Cold Comfort Farm was featured recently on the ABC's Tuesday Book Club. I was intrigued and purchased an eBook copy from Amazon. It is an outrageous parody of a type of novel that draws on the vicissitude of English country life and class envy to create a type of depressing drama replete with rural accents and often with cliched characters. Gibbons assaults all this in writing which would easily fit in a Monty Python show... remarkable as the book was written in 1932, not 1969!
We meet a character who I initially did not warm to... Flora. Her parents have annoyingly passed away leaving her little income. She decides to write to each of her relatives and will then pick the one who she would most like to stay with, as she has no intention of working. She gets an intriguing reply from Judith of Cold Comfort Farm, and the rest of the book details her struggles to sort out the lives of the astounding individuals who live there. There is Amos, who insists on cleaning the porridge bowls with a thorn twig but whose passion is fire and brimstone preaching, Shey, who epitomises the hero of the "ripped bodice" type of trashy romance, Adam, who cares only for "the beasts" but is bewildered to find bits of them falling off all the time, and the manipulative great aunt Ada who will not let any of them leave the farm for fear of a relapse into madness, having "seen something nasty in the woodshed" as a child.
In the face of the rage and bizarre behaviour of the rest of the family, I quickly warmed up to Flora who at least has a comprehensible fault in being lazy and wanting to "fix" the lives of others. Gibbons enriches the story of Flora's good deeds with a remarkable scattering of dialect. I was busy looking up words I had never heard of... until I realised nobody else has either. Some of them (a snood used to cook porridge) are good words put to bizarre uses. Others (titty-wren, scranling) are complete inventions.
For readers unacquainted with this genre of English novel, or at least unfamiliar with the mannerisms that are being parodied, this might all seem rather bewildering. I didn't find it laugh-out-loud material when reading to myself, but I found I simply could not read sections out loud to my wife with a straight face. I particularly like the scene where the breakfast porridge heaves and burbles in sympathy with the coarse sexuality being expressed by Seth.
If you had ever wondered what part of the English sensibility could have produced "The ministry of funny walks" or "The Knights that say 'Ni'", then this book will at least provide a glimpse of an earlier and equally frolicsome writer.
Andrew Lack
No comments:
Post a Comment