Cold comfort farm - the best book ever
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I think it's the best book ever.
I mean, it's not setting out to be the book of everything, like War and Peace, or to have the best style, or be the most structurally innovative - in fact, quite a lot of the book is composed of sections which deliberately mock the literary style which was fashionable at the time (Lawrence, for example). Gibbons was a book reviewer, so she'd read plenty of innovative, literary novels. Cold Comfort Farm laughs at those, rather than aspiring to be one of them.
The introduction of the edition I read has a passage where Lynne Truss, the woman writing the intro, says that she's not the classic reader of CCF - she didn't pick it up and read it spontaneously when she was ten, and then re-read it every year after that. Well, that describes me perfectly - that's exactly what I did, except that I read it more often than that. So I suppose I'm the classic CCF reader.
Flora Poste is an orphan aged 19. She doesn't have much money, so she decides to go and stay with her cousins in the countryside, the Starkadders who live at Cold Comfort Farm. She arrives and finds them miserable; she sets about making their lives better.
It's not just a book to me - it's a manual, a set of instructions about how to live your life better and stop making yourself miserable. Flora actually brings a self-help manual of sorts to the farm with her, but for me the whole novel worked as a self-improvement course. It was a revelation to a teenager - you don't have to be miserable because of other people's bad behaviour, being polite is important, it's not romantic or impressive to mooch about the place wearing cloaks and talking about elves, and many many more useful maxims not immediately obvious to young people. I was miserable when I read it, and this book made me happier.
Another way in which it made me happier was that it made me laugh all the time. It's one of the funniest books I've ever read, and I'm still laughing even now, after re-reading it however many times.
Flora is my heroine, along with Alice in Alice in Wonderland, and Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend. Each of them tried to bring order out of chaos, and generally make the best of a series of bad deals, and they succeeded. I love Flora, though I'm sure we wouldn't get on that well in real life, and I love this book.
(Incidentally, although it's very clearly stated that it's set in the near future (from the 1930s when it was written), I kept forgetting, and being surprised anew when characters had private planes and so on, because it doesn't feel very futuristic at all apart from a few small details.)
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