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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
41 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A "slapstick" novel of manners?,
By
This review is from: Cold Comfort Farm (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)
Could there be such a thing as a "slapstick" novel of manners? This one might qualify, for its humour both witty and broad and its country-house setting.Our highly-educated heroine Flora Poste, intelligent, witty, but fashion-addled, aimless, and seemingly shallow, descends on her rural relatives when her parents die leaving her penniless. Sharp parodies of rural England, the family includes, among others, an insane matriarch locked in her room, a love-mad and graceless granddaughter, a grandson who plays the same role among the maids that the bull does among the cows, an antique manservant who fails to notice when a cow's leg falls off. In short order Flora contrives to marry off the granddaughter to a local grandee, packs the grandson off to Hollywood, and generally manages things so craftily that everyone not only lives Happily Ever After but also does so with Good Manners and better haircuts. The most winning feature of Gibbon's book (after the fact that it is hysterically funny) is that she skewers not only the conventions of the 1930s upper classes to which Flora belongs, but also the working class denizens of the farm. At first everyone seems faintly ridiculous but over time your affections for ALL these characters grows. By the end you are actually happy to see them all happily settled, and Flora no longer seems like a conniver but a clever and sympathetic heroine-more Elizabeth Bennet than Becky Sharpe. A very neat trick on the part of the author, and one well worth the discovering. One miniscule note of caution: Gibbons, writing in the 1930s, sets her novel "in the near future," and adds a couple of futuristic features that confuse the casual reader-telephones with televisions in them so you can see the speaker, references to the "Anglo-Nicaraguan War" and the like. You may safely ignore them without diminishing the book.
22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A brilliant, affectionate book,
By
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This review is from: Cold Comfort Farm (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)
Parody is easy to do but hard to sustain or do well, and almost always done as an end it itself--the author saying, "See how wicked and clever I am, and how silly the thing I'm mocking is!" Gibbons' genius is that she while she pokes fun at specific genres and authors (including herself), she actually writes a complete (and well-done) novel, and she treats the characters with affection and a certain dignity. The result is a book that's not only clever, funny, and well-written, but that is also unexpectedly, in the end, sweet and romantic. For those wondering, the 1995 film adaptation (available on DVD right here on Amazon) is remarkably faithful (with understandable trimming, folding and tucking), and likewise hilarious without ever being mean spirited. Both have my highest recommendation. ..bruce..
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A brilliant book,
By Suzanne Sanderson (Mercer Island, WA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Cold Comfort Farm (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)
Not long before she died, I wrote to Stella Gibbons to tell her how much I liked her books - all of them. She wrote back that most readers have only read Cold Comfort Farm. "It's rather like having a brilliant eldest child who puts the rest in the shade", she said. Since, with the exception of Cold Comfort Farm, all of her literary offspring are out of print, content yourself with buying the brilliant eldest book. Flora Poste, a true Virgo, descends on the Starkadder clan and creates calm out of chaos. And as with all good fairy tales, even the Starkadders lived as happily-ever-after as anyone with such a lurid emotional life could. (Note: If you enjoy this book and want to try some of Stella Gibbons' other titles, there are some gems, but they are all quite different in style from Cold Comfort Farm - it is unique.)
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