"The Eyre Affair" by Jasper Fforde

 Literary detective Thursday Next battles Jack Schitt of the Goliath Corporation and master villain Acheron Hades when first a minor character in Martin Chuzzlewit is kidnapped and then disruption is planned to Jane Eyre in a whimsical comedy thriller involving time travel and forays into fiction. 

It was mostly moderately funny and moderately exciting, uneasily straddling the gap between the two genres, with a meandering plot. The highlights were some clever names, including that of the heroine, her colleague Paige Turner and villain Jack Schitt. There were also two very funny set pieces: 

• A performance of Richard III in which the audience repeatedly heckle in a call-and-response manner, such as: "When is the winter of our discontent? Now is the winter of our discontent?"
• Bookworms who emit apostrophes, unnecessary capitalisations and, when really excited, hyphens, leading to mutations in the dialogue of the other characters such as: "You're Upsetting the Wor'ms! They'rer starting the hy-phen-ate!"

An enjoyable romp blurring the boundaries between fiction and fiction; this witty novel reminded me of At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (a work of genius) and The Last Simple by Ray Sullivan (which is much funnier).

Selected quotes:

• "The Goliath Corporation was to altruism what Genghis Khan was to soft furnishings."  (Ch 7)
• "It had been of considerable anguish to her [my mother] that I waqsn't spending more time with swollen ankles, haemorrhoids and a bad back, popping out grandchildren." (Ch 9)
• "As much charm as an open grave." (Ch 12)
• "Don't ever call me mad ... I'm not mad, I'm just ... differently moralled." (Ch 15)
• "the sullen smell of death." (Ch 17)
• "Somehow 'fucked up' made it seem more believable; we all make mistakes ... It is only when the cost is counted in human lives that people really take notice." (Ch 18)
• "Small pockets of fog ... parcels of gloom." (Ch 19)
• "The standard joke about Swindon's morgue was that the corpses were the ones with all the charisma." (Ch 20)

April 2026; 373 pages
First published in 2001 by Hodder and Stoughton

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Cold Comfort Farm" by Stella Gibbons

 This is a funny book with a big reputation. It was rated in a BBC poll as the 92nd best ever novel. 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'. I'm not sure about 'chuck-stubbard' (a young man).

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:

• “I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favourable reviews, to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible.” (Foreword)
• “A lowering, moist, steamy light, almost like that which gleams below the eyelids of a man in fever, filled the cowshed.” (Ch 3)
• “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.
• “The country for miles, under the blanket of the dark which brought no peace, was in its annual tortured ferment of spring growth; worm jarred with worm and seed with seed.” (Ch 4)
• “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 liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while you were eating an apple.” (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)
• “His conversation ... was ... mainly a kind of jockeying for place, a shifting about of the pieces on the board before the real game began.” (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)
• “She was the core, the matrix; the focusing point of the house ... and she was, like all cores, utterly alone. you never heard of two cores to a thing, did you? Well, then.” (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)
• “The dawn widened into an exquisite spring day. Soft, wool-like puffs of sound came from the thrushes’ throats in the trees. The uneasy year, tortured by its spring of adolescence, broke into bud-spots in hedge, copse, spinney, and byre.” (Ch 17)
• “The sordid flies, intent on their own selfish pleasure, buzzed in idiotic circles above her head with as much noise and as little meaning as life itself.” (Ch 19)
• “They ... made their supper off beef, beer and pickled onions, pleasantly spiced by anxiety and speculation.” (Ch 20)

A joy to read. Vastly entertaining. Endlessly creative.

April 2025 and again November 2025 (that's the joy of belonging to three reading groups); 224 pages

First published in 1932

My Penguin paperback edition was issued in 2006

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Wikipedia quotes Faye Hammill's work exploring the influences on Cold Comfort Farm:

• The farm and Aunt Ada Doom are modelled on Dormer House and Mrs Velindre in The House in Dormer Forest by Mary Webb.
• The original for Reuben comes from Sussex Gorse by Sheila Kaye-Smith.
• The Quivering Brethren are modelled on the Colgate Brethren in Susan Spray by Sheila Kaye-Smith
• The rural mysticism is found in Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys is another target.

Odd notes:

• Twice, Gibbons describes the eyebrows as ‘penthouses’. The word, deriving from the AngloNorman word ‘pentiz’ meaning an ‘appendage’ and only later being modified to penthouse because it was applied to buildings, originally (from the fourteenth century) meant a structure with a sloping roof, joined onto a main building, like a shed. From the sixteenth century this was extended to mean a canopy. In the seventeenth century it was applied to the sloping roofs in a real tennis court. It only reached its present meaning, a posh apartment at the top of a block of flats, in the nineteenth century. The word ‘pent-house’ meaning eyebrow can also be found in Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott.
• It’s set in Sussex ... yet Flora washes with soft water (Ch 5) which might be difficult to come across in the chalk-based South Downs.
• The phrase that became famous was that Aunt Ada Doom “saw something nasty in the woodshed” when in fact she remembers it (and she has “never forgotten it”) in the woodshed, the bicycle shed, potting-sheds, cow-sheds ... (Ch 10)

"A Pelican at Blandings" by P G Wodehouse

Another Blandings novel. Once more Galahad, the younger brother of Lord Emsworth, must reunite  sundered lovers. Once more the antagonists are Lady Constance and the truly awful Alaric, Duke of Dunstable. Once more there are imposters. And if no-one has any plans to kidnap the Empress of Blandings, there are plans afoot to steal a painting of a nude lady that looks a bit like the fat pig herself.

So the plot and the characters are the same as all the other Blandings novels. Never mind! What makes Wodehouse adorable is the way he twists our common language into absurdity:

• "A man, to use an old-fashioned phrase, of some twenty-eight summers, he gave the impression at the moment of experiencing at least that number of very hard winters." (6.1)
• "Something had told Lord Emsworth that this interview might prove to be a difficult one, and it was plain to him that something had known what it was talking about." (7.3)
• "'I wouldn't marry him if he were the last man on earth.' 'Well, he isn't, so the question does not arise.'" (9.2)

One of the other joys of this book is the way he teases his fellow authors:

• "A stylist like Gustave Flaubert, with his flair for the mot juste, would have described her as being as mad as a wet hen." (8.1)
• "Thomas Hardy would have seen in the whole affair one more of life's little ironies and on having it drawn to his attention would have got twenty thousand words of a novel out of it." (10.2)
• "Like all authors, she knew that her output was above criticism." (13.1)

And one of the characters is called Abercrombie Fitch!

Selected quotes:

• "She belonged to the school of thought that holds that a nice glass of hot milk, while not baffling the death angel altogether, can at least postpone the inevitable." (6.1)
• "He switched on the torch. When he did so, he instantly became the centre of attraction to a rowdy mob of those gnats, moths and beetles which collect in gangs and stay up late in the rural districts." (7.2)
• "A stare that would have aroused the respectful envy of a basilisk." (8.1)

Other P G Wodehouse novels reviewed in this blog may be found here.

August 2022; 249 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Mike" by P G Wodehouse

This novel was originally published in serial form and has since been republished in a variety of forms, including as two novels: Mike at Wrykyn and Mike and Psmith. It is an example of the very early work of P G Wodehouse and shows him transitioning from the school-based story genre to the comic novel based around eccentric aristocrats. Psmith, who makes his first appearance in the second half of this novel, was, perhaps, his first 'Woosterish' character (though Psmith has brains), although the character of Wyatt, who appears in the first half of this novel, is very much Psmith in embryo.

The book divides into two very separate halves: 

• In the first half, Michael Jackson, the eponymous hero, is a keen cricketer (he has three brothers who play first-class cricket) who goes to public school Wrykyn with the ambition of making the First Eleven in his first term. 
• In the second half, Mike has been taken from Wrykyn just before becoming captain of Cricket and, because of bad reports, is sent to Sedleigh, a much smaller school with a much smaller reputation in cricket. Sulking, he decides he won't play cricket for Sedleigh. 

The style shows clear indications of what PGW will become. His authorial voice is already there:

• There are the authorial reflections, with a twist of wryness:
• "And here, I regret to say, Mike acted from the best motives, which is always fatal." (C 2)
• "Influential relations are a help in every stage of life." (C 4)
• "No man of spirit can bear to be pelted with over-ripe tomatoes for any length of time without feeling that if the thing goes on much longer he will be reluctantly compelled to take steps." (C 8)
• "The true philosopher is the man who says “All right,” and goes to sleep in his arm-chair." (C 22)
• There are the reinterpreted metaphors:
• "Rather like crushing a thingummy with a what-d’you-call-it." (C 14)
• "He paced up and down the room like a hungry lion, adjusting his pince-nez (a thing, by the way, which lions seldom do)" (C 19)
• "With a strong hand she had shaken the cat out of the bag, and exhibited it plainly to all whom it might concern." (C 21)
• There are utterly original descriptions:
• "The whole business had some of the dignity of the old-fashioned minuet, subtly blended with the careless vigour of a cake-walk." (C 40)

There are even hints of characters in later novels. For example, Mike says that before Wrykyn he was at a private school "at Emsworth" which foreshadows Lord Emsworth, the hero of the Blandings Castle saga.

Both halves resonate with the public school ethos of the age. On the one hand, it reeks of privilege. The boys live in a protected bubble; the lower classes are subservient. Even when the village policeman is thrown into the pond, the headmaster is fundamentally complacent.

On the other hand, it is fascinating to see how things have developed. This is a time before toothpaste: "Push us over a pinch of that tooth-powder of yours. I’ve used all mine.” (C 23) The googly is still new and unnamed: "my friend said he had one very dangerous ball, of the Bosanquet type. Looks as if it were going away, and comes in instead.” (C 27)

Some words are in early stages of their development:

• There is an interesting use of the word 'stereo' (unacknowledged in my Chambers) as a shortening of stereotyped to describe the conventional conversation around the breakfast table in the Jackson household.
• One doesn't 'oversleep', one 'oversleeps oneself'.
• “I simply sha’n’t go to school.” (C 9)
• “Nothing that happens in this luny-bin,” said Psmith, “has power to surprise me" (C 46)

Selected quotes:

• "Except during the cricket season they were in the habit of devoting their powerful minds at breakfast almost exclusively to the task of victualling against the labours of the day." (C 1)
• "He had the same feeling for Mike that most boys of eighteen have for their fifteen-year-old brothers. He was fond of him in the abstract, but preferred him at a distance." (C 1)
• "An entirely modest person seldom makes a good batsman. Batting is one of those things which demand first and foremost a thorough belief in oneself. It need not be aggressive, but it must be there." (C 4)
• "There is nothing more heady than success, and if it comes before we are prepared for it, it is apt to throw us off our balance. As a rule, at school, years of wholesome obscurity make us ready for any small triumphs we may achieve at the end of our time there." (C 5)
• "when Mike was pleased with life he always found a difficulty in obeying Authority and its rules." (C 5)
• "I often say to people, ’Good chap, Trevor, but can’t think of Life. Give him a tea-pot and half a pound of butter to mess about with,’ I say, ’and he’s all right. But when it comes to deep thought, where is he? Among the also-rans.’ That’s what I say.” (C 17)
• "The first duty of a captain is to have no friends." (C 20)
• "There are many kinds of walk. Mike’s was the walk of the Overwrought Soul." (C 20)
• "Marjory meant well, but she had put her foot right in it. Girls oughtn’t to meddle with these things. No girl ought to be taught to write till she came of age. And Uncle John had behaved in many respects like the Complete Rotter. If he was going to let out things like that, he might at least have whispered them, or looked behind the curtains to see that the place wasn’t chock-full of female kids." (C 21)
• “if I cannot compel circumstances to my will, I can at least adapt my will to circumstances." (C 22)
• "it’s awful rot for a chap like Wyatt to have to go and froust in a bank for the rest of his life.” (C 26)
• "I’ve just become a Socialist. It’s a great scheme. You ought to be one. You work for the equal distribution of property, and start by collaring all you can and sitting on it." (C 32)
• “Of all sad words of tongue or pen,” said he, “the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’" (C 33)
• "The advice I give to every young man starting life is: ‘Never confuse the unusual and the impossible.’" (C 33)
• "He walked well, as if he were used to running." (C 36)
• "He positively ached for a game. Any sort of a game. An innings for a Kindergarten v. the Second Eleven of a Home of Rest for Centenarians would have soothed him." (C 37)
• "The ball, when delivered, was billed to break from leg, but the programme was subject to alterations." (C 40)
• "Of all masters, the most unpopular is he who by the silent tribunal of a school is convicted of favouritism." (C 40)
• "Jellicoe, for the latter carolled in a gay undertone as he dressed, till Psmith, who had a sensitive ear, asked as a favour that these farm-yard imitations might cease until he was out of the room." (C 42)
• "Mr. Downing was in a sarcastic mood when he met Mike. That is to say, he began in a sarcastic strain. But this sort of thing is difficult to keep up. By the time he had reached his peroration, the rapier had given place to the bludgeon." (C 42)
• “One of the Georges,” said Psmith, “I forget which, once said that a certain number of hours’ sleep a day—I cannot recall for the moment how many—made a man something, which for the time being has slipped my memory. However, there you are. I’ve given you the main idea of the thing" (C 44)
• "There had been a time in his hot youth when he had sprinted like an untamed mustang in pursuit of volatile Pathans in Indian hill wars, but Time, increasing his girth, had taken from him the taste for such exercise." (C 45)
• "it was this that made him feel that somebody, in the words of an American author, had played a mean trick on him, and substituted for his brain a side-order of cauliflower." (C 58)

A fascinating glimpse of early Wodehouse, already funny.

The next book in the series is Psmith in the City.

Other books by P G Wodehouse reviewed in this blog can be found here.

November 2021

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God