Book Corner – August 2020 (4)
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
It’s a curious thing. Although I had read this book many moons ago and knew that there had always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm and that Ada Doom had seen something nasty in the woodshed, I realised as I turned the pages, I couldn’t remember the plot. The onset of senility, perhaps, or for all its brilliance is it that Gibbons’ masterpiece is more a triumph of style over substance?
Published in 1932 when Gibbons was working on the books pages of The Lady magazine, it was her first novel. And its success eclipsed anything else she produced during her career, much to her chagrin. Indeed, her other works are so forgotten nowadays that asking anyone to name one would almost certainly generate a perfect Pointless score. She even wrote a sequel, Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, a short novel in which the farm becomes a conference centre and tourist attraction but though moderately successful, it has now sunk into obscurity.
These days I tend not to read introductions penned other than by the author. There is nothing worse than someone giving away the nuances of the plot or highlighting the best passages of the work before you have even had the opportunity to sample it. However, you should read Gibbons’ Prologue before you embark on this novel. It will unlock the key to why some of the paragraphs in the text are marked with between one and three asterisks. It is Gibbons’ tongue-in-cheek way of alerting the reader to passages she considers to be particularly impressive.
As a book, Cold Comfort Farm is a wonderful parody of those doomy, tragic, rural novels penned by the likes of Thomas Hardy and D H Lawrence as well as a swath of lesser writers, particularly prevalent and popular in the 1920s. They were full of sons of the soil, saddled with Biblical names, who cannot control their strong natural urges. But whereas they were full of tragedy, disgrace and death, in Gibbons’ hands they see the path to happiness and redemption. Her guardian angel is Flora Poste, recently orphaned at the age of 19 losing both her parents to the 20th century killer, Spanish flu, and accepts the strange invitation to live with her distant Sussex relatives, the Starkadders.
The farm is a desolate place, stocked with characters bearing names such as Seth, Reuben, Harkaway, Urk, Ezra and Caraway and animals such as Big Business the bull, and cows bearing monikers such as Graceless, Pointless, Aimless, and Feckless. Upstairs is the brooding and controlling presence of Aunt Ada, her gargantuan appetite and her obsession with that nasty vision she had in the woodshed many years ago. Taking stock of her situation and her gloomy, eccentric relatives, the thoroughly modern Flora decides to shake things up and give them a path to happiness and self-fulfilment.
Flora comes over as bossy but well meaning and she eventually succeeds in her objective, picking up a fiancé along the way. Astonishingly, the book is set a little into the future, planes whizz in and out to whisk some pf them away. The book is genuinely funny and, for me, the standout piece was Amos’ sermon, full of hellfire and damnation, delivered to the assembled congregation of the Church of the Quivering Brethren.
Great stuff and justifiably a classic. If your first book is a masterpiece, it is hard to top it. As Neil Young once sang, “it is better to burn out than fade away”. It was Stella Gibbons’ misfortune that she had to fade away.
