Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

This one has been on my reading list for a long time.  In fact, I have started it three times before now, only to have life intervene and make me put it down.  Fourth time's a charm.

Cold Comfort Farm is a parody on the English rural novels that were popular in the opening decades of the 20th century.  Like them, it is full of doom-laden characters who are tortured by their own glaring psychological problems.  However, into their midst comes Flora Poste, a modern girl with modern ideas, a penchant for organising others and a never-say-die attitude.  

Cold Comfort Farm itself is situated on the outskirts of the fictional town of Howling in Surrey.  It is populated by several generations of the Starkadder family.  Amos and Judith are the parents of Reuben, Seth and Elfine.  Amos spends his weekends delivering hell-fire sermons in Howling; Reuben wants to run the farm according to modern techniques but can't while his father is still around;  handsome and virile Seth is a notorious womaniser with a secret passion;  Elfine is an unrefined girl who needs an education; Judith has an unhealthy self-esteem problem and an even unhealthier obsession about her son Seth.  

And ruling the roost is Judith's mother Ada Doom, who 'saw something nasty in the woodshed' when she was a child.  Ada Doom uses this experience as a psychological weapon to stifle her family and to cause life at Cold Comfort Farm to stagnate for over twenty years.  The question is: Can Flora's youthful momentum overcome the decades of Ada Doom-induced inertia? Of course, the joy of reading Cold Comfort Farm is in finding out the answer to that question. 

Stella Gibbons tells her story with a disarmingly breezy prose style that gently pushes the reader from one scene to the next.  And like a breeze she blows into every psychological nook and cranny of her characters.  Gibbons builds the tension throughout the first two-thirds of the book, and this leads to the brilliant and totally satisfying relief of the denouement in the last third of the book.  Gibbons controls the plot and characterisation with such a deft touch that the parody never blows out into farce.  The result is that Cold Comfort Farm is a masterpiece of comic storytelling in the form of a novel.

I'm so glad I was given the opportunity of finally finishing this book.  I really enjoyed it.

Cold Comfort Farm was first published in 1932.