Customer Reviews

Cold Comfort Farm (Abridged Edition)

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Every now and then, usually when life gets a bit too stressful, I need a good belly laugh. And if an author can do it in a clever fashion, then all the better. Such was the case with Stella Gibbon's Cold Comfort Farm.

Written in 1932, and set in "the near future," it's the story of the Starkadder family and what happens when they have a run in with the determined Flora Poste. Flora is one of those heroines who is decidedly cheerful, and very intent on fixing up other peoples messes and untidiness. Forced with the decision to either throw herself on the mercy of some relations goodwill to take her in, or (horrors!) get a job, Flora writes to the various relations that she has in search of a home after the demise of her parents. In exchange, Flora will hand over her slight inheritance of a hundred pounds a year.

And it seems the only relations who do want her are the Starkadders, off in the downs of Sussex. Flora is imagining a tidy home farm. What she gets is a set of cranky, eccentric if not outright insane, cousins, with the ringleader, Aunt Ada Doom in the middle of it all. There is the son of Ada, Amos Starkadder, who runs the farm, but spends Tuesday nights off preaching fire and brimstone to the Brethren; his wife Judith who worships her youngest and views the world as perpetual misery and just wishes that everyone would leave her alone. Pretty Elfine, all of seventeen, spends her days running wild and imagining herself a dryad, twigs and leaves included. And then there are the boys, most notably, Reuben, who loves farming, but Amos doesn't trust him, and Seth, an oversexed, hunk of manhood who seems to have nothing but sex on the brain, but the reality is much more interesting. And then the ancient, muttering Adam, who 'cletters' the dishes with thorny twigs.

In short, Flora has all sorts of interesting projects at hand, and it's a task that she falls to with glee with great practicality and not a little cunning on her part. It's a mad riot of a novel, generously slathered with wicked parodies of the overwrought prose of D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, asides to the writing of Gaskell and a great withering jab at the Brontes. For anyone who has survived a university level course in nineteenth century English lit, it's the perfect antidote to the general depression that follows such a course, and it's worth it.

Asute readers will note that Flora blithely goes about her mission of improving everyone's lives and being a dreadful snob about it. It takes a little while to realize that Gibbons is making fun of her heroine just as much as she is of the popular novels of the time. Flora never quite seems to see the chaos that she is spreading about in her wake as she goes about her tidying, and assumes that she is 'doing the right thing.'

From the names of the farm's herd of cows -- Aimless, Feckless, Graceless and Pointless and the stud bull, Big Business -- to the real intent and mystery of Aunt Ada, who saw something nasty in the woodshed, it's a grand read of a book. You'll find yourself giggling over the descriptions, the sly wit, and the oft-times ridiculous situations that arise in this tale of a tormented family. I enjoyed myself immensely, and found it vastly entertaining and worth it to mend the blues for an evening.

It's not a very long book, just under 240 pages, and if you can, find the new release from Penguin Books, with a new introduction by Lynne Truss, and a delightful cover by artist Roz Chast. There have been several film versions of this one made, most notably with Kate Beckensale as Flora, and I urge anyone who hasn't read the book to do so. You'll never look at English Literature in quite the same way again.

I read the book as part of a book club. We all found it amusing and entertaining. Be warned - this is not the same text as originally published. I ordered this edition because it would ship sooner than others which appeared higher on the sort list. While the story arc is the same, and the characters as quirky, it became apparent that my version misses a lot of the descriptive prose my friend all read. Skip this edition and get the full deal.

Do NOT waste your time with this edition. As another review has stated, this edition (ironically, the only edition Amazon includes for Amazon Prime shipping) is NOT the original text, and the "translation," the "der....I can't handle British English...huh huh...." American translation, is offensive in its juvenile and lowest-common-denominator approach to this novel. So much has been changed that it's hardly the same work at all. When comparing this edition with the Penguin text side-by-side, I cannot follow the story line from page to page - that's a drastic change! Even the "glossary" in the back questions the reader's intelligence (do I really need to be told the definition for "beetle" and that in Sussex the word "nay" means "no?"). Somehow the editor/butcher has managed to turn a 233 page text into 117, obviously showing some major cutting to the descriptions that make Cold Comfort Farm a wonderful book. There are 23 chapters to the original text; this edition has only 11 SHORT chapters - how is it even possible to call this the same book??

One would think that Amazon's description would at least mention that this is not Stella Gibbons' original work but some sort of adaptation. There is a brief mention that "Anne Massey's skillful rendering of a variety of accents will make this story more accessible to American audiences;" however, let me point out that the change of "accents" (ahem...dialect, people...we're talking about a stylistic choice made by the writer to include the dialect!) is not the most drastic change to the book - huge chunks have been taken out, and the syntax of practically every sentence has been changed into a style unrecognizable in relation to the author. Hell, entire paragraphs are unrecognizable when compared to the original text. It's almost like someone tried to turn a novel into a children's book! The publishing company should remove Gibbons' name from the cover and replace it with the BNPublishing logo, or at the very least say something on the cover about the book being some kind of adaptation of the original novel. Unfortunately, I did not see the statement on the back of the book about Massey's rendering of the accents, or I would have had an early warning that this was the wrong edition; however, as I started reading the book, I knew something was wrong - how could this be on a PhD English course syllabus?? Haha...thank goodness I have experience with 20th Century British literature so that I caught my mistake within my reading two pages! Well, I'm thankful Barnes and Noble could supply me with the Penguin edition on short notice so that I would not embarrass myself in class! MAKE SURE YOU SPECIFICALLY SEARCH FOR AND BUY THE PENGUIN CLASSICS EDITION!

This is the book that makes marvelous fun of them. If you slogged through Wuthering Heights and Tristram Shandy and Jane Eyre and The Mayor of Casterbridge or Return of the Native wishing someone would just smack some sense into someone or have a little normal fun, this is the book for you. And if you loved those books, you'll love this one even more. Gibbons attacks the Gothic and Pastoral novels on their own turf and turns them on their ears while delivering a few good jabs at the Modern Novels of the 1930s to boot. Literary humor so good it'll make you giggle and snort and want to read aloud.

This particular edition, while it has the most awful cover art on the planet, happens to have very nice introduction by Lynne Truss--the author of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves--which gives some wonderful and funny background on Gibbons, her life, times, and writing. It's also amusing on its own and great info if you're stuck writing book reports.

There are some oddities to this book in which a "near future" England of 1938 has no hints of World War II, but that makes it so much more delightful. It is a book that exists in a bubble just like the worlds of the stories Gibbons lampoons so well. Cold Comfort Farm is a literate and intelligent piece of writing that is also hilarous and great fun to read.

This review applies ONLY to the edition of "Cold Comfort Farm" sold by BN Publishing. It is an abridged edition - or as one reviewer called it, a "dumbed-down" version. It still retains some entertainment value, but reads more like a novelization for teens of the 1995 Kate Beckinsale move (which I liked very much) than great literature. I couldn't believe this was a book with such a wonderful reputation, and then I realized this wasn't what Stella Gibbons actually wrote. To make matters truly annoying, I had to confirm my suspicions from external sources. There is absolutely no indication in the book itself that it's anything other than the original. I certainly hope to get the real thing some day, and for anyone else I strongly recommend doing that, and not repeating my mistake.

A couple other reviewers have made this point before, but I feel it requires additional emphasis. Those reviews are buried among the high praises of people most of whom probably read unabridged editions, not this one. I don't know exactly how this happens, but I've noticed other cases where reviews clearly don't apply to the particular edition described on that page.

The humor of this glorious funny book resides mainly in Gibbons' masterly control of prose style; if you have only seen the movie, you know less than half of what the author has to offer. Yes, she creates a wonderful gallery of extraordinary characters, and the story clips along nicely if rather predictably, but it is the author's language that really gets you laughing out loud. Written in 1932, the book is a parody of a certain kind of rural melodrama popular at the time, but of the authors mentioned by the Oxford Companion to English Literature as models only D. H. Lawrence is still read today. But no matter; there are strong echoes of Hardy and the Brontes as well, and anyway the language works just fine on its own. It ranges from gothic descriptions of a landscape primeval and stark, throbbing with the fecund sap of plant and beast, to gnomic sayings delivered in a rural dialect so thick as to be incomprehensible if one did not realize that half the words in it were probably made up by the author. And, as an added incentive, Gibbons has helpfully marked her most purple passages with two or three stars, "according to the method perfected by the late Herr Baedecker."

Flora Poste, twenty, fashionable, well educated, and recently orphaned, decides against working for a living so writes around to various distant relatives asking them to take her in. She decides to go to live with the Starkadders, some distant cousins whose alarming address is Cold Comfort Farm, Howling, Sussex. (This will seem less odd if you know English place-names, and throughout the book Gibbons' choice of names is both almost plausible and brilliantly absurd.) The farm is described in the first of the starred passages, beginning thus:

"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. The farm was crouched on a bleak hill-side, whence its fields, fanged with flints, dropped steeply to the village of Howling a mile away . . . ".

The extended family she meets there, all with short biblical names of Old Testament force, is equally dour, and the living conditions are primitive to say the least. The household is presided over by the matriarch, Great Aunt Ada Doom, who "saw something nasty in the woodshed" as a child and has barely emerged from her room since, but terrifies the others into submission for fear of completing her descent into total insanity. But Flora determines to take the farm and the family in hand, beginning with the youngest, the nature spirit Elfine, and working up to the old woman. The manner in which she does so forms the plot of the rest of the book.

The gothic style which the author handles so well depends upon the ability to evoke impending doom, and Gibbons virtually redefines the verb "impend." So the first half of the novel at least is superb. However, as light and warmth are brought into Cold Comfort Farm, the doom begins to dissipate. In nineteenth-century terms, Gibbons' influence changes from Bronte to Jane Austen, whom she can certainly match in witty observation, though at the loss of the gothic elemental power. The plot, too, lacks suspense; everything that Flora undertakes to do works out with few surprises; the main parody element at the end is the neatness with which it all does work out, even including the resolution of Flora's own romantic needs. But in exchange, as others on this site have mentioned, Stella Gibbons achieves a transformation of a different kind: the forbidding cast of caricatures to whom we are first introduced has become a family of real people, whom Flora finds herself caring about quite a lot. And the reader too. Skill of this sort takes Stella Gibbons beyond the ranks of a mere parodist and reveals her as a true novelist.

[I actually read the book in the older Penguin edition, which has a fine cover, quite relevant to the period, taken from a painting by Stanley Spencer. But it is rather sloppily printed. The Penguin de luxe edition (which I have seen but didn't buy) is much better produced, and has the added bonus of a cover by Roz Chast -- a masterly match-up of two funny women working eighty years apart.]

Run away, run away screaming from this version of the book! This is NOT the book Stella Gibbons wrote. I don't know how it's legal to make serious changes to a book and publish it under the original author's name. The charm and humor of the original is completely lost in this badly re-written version of the book.

First published in 1932, this novel is a hysterically funny, tongue in cheek parody of the heavy handed, gloomy novels of some early twentieth century English writers who had previously been so popular. Tremendously successful when first published, "Cold Comfort Farm" caused quite a stir in its time.

The novel starts out innocuously enough, when well-educated Flora Poste finds herself orphaned at the age of twenty. Discovering that her father was not the wealthy man she believed him to be, she is resigned to the fate of having to live on a hundred pounds a year. Opting to live with relatives, rather than earn her bread, she seeks out a most unlikely set of relations, the odd Starkadder family who live in Howling, Sussex.

Therein begins what is certainly one of the funniest novels ever written. When Flora arrives in Howling, she meets her odd relatives, who live in neglected, ramshackle "Cold Comfort Farm", where they still wash the dishes with twigs, and have cows named Graceless, Pointless, Feckless, and Aimless. Headed by a seventy-nine year old matriarch, Flora's aunt, Ada Doom Starkadder, who has not been right in the head since she "saw something nasty happen in the woodshed" nearly seventy years ago, they are a motley and strange crew indeed. Confronted with their dismal and gloomy existence, Flora sets about trying to put things to right.

Peppered with eccentric, memorable characters, this book will take the reader on a journey not easily forgotten. It is one that is sure to make the reader revisit this novel yet again, like an old friend who is missed too soon.

I ordered this edition of my favorite book on my Blackberry, so didn't bother to read the fine print that explained that it had been re-worked for American audiences. Considering how popular Jane Austen is in the US at the moment, I fail to see why the Sussex dialog and other British-isms need to be changed. I know the book so well that I thumbed through this edition and found that it wasn't only the Sussex language that was changed- EVERYTHING is watered-down, so the piquancy and charm is totally missing. I am grateful that the bookseller was very accommodating when I requested to return it for a refund. Back to the British publications for my fix!

This is probably a very lovely book, but BE WARNED: The copy on this page is the abridged edition, not Stella Gibbons's original text! There is no need to read an abridged version of this English classic. The publisher should make more clear that this is not the real text.