I'd been aware of Cold Comfort Farm for a long while, but it was only recently that I had the opportunity to read it. And I must say: this novel is fantastic. Indeed, it's everything you'd like to see in a literary comedy: equal measures seriousness and parody, wrapped in superb prose. Stella Gibbons produced something tremendous when Cold Comfort was published in 1932.
Like other novels of this period, Cold Comfort has assumed a last quality: the characters emerge in three dimensions; they are funny, even absurd; but they are also representative, in their thoughts and actions, of themes larger than themselves. This is not an exercise in belittling; it is instead an effort to uncover, with humor, the shifting social plates of interwar period.
Gibbons, of course, produced a number of memorable scenes in Cold Comfort, including several with her primary character, Flora Poste. In many ways, and at many moments, Poste serves as the hinge: she embodies a polite mannered culture, while, at the same time, flirting with modernity, with private jets and birth control. She plays the traditional matchmaker, but again, without hesitation, acknowledges the less predictable worlds of sexuality and romance. All of which is to say: Cold Comfort sits at the very lively intersection between Georgian custom and contemporary liberation, between rural tradition and urban sophistication.
Ultimately, Cold Comfort reads as a classic comedy -- one employing all the tricks and crafts of the trade: it's a very well written novel with a tangled web at its start and a long gilded line at its end. I enjoyed Gibbon's achievement throughout. After all, there's nothing funny about great writing.
