Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

On Monday, January 4th, the Booked for the Day Book Group met to discuss, Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons.  Here are a few things we discussed during the meeting:

We had a great time laughing while discussing this book because it definitely was a very strange novel.

We started our discussion with whether the style and dialects Gibbons used made it more challenging to read. We all thought that it did but it did became easier for some of us to understand as the book went on. We also felt that we might have missed some of the humorous nuances because we did not understand the text and we were also unfamiliar with some of her references. So many of us probably missed some of that humor too.

Since the book was written in 1932 we talked about how well it held up from the last 80 years. One of our members thought that the stories of farm life was just as true today. Farm families tend to stick together, past the farm down to the next generation (There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort) and can be as set in their ways as they were in the 1930s.

We talked about her system of asterisks to mark out particularly impressive passages. *** indicates that the reader should really sit up and take note. In reading the passages we thought that they were really over the top, this was again a way of mocking an author who used this method because he felt that the reader was not bright enough to figure things out on their own

Our impression of Flora changed through the course of the book. At first we did not like her but eventually she grew on us. We compared her to Mary Poppins who comes in and saves the day then flies off when her job was done. She also reminded us of the Jane Austin’s character, Emma who meddles in the lives of everyone she comes across. We liked Charles because he made it clear that she was not going to interfere in his affairs.

We laughed talking about the idea of The Quivering Brethren who meet weekly in the village to quiver with religious fervor. We thought this might have been a take on the Shaker Religion.

We decided that the novel is best enjoyed if you go into it understanding that it is a parody of the romanticized, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time such as in Wuthering Heights. I was the only one who laughed out loud at a couple of passages. Some of the group thought it was like the Beverly Hillbillies and found no humor in it and others enjoyed the odd humor. Our final decision on this book is that most of us would not recommend it. Others thought they would but only to certain people.

These are just a few things mentioned during the discussion. Please feel free to add any of your thoughts in the comment section.