Cold Comfort FarmI just finished re-reading one of my favorites, “Cold Comfort Farm.” Written in 1932, it’s a parody of the rural genre of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.

Yeah, sounds fun, right? Stick with me, it’s worth it. I’ve never read Thomas Hardy or D. H. Lawrence, and I loved it.

Flora Poste, an orphan at 19 with an expensive and unmarketable education, is faced with the decision of moving in with relatives. The ones she selects are the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm in Howling, Sussex.

Determined to tidy up the personal lives of her passionately dysfunctional relatives, Flora embarkes on a campaign worthy of Hannibal, encountering fierce resistance. Flora is the enemy of melodrama.

Here’s Flora meeting her cousin Reuben:

The man’s big body, etched menacingly against the bleak light stabbed in from the low windows, did not move. His thoughts swirled like a beck in spate behind the sodden grey furrows of his face. A woman…Blast! Blast! Come to wrest away from him the land whose love fermented in his veins like slow yeast. She-woman. Young, soft-colored, insolent. His gaze was suddenly edged by a fleshly taint. Break her. Break. Keep and hold fast the land. The land, the iron furrows of frosted earth under the rain-lust, the fecund spears of rain, the swelling, slow burst of seed-sheaths, the slow smell of cows and cry of cows, the trampling bride-pride of the bull in his hour. All his, all his –
“Will you have some bread and butter?” asked Flora, handing him a cup of tea. “Oh, never mind your boots. Adam can sweep the mud up afterwards. Do come in.”

Faced with the Starkadder’s monumental strangeness, Flora decides to send her cousin Amos off on a preaching tour, marry her flower-child cousin Elphine to the son of the local gentry and deal with the matriarch Aunt Ada Doom once and for all. (Aunt Ada once “saw something nasty in the woodshed” and has never been quite the same - though her madness conveniently doesn’t stop her from keeping track of the farm’s poultry earnings.)

Something about the book reminds me of my adolescence, but in a good way. In high school I had a bunch of friends whose lives needed managing (back when I was still young enough to think that I should be the one managing them.) That was also the time period that I decided that tragic, artistic souls took themselves too seriously. Also that hemp clothes do nothing for a girl’s figure and that patchouli oil cannot perform the same function as anti-perspirant. Smells Like Teen Spirit indeed.

Verdict: 9 out of 10. It’s lighthearted and bracing at the same time, and even though I don’t catch some of the 1930s British references, I love reading this book.