons did indeed intend Cold Comfort Farm to amuse, she also intended it to be read as a panegyric on the virtues of orderly modernity. Flora explains her decision to go to Cold Comfort Farm rather than pursue other options but describing it as "interesting and appalling...the others just sound appalling!"

The reader is evidently expected to empathise with Flora. It is assumed you will share her view that the muddle in which she finds the Starkadder family is appalling, and to applaud her determination to make it more orderly, all for their own good. Personally, though, I find the presumption that life will necessarily be improved by bossy tidy-mindedness just as appalling, perhaps more appalling still.

* The Author *

Stella Gibbons was thirty when she wrote Cold Comfort Farm, her first novel, although she had previously published a volume of poetry. Before then she had pursued her career as a fledgling journalist with little success; the idea for Cold Comfort Farm occurred to her when she was asked to write a synopsis of a Mary Webb novel for The Evening Standard, from which she was subsequently sacked.

Following the success of Cold Comfort Farm she went on to write numerous novels, short stories and collections of verse, but none struck the same chord with the public as her masterpiece. Even two follow-ups - a collection of short stories entitled Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm and a sequel called Conference at Cold Comfort Farm - made little impact. They simply didn't have the same wit and panache. Having read those two many years ago I can confirm that they are eminently forgettable. I could barely describe them now, so I won't try.

Stella Gibbons published her last novel in 1970 and died in 1989. For all her prolific output, she seems destined to go down in literary history as a one-book wonder, the one book being Cold Comfort Farm.

* Availability *

Cold Comfort Farm is published in paperback in the UK by Penguin Books, ISBN 0141182652, 240 pages, cover price £7.99. Amazon have it for £6.39, I notice.

* Conclusion *

Don't let my misgivings put you off. The book is dated in some ways, but timeless in others. It is timeless in its sharp observation and humorous turn of phrase. Read it as I first misread it, as a light-hearted satire on all its characters - as making fun of Flora and her self-satisfied social set in London as much as the murky yokels of Cold Comfort Farm - and you'll find it enormous fun.

© torr 2005