Category Archives: humour

Book review, Discworld, humour, Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic

The Colour of Magic (Discworld 1) by Terry Pratchett, 1983

Colour of magic

So this is where it all began. I returned to the original Discworld novel as a change of pace from Dickens and with one question at the front of my mind – would it stand the test of time? How well would it have aged, and how fully formed was Pratchett’s early vision of Discworld? Would the detail and complexity all be there, or would, as I assumed, the detail have developed and accrued over time, book by book? Which is a lot more than one question of course.

Remarkably the Discworld universe is almost completely fully developed in this first portrait. The cosmology or Astrozoology – with the Great A’tuin and his accompanying elephants – is all there, and Pratchett had obviously given a lot of thought to the practicalities of a flat world with its hub and the Rim. Ankh-Morpork is complete in virtually every detail (quote) with the pre-Sam Vimes Watch, the Patrician (not yet identified as Vetenari) and the Thieves and Assassins’ Guilds. The Unseen University with its complex hierarchy of wizards and ArchWizards is there, as is magic as a practical working concept. I really enjoyed the way Pratchett plays with the idea of science being a modern equivalent of magic – not a new idea of course, but one he has fun with, for example when Rincewind is trying to work out how Twoflower’s camera works.

“This is all wrong. When Twoflower said they’d got a better kind of magic in the Empire I thought – I thought…

The imp looked at him expectantly. Rincewind cursed to himself. “Well if you must know, I thought he didn’t mean magic. Not as such”

“What else is there, then?”

Rincewind began to feel really wretched. “I don’t know” he said. “A better way of doing things, I suppose. Something with a bit of sense in it. Harnessing – harnessing the lightening, or something”.

‘The Colour of Magic’ also features two of Pratchett’s most-loved ‘characters’ – Twoflower’s sapient pearwood Luggage, and Death. The Luggage is an indefatigable multi-legged terminator, while Death already speaks in his distinctive capitalised tone, and already has his habit of appearing when least expected, such as here when the landlord of the Broken Drum is trying to set fire to his cellar to claim on his recently agreed inn-sewer-ants polly sea:

“At the top of the cellar steps Broadman knelt down and fumbled in his tinderbox. It turned out to be damp.
‘I’ll kill that bloody cat,’ he muttered, and groped for the spare box that was normally on the ledge by the door. It was missing. Broadman said a bad word. A lighted taper appeared in mid-air, right beside him.
HERE, TAKE THIS.
‘Thanks,’ said Broadman.
DON’T MENTION IT.”

The other thing that struck me, and which may be controversial, is that over time Pratchett became a much better and funnier writer. That’s not to say ‘The Colour of Magic’ isn’t funny – it is – but I think his comic style matured and improved. His love of groanworthy puns is already evident here, but some of the jokes go beyond being bad dad jokes, and are just plain bad, for example:

“My name is immaterial,’ she said.
That’s a pretty name,’ said Rincewind”

There is a thin dividing line between using clever references to other writers and genres, and just being derivative. Pratchett tiptoes close to the line sometimes in this novel, and in particular I have always thought that his debt to Fritz Lieber, author of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series has been acknowledged but never fully appreciated. In later novels there is a lot more Pratchett and far fewer borrowings – references of course, but done in a way in which the original source is acknowledged without being simply reproduced.

Almost lastly, a bit of a moan about this edition. It is the Corgi edition shown above, with the original Josh Kirby illustration (which I always felt were a bit over the top tbh), published this year with a mention of Pratchett’s death in the frontispiece. The blurb includes a quote from the independent calling Pratchett “one of the funniest English authors alive”. Was this just a case of laziness by the publishers not bothering to update their copy, or just a bad joke?

Finally, a quiz question for you, which should be easy given the subject of this blog entry – who are Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon and Jerakeen?

Standard
20 Books of summer, Book review, humour, Kingsley Amis, You Can't Do Both

You Can’t Do Both, by Kingsley Amis, 1994

‘You Can’t do Both’ was published in 1994, a year before Amis’s death. It is strongly autobiographical, in particular the central scene when the main characters, Robin Davies and his girlfriend, Nancy, decide at the last moment not to go through with a planned illegal abortion. It is constructed in four long chapters, each representing a phase of Robin’s life – schoolchild, undergraduate, young man, and married life. The third phase is key and formative – Robin is still in his early twenties, returning from active service in the Second World War and trying to resume normal life while his parents age and die.amis

In its review of this novel when it was first published, the Independent claimed “Amis throws off his reputation as a misanthropic old goat.” Distance as always gives perspective, and reading the novel now my immediate reaction was that if this is Amis being unmisanthropic and un-old-goatish, goodness help anyone reading the earlier novels, which must have been monstrous (personally I don’t think they were that much worse – I think the reviewer saw a change of tone where there wasn’t one).  Davies, the Amis-lite central character, perhaps anti-hero of this novel, is, in the words of a Goodreads reviewer, “seriously an insufferable git.” He tolerates other people, at best, and has few real friends. He is constantly on heat, and while his sexual conquests are at first clumsy and unsuccessful, he quickly becomes, as is the way with many author-avatar figures, irresistible to women.

The humour in the novel – it is intended as a comic novel – derives in part from Robin’s Lucky Jim-like frustration with the rest of the world. Where Jim’s frustrations managed to be comic and relatable, Robin’s are simply spiteful – his misanthropy towards his harmless young niece is particularly unpleasant. Occasionally he manages to raise a wry smile – for example in Robin’s description of meeting his father for the first time after a spell in a prisoner of war camp – “There had been the kind of brief, stylised embrace between the two that might have recalled a French general half-way down a long line of winners of minor decorations”.

In essence, this novel is a long and unsuccessful attempt to justify a life ill-spent. Davies is serially unfaithful to his wife, and only begrudgingly marries her because he is unable to go through with the said abortion. The denouement, in which he is caught in-flagrante by his wife with his cousin Dilys -“Within in a couple of minutes he was hard at it…On the whole the thing was a great success” – comes without consequences for Davies, barring a well-earned slap round the face. Amis is confessing to his weaknesses, and at the same time not very subtly bragging about his success with “the ladies” – women are “the little blonde creature” or “them” (as in “never lay a finger on them till they graduate”).

If this novel was a simple portrait of an insufferable old git then it would be a great success. But I strongly suspect it is a self-portrait of someone who knows himself deep down to be insufferable, but really hasn’t come to terms with it, is in denial, and can’t understand why everyone doesn’t love him as much as he loves himself.

Finally, in reading some online reviews of this novel I came across the following analysis. https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/08/25/you-cant-do-both-kingsley-amis/

It’s a wonderfully careful, detailed and thorough analysis that almost persuaded me not to write my own review. It’s a little long, but when you take down and apart a Booker prize winning novelist you can justify taking your time over it.

 

Standard
100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, Book review, H G Wells, HG Wells, humour, The History of Mr Polly

The History of Mr Polly by H G Wells, 1910

Most Victorian novels were about prosperous people. Yes, they sometimes had money worries, but they weren’t urban working class. Dickens changed all that, and people from all parts of the class spectrum became suitable subjects. However, the petit bourgeoise, the shop keeping class, technically bosses in that they were self employed, but dirt poor nonetheless, were largely ignored. That changed with the Grossmiths’ ‘Diary of a Nobody‘ in 1892, and ‘The History of Mr Polly‘ is an early entry in this ‘little man and his troubles’ or ‘white collar’ genre.

‘Mr Polly‘ opens with him sitting on a stile, grumbling. He hates his life. He doesn’t love or particularly even like his wife, he finds his job as a shopkeeper dull and unfulfilling, and he mourns the absence of any romance or culture in his life. He also suffers horribly from chronic indigestion, representative of his dissatisfaction with life. The first half of the novel is a flash-back from this point, chronicling how he has always felt this way, more or less, and how he reaches this nadir. He settles on suicide as the only logical escape and having made that decision implements his plan quite calmly. Inevitably he botches the job and in the process burns half his street down. Ironically this provides him, in the form of insurance money, an escape route and he runs away. The final section of the novel sees him settled as a handyman at a country pub, living a bucolic but largely culture-free lifestyle that seems to suit him. This life is threatened by uncle Jim, the nephew of the landlady, a thug who menaces her for money. Polly discovers the hero inside himself, stands up to Uncle Jim, and in comic bumbling fashion defeats him.

Polly is quite an engaging anti-hero. He reminded me of Anthony Burgess’s Enderby, one of my comic legends. He has a kind heart, and does his best to avoid causing harm. he takes the hardships in life as they come and looks for pleasure in small things. He has a way of mangling the language which is intended as humorous, and which just about manages to raise a smile. Despite his ineptitude in most things, somehow he manages to come out on top. Some of the set-piece scenes in the novel, such as his father’s funeral, where remote relatives descend on the wake and have a great day insulting one another, are enjoyable. If one looks hard for more serious themes, such as any traces of Wells’ Fabianism, they can be found, but the novel is not openly political. The main ‘message’ of Mr Polly’s history is that one should be true to oneself:

“when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you, you can change it. Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether. You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter, something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more interesting. There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary”

Mr Polly didn’t have such a terrible life. While slowly going bust in his shop, he didn’t suffer the privations many people experienced, and enjoyed many of the comforts of his Edwardian idyll – an idyll that was to be lost forever just a few years after this novel was published.

Standard
100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, Book review, humour, Joy in the Morning, P G Wodehouse

Joy in the Morning by P G Wodehouse, 1946

I had a fairly strong reaction when I last read some Wodehouse, and I suspect my record of the event is intemperate. Having calmed down I returned to ‘Joy in the Morning’ determined to be fair minded. In that same spirit of fairness I ought to acknowledge that Wodehouse has some heavy-weight admirers whose opinion I have rarely had occasion to doubt. Douglas Adams no less is quoted on the cover of this Arrow (2008) edition saying “Wodehouse is the greatest comic writer ever”, and Stephen Fry is on the frontispiece describing Wodehouse as the “funniest and finest writer”. High praise indeed.

Written in the early 1940’s during Wodehouse’s internment in France and Germany during the second world war, this novel tells in Bertie Wooster’s first person narrative the story of his adventures at his uncle’s country home in Steeple Bumpleigh, or in Wooster’s words “the super-sticky affair of Nobby Hopwood, Stilton Cheesewright, Florence Craye, my uncle Percy… is one of those imbroglios that Bertie Wooster believes his biographers will refer to as “The Steeple Bumpleigh Horror”.  The Guardian’s recent review described the novel as “both an elegy and an encore” – an elegy for a lost Edwardian Britain, and an encore because this is very familiar ground – Wodehouse recycled this very limited set of characters and situations endlessly. “

 

‘Joy in the Morning’ (and in my head I keep mixing this title up with ‘Morning Glory’ which is something entirely different) is a ‘greatest hits’ selection of comedic situations: the imposed engagement; a blazing country cottage; a nocturnal confrontation; a fancy-dress ball. The novel also contains an element of self-justification for Wodehouse’s involvement in what some considered war crimes, namely broadcasting on German radio from Berlin. “I doubt,” says Bertie, speaking of the writer Boko Fittleworth, “if you can ever trust an author not to make an ass of himself.”

 

Despite my best intentions I did find myself laughing out loud at some passages. Wooster is such an idiot. But overall the novel is not a success. It is over-long and predictable. Wodehouse claimed to work tirelessly on his plots, and farce well done does require tight plotting in order to be plausible, but the plotting here is a mess. It depends on people behaving in ways that are more than just ridiculous but utterly unbelievable: schoolboys burning houses down, successful businessmen agreeing to conduct private meetings at a fancy dress ball, policemen leaving their uniforms on the riverbank while taking a dip in the river, and so on. The resulting comic situations lose a lot of their impact when they are set up so clumsily – we know Wooster is going to lose an important birthday gift brooch, that Jeeves is going to come up with a cunning plan to rescue the situation, that the imposed engagement will fade away by the end

 

Wodehouse may have been a collaborator, and may have romanticised a lost Britain that depended on a rigid class system that virtually enslaved the working class to preserve the privilege of a small minority, but he could turn a phrase, for example “There was a sound in the background like a distant sheep coughing gently on a mountainside. Jeeves sailing into action.”

 

Wodehouse is adept at using the gap between Wooster’s weaknesses, his village idiot view of the world and reality, to comic effect; many of them are having an affectionate nod towards Shakespeare:

 

 “It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can’t help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.”

 

“She came leaping towards me, like Lady Macbeth coming to get first-hand news from the guest-room.”

 

“You can’t go by what a girl says, when she’s giving you the devil for making a chump of yourself. It’s like Shakespeare. Sounds well, but doesn’t mean anything.”

 

The bromance between Wooster and Jeeves is as strong as ever, and even in this strangely sexless world, in which all a chap ever wants is to avoid being ensnared by an eligible young woman (what possible reason could Wooster have for not wanting to get married or be involved with any of the women who circle around him?) is quite touching. Jeeves and Wooster are only going to be apart for a few hours, but still say a tearful goodbye:

 

 “We part, then, for the nonce, do we?’

‘I fear so, sir.’

‘You take the high road, and self taking the low road, as it were?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I shall miss you, Jeeves.’

‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Who was that chap who was always beefing about gazelles?’
‘The poet Moore, sir. He complained that he had never nursed a dear gazelle, to glad him with its soft black eye, but when it came to know him well, it was sure to die.’
‘It’s the same with me. I am a gazelle short. You don’t mind me alluding to you as a gazelle, Jeeves?’
‘Not at all, sir.”

Standard
21st century literature, Book review, David Nicholls, humour, The Understudy

The Understudy by David Nicholls

Sometimes novels don’t quite work. They really ought to, but at the end you are left with a vague feeling that the author missed an opportunity to write an entertaining, satisfying relationship novel, and instead wrote three quarters of one. This was Nicholls’ second book after ‘Starter for Ten’, which has a single white young man as its central character, through whom we see the events of the novel, as does ‘The Understudy’. While the protagonist in ‘Starter for Ten’ is relatively easy to identify with – he is fallible, but charming (although I am not sure female readers would agree) – the central character in ‘The Understudy’ is far less engaging. For a start Nicholls has given him a silly name – Stephen McQueen – and the joke “Stephen with a ph” wears thin pretty early on. Each time it was repeating I was reminded of the fact that as an aspiring actor he would have adopted a different professional name after about 30 seconds. He is dishonest, unsuccessful, profoundly so, divorced, and quite bitter about his lack of success. 

I am not sure if we were supposed to identify with McQueen, or find him in any way endearing, but I didn’t. He is manipulated and walked all over by Josh, the obnoxious character he understudies (if Josh is a portrait of anyone Nicholls knew in real life, they should sue!). Nobody really likes him, his life is a complete mess, his pursuit of acting success at the cost of his marriage is quite clearly pointless, rather than noble, and while the novel ends with him recognising that, failure isn’t entertaining or funny. He does – kind of – get the girl – but the attraction is really hard to understand or believe, and only the abrupt ending prevents us from seeing the inevitable rejection. I suspect Nicholls’ made Stephen so unlikeable in an attempt to avoid the standard rom-com clichés, but he didn’t follow this through – the character may be creepy and unloveable, but the situations he finds himself in are predictable and lame, all informed by a self-consciousness and determination to demonstrate that this isn’t ‘Love Actually’, actually.

The plot revolves around McQueen’s part as an understudy in a successful stage play about Lord Bryon, in which Josh has the lead. Each night McQueen has little to do except hope Josh is ill or has an accident, which he never does. Josh invites him to a party – and the comedy set up here is that Josh is actually asking him to help out as a waiter, while Stephen thinks it is an actual invitation. I saw that coming a mile off, but it doesn’t make sense – if you are having a party professionally catered, you don’t supplement the staff with vaguely worded invitations to casual acquaintances. That gives you a good flavour of the comedy incidents that are scattered through the novel, and which aren’t really that funny. Nicholls does his best, and there are plenty of drinking to excess, unsexy sex scenes, and theatrical failures – but its all a bit laboured and predictable. As an example, Stephen accidentally steals (whilst drunk) a BAFTA trophy from Josh’s flat. You know that the chances of him returning it with an apology, anonymously if necessary, are nil, this being a relationship comedy. So it’s just a question of when, not if, this theft is discovered, and sure enough, the award is found at the back of a wardrobe just in time for it to be used as an impromptu weapon.

‘One Day’ and ‘Starter for Ten’ have both been made into reasonably successful films, and my suspicion is that ‘The Understudy’ would actually make a better film than a novel. Some of the physical comedy would work better – for example the scene with Stephen dressed up as a squirrel for a children’s ‘How to count’ film, which he has lied about to his family, describing it as a crime drama – and some of the dead wood could be pruned. But if you are looking for a follow-up for ‘One Day’, ‘Starter for Ten’ would be a much better (forgive me) starter for ten.

Standard
100 Best Novels Guardian list, Book review, Classics, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, humour, Jerome K Jerome, Three men and a boat

Three Men in a Boat (not to mention the dog) – Jerome K Jerome – 1889

Mildly amusing. Whimsical. Harmless  These are the words that come to mind when I reflect on the experience of reading this Victorian “classic”. For some reason, while many comic novels age appallingly, Three Men in a Boat seems bullet-proof against the passage of time. It is feather-light – there is no plot to speak of, very few events, no characterisation, or only the barest. The title sums up pretty much all you need to know about the novel – three middle class single men of indeterminate age or occupation take a short trip in a rowing boat up the Thames. It rains. They fall in occasionally. The narrator tells several stories of similar incidents on similar trips. These stories all follow the same pattern – the principal character is hugely over-confident in his own abilities – to sail, hang a picture, pack a bag, navigate a maze etc. – and retains this over-confidence in the face of every failure.

I am clearly missing something, because many online reviewers describe this novel as “laugh out loud”, and it has never been out of print. The lead review in Amazon goes to far as to say “If you don’t love this book, and don’t weep laughing whilst reading it, then there’s something wrong with you”. I can’t recall ever weep laughing at any novel, let alone one with so flimsy an appeal. There is admittedly a whimsical charm to the whole enterprise, and the appeal to a late Victorian bygone era where the outside world rarely intrudes is clear. There are however a few points in the novel where this approach is discarded, and these jar badly. Mostly these are the scenic descriptions which were the novel’s original premise, (it was commissioned as a travel book) and they do not fit at all with the tone of the rest. But there is also a casually gratuitous use of a racial slur – the n-word – which may have been acceptable in the 1880’s but is hateful now. Possibly even worse, there is a description of a suicide. I can only assume Jerome included this distressing scene – a woman falls pregnant without being married, and, shunned by her family and friends, she finally ends it all by drowning herself in the Thames, to be discovered by our three men – as a contrast to the nonsense about frying pans and banjos. Victorians were famously mawkish and sentimental, so presumably this also seen as justification for this scene, but to a contemporary reader it is deeply uncomfortable.
So in a way I feel that, as does happen sometimes, I have failed. Failed to unlock this novel, to find a way of reading it that gives it some value, the value others clearly believe it to have. Which is of course nagging me. I was tempted to try to read this as social commentary, a reflection on late Victorian England, a period of change of course as technology gathered pace and the lower classes began to find their voice. The three men are clumsy buffoons, but there are closer to Grossmith’s Mr Pooter, or indeed Wells’ Mr Polly, than Wodehouse’s much later creations. This is a confident, relaxed country, peopled by citizens not afraid to assert their challenge to order – the boatmen for example are very clear that fencing off backwaters on the Thames is reprehensible, and signs denying picnickers the right to rest on land adjoining the river are to be ignored – no great respect for property rights are shown. But in all honesty this remains thin stuff, nostalgic and comfortable compared to much of the challenging literature being written elsewhere around this time. So for now I admit defeat – there must be a reason why this novel remains so popular, but what that is I cannot tell.
 
Standard
20th century Literature, Book review, Evelyn Waugh, humour, Scoop

Scoop – Evelyn Waugh – 1938

Read in a Penguin Classics edition

Scoop is, by Waugh’s standards, a fairly light-hearted satire on Fleet Street, Government, and the British upper classes. Nobody dies or gets stranded in remote jungles; instead we have what comes closest to a happy ending, in which everyone gets what they wanted. I usually avoid writing at too much length about the context in which a novel was written, but given the date of publication (1938) you would expect the novel, with its themes of colonialism and Imperialism, whereby a proxy European war is fought over the resources of a remote African country, to be much darker than it is.

The plot is simplicity itself. By a confusion over names, William Boot, the Daily Beast’s rural affairs correspondent, is sent to cover a conflict in Ishmaelia, a North African country where gold has just been discovered, and where the European powers are struggling, through proxies, for control. War has yet to be declared – it never really is – and the journalists have little to do except follow one another around. Boot stumbles upon the real story by accident, and returns to acclaim, only for the case of mistaken identity to be repeated, leaving him in the countryside seclusion her prefers.

Waugh portrays Fleet Street as a wholly corrupt organisation, which an appallingly cynical approach to foreign news. Lord Copper, press magnate, and owner of the Daily Beast gives his new war correspondent some guidance on the conflict thus:

“The British Public has no interest in a war which drags on indecisively. A few sharp victories, some conspicuous acts of personal bravery on the Patriot side, and a colourful entry into the capital. That is the Best Policy for the war.”

If Fleet Street is shown as a irredeemably corrupt, Government doesn’t come out any better. The European countries trying to exploit Ishmaelia and its gold are incompetent and amateurish. Salter, the Beast’s foreign affairs editor, summarises he conflict by explaining:
“when you say black you mean red, and when you mean red you say white, and when the party who call themselves black say traitors they mean what we call blacks, but what we mean when we say traitors I really couldn’t tell you…..But, of course it’s really a war between Russia and Germany, and Italy and Japan who are all against one another on the patriotic side.” (43)

Elsewhere a fellow journalist explains in anecdote the power of the press, and why it should not be ignored:

“Once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn’t know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel, and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote. Well they were pretty surprised at his office, getting a story like that from the wrong country, but they trusted Jakes and splashed it in six national newspapers. That day every special in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution. Everything seemed quiet enough, but it was as much their jobs were worth to say so, with Jakes filing a thousand words of blood and thunder a day. So they chimed in too. Government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny — and in less than a week there was an honest to god revolution under way, just as Jakes had said. There’s the power of the press for you. They gave Jakes the Nobel Peace Prize for his harrowing description of the carnage”.
Boot is an ingénue, wandering through the conflict understanding little, but accidentally discovering the scoop that all his professional rivals are looking for.
So is it funny, and is it racist? Occasionally – the jokes are clever, but entirely predictable. The stereotypes that Waugh describes, such as the decaying Boot Magna with its retinue of servants having to fit in their duties around five meals a day, would, in the 1930’s, have been a lot fresher and more original than they are now. The racism is of course a more serious charge. On the one hand Waugh treats the Europeans trying to exploit the Ishmaeli’s as the inferior race – they invariably come off second best. It would have been remarkable given the context if Waugh had written respectfully about the Africans in his novel when everyone else is given such a hard time, and I can’t think of a novel of this period written by a European when the accepted racist attitudes towards “colonial races” are challenged. If you want to understand how most European’s thought about the people of Africa this is as good a starting point as any. Whether any of that is an acceptable excuse is for you to decide.
Standard
Book review, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, humour, Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten, Thursday Next

Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde

Something Rotten is the fourth in Jasper Fforde’s “Thursday Next” series. I am a big fan of Fforde – he has a comic inventiveness mixed with erudition that is rare in today’s literature. He is hard to categorise – comic fiction certainly, but that is only the start of it. In Thursday Next he has created an original character that you genuinely care about (if not identify with) and her separation from and eventual reunion with her husband is quite touching. So why was I left a bit underwhelmed at the end of this book?

I am pretty sure it is not because his standards are slipping. There are some negative features of a series of novels that are unavoidable – for example we know the principal character will almost certainly survive, no matter what – in this case a bullet to the head is shrugged off in a couple of chapters – so there is little if any tension about the final outcome. As we know what is going to happen, the only interest rests in how we get there, not where we are going. That’s not to say that there aren’t challenges ahead for Thursday in the rest of the series I am sure.
I think the heart of the problem is in the way I have been reading these books – that is, altogether, without any significant breaks. Imagine if you read all of the Harry Potter series in one go, not over the ten or so years they were published. The impact would have been completely different. The suspense would be seriously diminished, the changes in style and pace would be much more obvious, plot discrepancies would jump out at you, and the point at which Rowling’s editors gave up – at the end of “Prisoner” – would be stark. Even knowing that there were seven books in the series, and that it has a definition conclusion, would make the experience different to reading each as it was published (or in my case joining the party at 4 and working back, hurriedly). That experience would be hard but not impossible to create, but I think explains some of my staleness with Fforde. So the simple prescription is a break from this series – the only remaining question is – Where next?
Standard
100 Best Novels Guardian list, Book review, Cold Comfort farm, Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, humour, Starkadder, Stella Gibbons, Uncategorized

Conference at Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, 1949

More on Cold Comfort – not that I am obsessed or anything. The original novel, Stella Gibbons’s first, was published in the early 1930’s. It has a wonderful period feel – although it is set a few years in the future, and there are glimpses of how the world has changed, with video phones and passing references to a recent war, for example. Despite this the world described is comfortably Edwardian, with strong echoes of Waugh and Saki in the opening chapters on Flora and Mrs Schilling’s life in London. The move to deepest darkest Sussex, even then surely not as isolated and backward as Flora describes it, provides a contrast to the metropolitan life she has temporarily abandoned. That contrast is kept in focus by the introduction of Mr Mybug (what a great name – he is Flora’s pest, but she has a soft spot for him nonetheless) with his gloriously stupid theories about Bramwell Bronte.

Mybug “works” in the novel as a contrast to the mad rural folk around him and as a foil for Flora, but the decision to take his character and turn it into the central theme of the Cold Comfort sequel, Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, has to be one of the most bewildering a writer has ever made. The yearning to return to the Starkadders, especially when her subsequent novels had never made the same mark as her first, must have been irresistible. We all wanted to know what had happened to the farm and the cast of characters – but cared very little about the intellectuals that Mybug represented. Yet in the sequel the original cast of characters is largely forgotten or treated as marginal. We are introduced to a series of grotesque caricatures of writers and artists from Mybug’s world at whom we are invited to sneer. It is car crash writing, and how it got past an editor I will never know. It is disrespectful to the original novel, and if it has been written as fan-fic it would have been rejected by Gibbons’s estate with barely a glance.

And yet I still love it. Written in the 1950’s, with of course the world an utterly darker place, it was out of print for a long time. I originally came across it as a library copy, and pounced, desperate to know what had happened to Flora, Charles, Seth, Reuben, and the whole grisly crew. We go back to a farm transformed into a prettified National Trust venue that has been turned, utterly improbably, into a conference centre. Flora goes down to help Mr Mybug run a cultural event there for no good reason (she has a large family with Charles by now) and not much happens until the Starkadders return and all is righted. Everything funny from the original novel, including the invented language (sukebind, mollocking) has gone. But it is still Cold Comfort Farm, and we love it. We love our parents when they grow old, we love footballers who retire and get fat because of their past glories, we love the town we grew up in even though they have paved over it and erected a shopping centre – we love them despite all that, not because of it, and I still treasure the glimpses of the world Stella Gibbons unforgettably created in her original burst of genius.

Standard
100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, Book review, Cold Comfort farm, humour, Stella Gibbons

Cold Comfort Farm – a classic

I have a confession to make – I love Cold Comfort Farm so much that I/we named my firstborn after two of the principal characters. I figured this would at least give him a great conversation opener when he finally gets interested in girls.
CCF is in my top three works of fiction of all time. On my desert island it would share a shelf with the Collected Works of Shakespeare, and, oh, probably the Gormenghast trilogy (if I could get away with having a trilogy).
The clichés about CCF are all, sadly, true. Stella Gibbons never wrote another word coming close to its genius, and the introductions to her recently reissued novels by Vintage acknowledge as much. That’s not to say her other work isn’t worth reading, (and I will write separately about Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, and Christmas at CCF) but you can never for a second forget that they are written by the same person who wrote Cold Comfort Farm. The contrast can be painful.
(this cover illustration is wrong is so many different ways, but is from the first edition I owned)
Anatomising why the novel is such a delight is in some respects pointless – it doesn’t bear too much analysis and inspection. The plot is flimsy, the minor characters deliberately (and joyfully) muddled up, the purple prose is flagged for the reader’s ease of appreciation. But some observations can’t be resisted. The romance between Flora and Charles, drawn with an economy that Austen would be proud of, is a particular delight. At the end of the novel (spoiler alert) they fall into one another’s arms, and are virtually speechless with genuine delight. Another joy is the use of names – Urk and his water voles, Richard Hawk-Monitor the local gentry from Haut-Couture (“Howchicker”) hall, Adam Lambsbreath (Adam has strong echoes of Joseph, the irascible and largely incoherent rustic who haunts Wuthering Heights) and of course, Aunt Ada Doom, matriach of the Starkadders.
The cliche that one could not love someone who did not love (insert cultural artifact of choice) is over-used, but I am so glad that the person I chose to spend my life with loves Cold Comfort as much as I do.
Standard