Once ensconced, she addresses herself to hygienic interference in the affairs of the clan: poetical, unkempt, sensationally beautiful Elfine; amorous Seth, who secretly loves the talkies better than the myriad women he gets up the duff; fiercely territorial Reuben; and the unforgettable Great-Aunt Ada, who once saw "something narsty in the woodshed" and has been reclining in bed ever since on four tray-meals a day, directing operations.
Where, for Webb or Hardy, a misstep, malformation or sin inexorably predicts a wasted, prematurely-ended life, or at least an awful lot of misery, Gibbons rolls up her sleeves and blithely enters the tragic landscape, tidying it up and setting things to rights. Early on in the novel, Gibbons blithely informs the reader that like Baedeker , she will use a system of asterisks to mark out particularly impressive passages. Gibbons enjoys herself enormously at the expense of people who insist on "living life with a wild poetry", and are often to be discovered "weeping on their bed" because of a tactless utterance at lunchtime.
Quotes Ada Doom : I saw something nasty in the woodshed! User reviews 75 Review. Top review. This film was produced for BBC television but had a theatrical release the next year -- probably to take advantage of the popularity of all those Jane Austen movies Emma, Persuasion, et.
The book it was based on was actually a parody of Gothic romance fiction. Even though this movie is played for laughs and has many , it still manages to make you care for the characters. Everything works here and editing, cinematography, performances and you really appreciate what the director, John Schlesinger, managed to do on a probably skimpy budget.
This movie was the first I ever saw of Kate Beckinsale and I thought she was fantastic in it. I remained a fan for a long while, even though her subsequent movie performances and choices have been awful. She finally lost me with her recent laughable turn in Van Helsing. Other standouts in the cast are Eileen Atkins, Rufus Sewell, and Ian McKellen who is screamingly funny as a fire and brimstone preacher.
This film is definitely worth having on video or DVD in that it bears up very well to repeated viewings. I've seen it at least 5 times since its release, and my estimation of it rises with each viewing.
Details Edit. Release date May 10, United States. United Kingdom. The plot is simple. Flora Poste, orphaned at 19 when her parents are both carried off by the Spanish flu epidemic, is penniless. Her only option is to throw herself on the charity of her remote Sussex relatives, the Starkadders — Judith, her preacher husband Amos, their sons Seth and Reuben, several other cousins Harkaway, Urk, Ezra, and Caraway including the dominant matriarchal figure of aunt Ada Doom — all living, or partly living, in Cold Comfort Farm, Howling, Sussex.
Among some memorable comic set-pieces, cousin Amos preaching hellfire and damnation to the congregation of the Church of the Quivering Brethren is a high point. One of the pluses of this book was the I do not know how I got wind of this book, but I am glad I did. One of the pluses of this book was the dust jacket of the edition I had procured from my library.
It was a series of caricatures drawn by Roz Chast, a well-known cartoonist whose oeuvre is displayed almost on a weekly basis at The New Yorker. I used to collect her cartoons tore them out of The New Yorker because some were so funny.
Maybe if you read the book you might learn what she saw in the woodshed! You can imagine how clean the dishes were at the farm. And so upon this menagerie of freaks, Flora Poste who is their blood relative arrives for a prolonged visit.
There were a number of times while reading that I laughed out loud. So so funny how those people living on the farm behaved and the interactions between them and Flora. I recommend this book for a light enjoyable read to get away from your cares of the world. Truss gives away too much in the introduction so that even before you start the novel, you know certain things that are going to happen in the story. Had I read the introduction it would have dampened the enjoyment I derived from reading the book.
But the Introduction is good, it gives a short biography of this remarkable author. Virginia Woolf was apparently miffed that she won the prize — she wrote to Elizabeth Bowen another well-known English novelist on May 16, I was enraged to see they gave the 40 pounds to Gibbons; still now you and Rosamund Lehmann can join in blaming her. Who is she? What is this book? She went on to write 24 more novels plus collections of short stories and poetry. I will have to do further investigation of her… I was very impressed.
View all 5 comments. Sep 28, Paul Bryant rated it liked it Shelves: novels. Although I don't think this the comic masterpiece everyone else does, I was very struck by this passage on p93 - written in , and seemingly predicting the s. In London our heroine goes to a meeting of the Cinema Society : "The audience had run to beards and magenta shirts and original ways of arranging its neckwear This still goes on by the way!
I began this book thinking: "Wow, very witty, very interesting, very much in the 4 star range The main character reminds me of Mary Poppins meets the setting of "Napoleon Dynamite" where he works on that creepy farm and the weathered farmhand offers him raw egg-juice It is just a flat-out strange book.
I can't fathom how it was printed in the first place. It's a parody? Well, that's fine, but sometimes that and some witty jargon just isn't enough. I closed this book with a roll of the eyes especially at the last line thinking: I guess I just had to be there.
And on a side note, I don't know if the author was simply trying to demonstrate how well read she was, but all the literary allusions peppered in here and there became tiresome. View 1 comment. Oct 22, Barry Pierce rated it it was ok Shelves: 20th-century , read-in Eh, it just wasn't for me. I really wanted to like this but it just felt too The sweetness of it turned sour in my mind.
However, the writing is good and very simplistic, nobody would find any trouble with it. The cast of characters are very memorable and incredibly idiosyncratic. Oh well. Jun 20, Shannon rated it it was amazing Shelves: classics , , favourite , fiction , satire.
God I wish I had a memory like that! All the joys of the movie and more are in the book, a wonderful, clever, readable satire of the classic rural novel et al Thomas Hardy and the l If, like me, you've seen the movie adaptation of Cold Comfort Farm , with Kate Beckinsale, Ian McKellan, Joanna Lumley, Stephen Fry and Rufus Sewell mmmm yum! All the joys of the movie and more are in the book, a wonderful, clever, readable satire of the classic rural novel et al Thomas Hardy and the like.
This book is an absolute joy to read. It was first published in but set "in the near future", allowing for some fun liberties taken with the 20s and 30s of last century, including some surprisingly modern speech and sensibilities. Like I said, this is one of the most readable classic novels I've ever read, and I can definitely see myself re-reading it many times over the course of my life, and finding more joy in it each time. Flora Poste finds herself an almost penniless orphan at 19, and decides to live off her relatives.
Her best friend, Mrs Smiling, doesn't think it's a good idea but Flora is determined. Of the four relatives she writes to, only cousin Judith of Cold Comfort Farm provides her with enough of an enticement: speaking of "righting the wrong" done her father, and being in general very mysterious.
Better the uncertainties of Cold Comfort than the old lecherous uncle in Scotland. Cold Comfort Farm has a long history, the farmhouse having been burnt down, rebuilt, added to, burnt down, rebuilt and added to time and again over the centuries.
It's bleak, and the Starkadders believe there is a curse on the farm. The dairy cows have names like "Pointless" and "Aimless" and keep falling apart. Garrulous Aunt Ada Doom holds them all in thrall, and refuses to let any of them leave. Her daughter Judith is miserable and a bit obsessive about her younger son Seth, who spends his time bedding the girls in the area; while her older son Rueben is obsessive about the farm but his father Amos, one of those fire-and-brimstone preachers, thinks to leave it to old Adam, who falls asleep while milking the cows and washes the dishes with a twig.
It's a nuthouse, alright, including Judith's daughter Elfine who floats about the moors in a cape and romantisizes the young upper class Dick who lives nearby. Flora immediately wants to fix things, and sets about figuring each of them out and improving things at Cold Comfort. She's a matter-of-fact young woman, intelligent and firm and with a dry humour. The stems reminded Mr Mybug of phallic symbols and the buds made Mr Mybug think of nipples and virgins.
Mr Mybug pointed out to Flora that he and she were walking on seeds which were germinating in the womb of the earth. He said it made him feel as if he were trampling on the body of a great brown woman. He felt as if he were a partner in some mighty rite of gestation. Everyone, in fact. Even Flora is not exempt from gentle ridicule. But it's not a mean-spirited book, nor a snobbish one.
It's full of humorous details, eccentric characters and beautiful prose, and the pacing - yes, the all-important pacing - is swift but not fast, tightly plotted and structured and zipping. I'm very gushy with this book, I know, but I highly recommend it and it's a real shame that all Gibbons's other books are out of print, because I would love to read one. View all 16 comments. Mar 11, J. Your very own. Do take it. His eyes had filmed over like sightless Atlantic pools before the flurry of the storm breath.
His gnarled fingers folded round the handle. My little mop! This is followed by several similar utterances from Adam in a dialect where Stella Gibbons seems to have had great fun making up words. I have in mind all those thousands of persons, not unlike myself, who work in the vulgar and meaningless bustle of offices, shops and homes, and who are not always sure of whether a sentence is Literature or whether it is just sheer flapdoodle.
The style is preposterous, and great fun. An exhausted silence, brimmed with the enervating weakness which follows a stupendous effort, mounted from the stagnant air in the yard, like a miasma. All the surrounding surface of the countryside — the huddled Downs lost in rain, the wet fields fanged abruptly with flints, the leafless thorns thrust sideways by the eternal pawing of the wind, the lush breeding miles of meadow through which the lifeless river wandered — seemed to be folding inwards upon themselves.
There is no answer to the riddle; only that bodies return exhausted, hour by hour, minute by minute, to the all-forgiving and all-comprehending primeval slime. This may be because in my own youth I was more like the dippy Elfine. One of the shining lights of the piece, for me, was the housekeeper, Mrs Beetle, married to one Agony Beetle. But what was it she saw? Can even the indomitable Flora find this out? Wuthering Heaths gets a long overdue Jane Austen-makeover!
This BBC Radio dramatisation does full credit to the novel and takes it even 1 level-up as does the the movie with Kate Beckinsale. Highly recommended. Apr 30, Roger Brunyate rated it really liked it Shelves: comedy-sorta.
Rural Gothic The humor of this glorious funny book resides mainly in Gibbons' masterly control of prose style; if you have only seen a filmed version, 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 , the book is a parody of a certain kind of rural melodrama popular at the time, but Rural Gothic The humor of this glorious funny book resides mainly in Gibbons' masterly control of prose style; if you have only seen a filmed version, you know less than half of what the author has to offer.
Written in , 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. Lawrence is still much 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.
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.
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. 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.
This book is a satire and an homage to famous British authors such as Jane Austen, the Bronte's and Thomas Hardy to name a few. Flora Poste is a recently orphaned socialite of little means. She is nineteen years old. She can choose to work or to live with relatives. She chooses to live with her country relatives, the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm.
For one so young, she is a smart, savvy woman who decides she must improve the conditions on the farm. It was a joy to watch her work her magic. One of my favorite lines: Flora says," When I am 53 or so I would like to write a novel as good as "Persuasion", but with a modern setting, of course. View all 13 comments.
Apr 23, Nandakishore Mridula rated it did not like it. I didn't get the joke. Mar 12, Terri rated it it was amazing Shelves: british-fiction , favorite-women-writers , classic-fiction , humorous-writings. I needed something funny to read and this did the trick. I can see why this book is a classic.
Loved every page! Highly recommend. Five stars. Feb 07, Mara rated it really liked it Shelves: recommended-to-me , ebook-owned. What a truly strange book This is a book of hilarious small details. Her friend's reputation for collecting brassieres. Adam's insistence on referring to Flora as "Robert Poste's child" every other sentence.
The cows constantly losing their limbs. It read kind of like the British version of a Mel Brooks' send up of Wuthering Heights, if that makes sense? Yeah, a trip, but I was very charmed by it and rarely have related more to a character than I did Flora What a truly strange book Yeah, a trip, but I was very charmed by it and rarely have related more to a character than I did Flora This is one of those books I've been trying to avoid for a while, inexplicably since I saw the movie, of which I remembered very little except for two words: Rufus.
Oh, Rufus.
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