Cold Comfort Farm was Stella Gibbons' first novel but not her last - 22 other literary works followed it.Another adequate movie that was a brilliant book. I came to Cold Comfort Farm having seen it referenced somewhere as a comic novel. It was that, in spades.
What:Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons was published in 1932. It’s a send-up of all the books of the time romanticizing the rural life. It references many of the popular novels of its time, adding a layer of appreciation if you’re familiar with that work, but it isn’t necessary to know that much order to enjoy it.
Who: People who enjoy English humor at its subtlest will particularly enjoy Cold Comfort Farm, as will those familiar with the literature of the time. And, if you are a woman who has ever been hit on by a particular type of academic male, you will recognize Mr. Mybug and glory in the very very accurate portrayal of a man soaked in nature’s fecund blessing.
Why: If you’re considering writing humor, this is an excellent book to take a look at for its myriad of different strategies, including a very accurate send-up of the ways dialect are often portrayed. At the same time, it remains an interesting and engaging story.
When: Read this when you want a little humor and charm. Read it when you have been too long among the self-important, and need to see them skewered a little.
Where and how: Don’t read it in the woodshed; there’s something nasty in there.
I love this book! I thoroughly enjoyed the writer’s commentary threaded through the text. It was also a great story and when they made it a movie, they did a good job. Thanks for the reminder!
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Review: The Red Knight By Miles Cameron
In the past I’ve found the promotional bag of books from a con can vary widely in terms of quality. One treasure that emerged from my World Fantasy Convention bag, though, is THE RED KNIGHT by Miles Cameron. I’m about to send my copy off to a friend, and I thought I’d recommend it to other folks as well.
In flavor, it reminds me a little of what I like about Joe Abercrombie – a nice grittiness to the characters, as well as a melange of viewpoints that end up weaving together coherently to deliver a story that pulls you along. The social structure feels medieval, full of knights and squires, but while noble by birth, most are not noble in nature. I like strong female characters in my fiction, and there’s plenty of them in here, including some older ones, which I appreciate. The fighting is nicely choreographed and realistic, without the description ever getting tedious.
It’s the usual some dark mystic force is invading sort of plotline, but it’s enjoyable and tense. I’m a fan of big fat fantasy novels, and this is both engaging and highly satisfactory, to the point where I’m eager to read the next, since THE RED KNIGHT is the first of a trilogy. The jacket says Miles Cameron writes historical fiction under another name, and I’m going to poke around and see if I can’t find his other work, since I enjoyed this so much.
For writers, it's worth reading the book a few times in order to see how the points of view, particularly that of the AI, are handled. Shelter by Susan Palwick is one of the reasons why I will never question the use of anything, be it shoe, gun, elephant, or even a rope, as a protagonist. That is because one of the multiple viewpoints it’s told from is that of a house, or to be more precise, the AI running it, and it is done so in such a way that it is integral to the story as well as entrancing.
Palwick is one of my favorite science fiction writers. She can wring your heart dry or make you laugh, and I always emerge from one of her stories still wrapped in it, thinking about it for hours, sometimes days afterwards, unfolding some of the thoughts arising in answer to the questions and observations she presents.
The book opens with the third narrator, House, an AI convinced it isn’t an AI. AIs are illegal in the US because they’re defined as legally persons, and therefore owning them is slavery. There’s also the AI terrorism problem… The House’s point of view is done beautifully. It feels entirely real, entirely immersive, and you can really believe the way it reasons its way through decisions. The book begins in the “present” of the story, during a very severe storm (global warming has got worse) and goes back to the earlier events that led to the world and the relationships we’re given at the beginning. Palwick directs our sympathies as a conductor directs a symphony. The twenty years of history and events we’re shown, from different points of view, build up a picture of a future that has clearly grown from our present. Every detail has second-order implications””you have bots doing the cleaning, so you have people afraid of bots, and people who think doing your own cleaning is a religious act, and you have sponge bots trying to stem a flood as a metaphor for people unable to cope.
In my Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction Stories class, we often look at the first paragraphs of works to see how much gets set up in it. Palwick’s constructs a world that clicks neatly in place as each sentence unfolds:
That same morning, Kevin Lindgren’s house warned him not to go outside. The house knew the sky was dangerous. Everyone knew. Kevin didn’t even need a house with a brain to tell him: all the newscasts said so, and special bulletins during the soap operas and talk shows, and, most especially, the sky itself, gray and howling, spitting sheets of rain and barrages of hailstones. Kevin himself knew that the sky was dangerous. Not fifteen minutes before he left the house, he’d watched a gust of wind pick up the patio table on his back deck and blow it down Filbert Street. Filbert wasn’t really a street at all, here; it was actually ten flights of steps leading steeply down Telegraph Hill to Levi Plaza and the waterfront. The patio table was teak, and quite heavy, but even so, the wind sent it a long way down the steps, until finally it came to rest in a neighbor’s garden. It could just as easily have gone through the neighbor’s roof or window.
Palwick is a writer I watch for. With her books it’s not so much a question of whether I’ll buy them as when. She’s also written one of my favorite replies to Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon in the title story from her collection The Fate of Mice. Anything by Palwick is good, but Shelter shows how marvelous SF can be in the hands of a master.
4 Responses
Yay Cold Comfort Farm!
…But I loved the movie as well as the book.
…One thing I haven’t seen people talk about is the ways in which the story echoes _Emma_. Some day I’ll write a blog entry about that.
I’d love to read that!
I love this book! I thoroughly enjoyed the writer’s commentary threaded through the text. It was also a great story and when they made it a movie, they did a good job. Thanks for the reminder!