This is a funny book with a big reputation. I vaguely remember reading it many years ago and enjoying it but I had blotted out most of the details.
The style of writing is heavily satirical, designed to parody a hugely popular (at the rime) genre of novels with earthy rural settings. The most outrageous paragraphs are marked with stars "in the manner of Herr Baedeker" so the reader "can be sure whether a sentence is Literature or whether it is just sheer flapdoodle" (Foreword) such as these (2 stars and 3 stars respectively):
- “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. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.” (Ch 3)
- “The blank eyes burrowed through the foetid air between herself and her visitor. They were without content; hollow pools of meaninglessness. They were not eyes but voids sunk between two jutting pent-houses of bone and two bloodless hummocks of cheek. They suspended two raw rods of grief before their own immobility, like frozen fountains in a bright wintry air; and on these rods the fluttering rags of a futile grief were hung.” (Ch 19)
Fundamentally, it is a glorious send-up, over the top in every possible way, from the names of the cows (Feckless, Pointless, Graceless and Aimless, one of whom loses a leg but seems to manage without it) to the one-dimensionality of the characters (love god Seth, old Adam who is said to be 90 and yet sings a "smutty wedding song he had learnt for the marriage of George I" who died in 1727, the eternally depressed Judith, Aunt Ada Doom hiding in her bedroom for twenty years having seen "something narsty in the woodshed" when she was two, ethereal Elphine, hell-fire preacher Amos, and modern novelist Mr Mybug to mention but a few). The language is a delight, from words that are completely made up such as 'sukebind' (a plant) or 'mollocking' (having sex) to words that she has dragged bag from the 'obsolete'; section of the dictionary such as 'bartery', 'thought-whelmed', and 'beasten-housen'.
The plot involves modern girl Flora travelling to deepest darkest Sussex (as someone who lives in East Sussex I was amused to find my bright metropolitan county depicted thus) to live with her relatives at Cold Comfort Farm. They are all trapped in the most depressing and muddy of rural lives. Flora is a practical and positive young lady and battles to improve their lives. Will she succeed or will she be dragged down with them into the endless mire?
So what's wrong with it?
- As with so many novels of the time, it is disfigured by some casual racism, such as the mention of a "Jew-shop" in Chapter 2.
- I was surprised to find that it was set in the future. In chapter two a bra designed in 1938 is mentioned. When she decides to travel down to Sussex she goes by train rather than fly because "there is no landing-stage nearer than Brighton". In chapter 12, telephones are fitted with television (yes, she uses the word in 1932) screens. "The Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of '46" are mentioned in chapter 15. This science fiction seemed totally unnecessary.
- I also thought that it took surprisingly long to get going. We don't get to the farm until the third chapter and we have already read a huge 7% of the book before the inciting incident, a classic letter from Judith Starkadder: “So you are after your rights at last. Well, I have expected to hear from Robert Poste's child these last twenty years. Child, my man once did your father a great wrong. If you will come to us I will do my best to atone, but you must never ask me what for. ... We are not like other folk, maybe, but there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort, and we will do our best to welcome Robert Poste’s child.” (Ch 2)
But once it gets going, the reader is repeatedly delighted by the endless inventiveness and the glory of the language. So what if the plot is silly and a tad predictable. This novel is meant to entertain and it does that in mattocks.
Selected quotes:- “His voice had a low, throaty, animal quality, a sneering warmth that wound a velvet ribbon of sexuality over the outward coarseness of the man.” (Ch 3) Seth is wonderfully one-dimensional as the love-god who finds the pressure of his female admirers rather too much and really just wants to spend an enjoyable afternoon at the talkies.
- “Then animation fell from him, a sucked straw. His body sunk into the immemorial posture of a man thought-whelmed. He was a tree-trunk; a toad on a stone; a pie-thatched owl on a bough.” (Ch 4) Wonderful description! Pie-thatched!
- “Mrs Starkadder was the Dominant Grandmother Theme, which was found in all typical novels on agricultural life.” (Ch 5)
- “Do you think I could have the curtains washed? I believe they are red; and I should so like to make sure.” (Ch 5)
- “She had a lively acquaintance with confinements through the work of women novelists, especially those of the unmarried ones. their descriptions of what was coming to their less fortunate married sisters usually ran to ... eight or nine pages of staccato lines containing seven words, and a great many dots arranged in threes.” (Ch 6)
- “It was too true that life as she is lived had a way of being curiously different from life as described by novelists.” (Ch 8)
- “Elfine: a light, rangy shape which had the plastic contours of a choir-boy etched by Botticelli, drawn against the thin cold sky of spring.” (Ch 10)
- “Old tides lapped his loins.” (Ch 10)
- “Those Bloomsbury-cum- Charlotte-Street lions which exchanged their husbands and wives every other weekend in the most broadminded fashion.” (Ch 10)
- “She felt like stout Cortez or Sir James Jeans on spotting yet another white dwarf.” (Ch 11)
- “It was impossible to sit down for five minutes in Hyde Park after seven o'clock in the evening without being either accosted or arrested.” (Ch 11)
- “Choir-boys are seldom sexless, as many a harassed vicaress knows to her cost.” (Ch 11)
- “Her hands, burnt and bone-modelled as a boys, were clenched.” (Ch 11) Bone-modeled!!!
- “The lights in the windows had a leering, waiting look, like that on the faces of old pimps who sit in the cafes of Holborn Viaduct, plying their casual bartery.” (Ch 16)
- “Flora ... felt as though she were at one of Eugene O’Neill’s plays; the kind that goes on for hours and hours and hours, until the RSPC Audiences batters the doors of the theatre in and insists on a tea interval.” (Ch 16)
- “They ... made their supper off beef, beer and pickled onions, pleasantly spiced by anxiety and speculation.” (Ch 20)
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