Reviews
3.5/5
http://pussreboots.pair.com/blog/2015...
What a lovely book. If only I could talk the way Gibbons write, I would be so eternally happy. This novel doesn't take itself seriously and pokes fun of many classics. Cold Comfort Farm is going on the list of the fictional places I want to visit the most. The End.
Flora Poste is an elegant, sophisticated young lady living in glamorous London in the 1930s. She’s also an orphan, and her determined sense of order demands that she put her good taste to work and find a new branch of the family to fix. She settles on the oddest bunch she can find—an aunt, uncle, and cousins who live deep in the country on Cold Comfort Farm. Armed with her journal, several issues of Vogue magazine, and a tall pair of rubber boots, Flora sets out to drag Cold Comfort Farm into the modern fashionable age. This act of generosity proves a bit more challenging when Flora finds herself confronted with an over-sexed, moving-picture-obsessed cousin; an uncle who preaches until his congregation literally quivers in Fear of the Lord; a poetry-writing, free-spirited young sprite who’s in love with the dashing lord next door; and a great aunt who’s “seen something nasty in the woodshed.” A parody of the earthy, melodramatic novels of D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, Cold Comfort Farm is, quite simply, hilarious. The 1995 film version (starring Kate Beckinsdale as the no-nonsense, never-give-up Flora) wonderfully captures Gibbons’ sense of the odd, the eccentric, and the absurd, and genuinely brings the page to life.
The title always put me off this one - I just assumed that it was going to be grey and depressing. It was not. Completely hilarious in a sweetly biting old-fashioned way.
This is a funny book – in the manner of a P.G. Wodehouse read – but not AS funny as the Jeeves collection, in my opinion. Flora’s parents die and she doesn’t want to go to work so she writes all her relatives to find one willing to take her in. She gets a reply from her country relatives, the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm who seem to feel they have a debt to pay to her. Aunt Ada Doom runs the farm from her upstairs bedroom and insists that no one leave the farm, or have any fun, for she has seen something “nasty in the woodshed.” Flora decides that she must go about setting everyone straight so she begins tidying up the place solving all manner of problems as she goes. A quick read. I’d say yeah, you should read this.
