Cold Comfort Farm
Feb. 15th, 2019 07:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThis week, I read Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. Written in 1932 and set probably in the early 1950s, it's a parody of melodramatic rural romances of the time and also a very weird speculative work that involves TV phones and air taxis.
It felt a bit overdone in places - I nearly didn't continue past the first introduction of Cold Comfort Farm itself. But the protagonist, Flora Poste, is now probably my favourite character in anything ever and I eventually enjoyed the book tremendously. Flora goes to live with her relatives on Cold Comfort Farm rather than finding useful employment, and turns her interactions with the Starkadders into a mammoth project to bring sense and fulfilment to the family.
The purple prose is quite deliberate and Flora's no-nonsense attitude and habit of speaking her mind clash hilariously with the doom-laden entrenchment of the Starkadders in their stagnation. It perhaps takes a little too long for Flora's plans to start to take fruition, and then everything comes together a bit too rapidly in the end. Some of the fates orchestrated for the female characters also don't feel quite as liberating and beneficial as they might. But it's mostly a work of genius. And it has a surprisingly and unabashedly romantic ending, which I found wholly satisfying.
It felt a bit overdone in places - I nearly didn't continue past the first introduction of Cold Comfort Farm itself. But the protagonist, Flora Poste, is now probably my favourite character in anything ever and I eventually enjoyed the book tremendously. Flora goes to live with her relatives on Cold Comfort Farm rather than finding useful employment, and turns her interactions with the Starkadders into a mammoth project to bring sense and fulfilment to the family.
The purple prose is quite deliberate and Flora's no-nonsense attitude and habit of speaking her mind clash hilariously with the doom-laden entrenchment of the Starkadders in their stagnation. It perhaps takes a little too long for Flora's plans to start to take fruition, and then everything comes together a bit too rapidly in the end. Some of the fates orchestrated for the female characters also don't feel quite as liberating and beneficial as they might. But it's mostly a work of genius. And it has a surprisingly and unabashedly romantic ending, which I found wholly satisfying.
