The thing—well, one of the things—about satire is that judging the book is more than just a matter of critiquing the plot, the style, and the characters. You have to look at how well it hits its mark. When the book in question is about 80 years old and it satirizes a genre that we don’t see much anymore, it gets harder to make a judgment. In the case of Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm, we’re pretty much left with asking, “But is it still funny?” I’m happy to report: It is. This may be because I have a warped sense of humor, but I was chuckling every few pages as I read it.
Written in 1932, Gibbons (for some reason I still don’t understand) chooses to set her story at least a couple of decades into the future. The book is littered with references to phones with TV screens and wars that never happened. If you ignore them and mentally reorient the story to the 1930s, it works a lot better. (This is what the movie version did.) Setting this bizarre problem aside, the book is fairly straightforward. In the first chapter, we meet a young woman, Flora Poste, whose father has recently died, leaving her with a small legacy and no place to live. As she has no ambitions beyond living an orderly life without too much effort, she decides to go live with relatives. Of the four invitations she receives, she chooses to go live on Cold Comfort Farm with her father’s people, the Starkadders, primarily because the invitation hints at irresistible family mysteries.
Cold Comfort Farm is a derelict place. The cows literally have pieces dropping off of them every few chapters. The inhabitants speak a strange patois of English farm language that takes more than a little getting used to. And they all have fascinating mental disorders or behavioral problems. Amos is a fire and brimstone preacher. Adam appears to be intellectually disabled. Elfine is a wood sprite. Seth is a misogynist nymphomaniac. Judith is depressed. And, the jewel in the crown, is Aunt Ada Doom, who saw something nasty in the woodshed when she was younger and who threatens to go mad if anyone leaves the farm or changes anything. Almost as soon as she arrives, Flora begins setting people to rights. Most of the novel covers her skillful manipulations of her relatives while avoiding the attentions of attempted writer Mr. Mybug (actually Meyerburg, but the local mispronunciation sticks).
Gibbons was mocking what Wikipedia refers to as the “loam and lovechild” genre. In this genre, the farms are miserable and the people doomed to the consequences of their own poor judgment and family curses. Think Wuthering Heights but with less style. Gibbons observes that if only there was someone to take them all in hand, everyone could end up with a happy ending. Just like Othello would have been a lot happier if one of the characters had been a marriage counselor.
While this “loam and lovechild” genre has (apparently deservedly) disappeared, I think Cold Comfort Farm still stands. You can’t really read it as satire anymore, but you can read it as a humorous novel. It’s sort of like an inverted soap opera, now that I think of it.If you have the right kind of humor, this book is hysterical.