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language: English
country: UK
year: 1932
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 21.8.22-22.8.22
Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm has been on my radar for a long time — we watched the movie at one point as a family, I think probably in connection with the time we watched I Capture the Castle, which I think is in pretty direct conversation with Cold Comfort Farm (the novel, at least; the movie loses so much of the humor of the book that I don’t know if the same is true, although maybe it’s in conversation with the Cold Comfort Farm movie). it follows Flora Poste, a “sensible, sophisticated” 19-year-old whose parents have just died, leaving her only a hundred pounds a year. in lieu of getting a job, she decides to impose on her relatives and ends up coming to live at the titular farm, where she proceeds to reorganize everyone’s lives according to her modern and pragmatic sensibilities. also it includes the author’s annotations — following “the method of Herr Baedeker”, throughout the novel various paragraphs and sentences are preceded by one to three asterisks as a star rating of how good she thought they were/how proud of them she was.
it’s very funny. I don’t remember the movie well enough to say but I doubt somehow that it effectively conveys the stylistic humor of the novel — it’s written in two radically different genres: when Flora is present, it’s a witty social comedy; when Flora is absent, it’s an incredible pastiche of vaguely gothic melodrama — the kind that regards its rural characters as “primitive” or even “subhuman”, beings of pure (but also repressed) emotion living in grimy decaying farmhouses. part of the point of the novel, as I take it, is precisely to humanize these characters, from the “highly-sexed young men” (Seth, my problematic beloved!) to the ominous and controlling grandmother “Ada Doom”, and doing so highlights how absurd the conceits of the kind of rural narrative it parodies are.
nonetheless, it suffers a bit from its inability to imagine rural life except through Flora’s perspective — as something that, fundamentally, is quaint and in need of some sprucing up that only an urbane and urban, thoroughly “modern” incomer can provide. it also suffers — in its focus on Flora’s upper-class friends and acquaintances — from the periodic passing racism of white, British fiction from the 1930s, although at times (particularly around the character of Mrs Smiling) I think it may be attempting to, if not actually challenge, then at least parody the way white, British society imagines the colonial “abroad”. it would be a stretch, though, to say it’s really “critical” in this way.
it’s also, intriguingly but somewhat perplexingly, a work of science fiction. Cold Comfort Farm was published in 1932 but is set at some point after 1946, following the “Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of ’46” (which one side character is a veteran of), the invention of flying cars and the widespread adoption of small planes, “air-mail” that’s literally dropped from the air by an “air-postman”, and the development of video phones. these coexist interestingly with the technologies and technological imaginary of the ’30s: movies from “twenty years ago” are assumed to be forever lost from public cultural memory, Flora regularly sends and receives telegrams, and in fact even ground-traveling cars are still absent from Cold Comfort Farm itself, although they’re present in the surrounding community. I’m still not sure what advantage making the setting science fiction served — with the exception of a few small details, the plot proceeds essentially unaffected.
some final thoughts: one, unfortunately, while Seth may be a disreputable jerk he is nonetheless a sexy ex-jock who moves “with the lounging grace of a panther” and unbuttons progressivly more of his shirt in moments of heightened emotion or intellectual effort, and I. love him. I Could Fix Him.
my favorite passage in the novel is early on, when Flora is trying to figure out which of her relatives to impose on:
Her mother’s cousin in South Kensington said that she would be very pleased to have Flora, only there was a little difficulty about the bedroom. Perhaps Flora would not mind using the large attic, which was now used as a meeting-room for the Orient-Star-in-the-West Society on Tuesdays, and for the Spiritist Investigators’ League on Fridays. She hoped that Flora was not a sceptic, for manifestations sometimes occurred in the attic, and even a trace of scepticism in the atmosphere of the room spoiled the conditions, and prevented phenomena, the observations of which provided the Society with such valuable evidence in favour of Survival. Would Flora mind if the parrot kept his corner of the attic? He had grown up in it, and at his age the shock of removal to another room might well prove fatal.
‘Again, you see, it means sharing a bedroom,’ said Flora. ‘I do not object to the phenomena, but I do object to the parrot.’
I do not object to the phenomena.
moods: emotional, funny, lighthearted