Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
I didn't have any idea what to expect from this book but it certainly wasn't the missing link between P G Wodehouse and Mervyn Peake. That is however, what I got.
The book opens with a foreword dedicated to "Anthony Pookworthy, Esq., A.B.S., L.L.R." Gibbons bewails the years she has spent as a journalist "learning to say exactly what I meant in short sentences." Now, to "achieve literature and favourable reviews" she must learn "to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible." His "books are not ... funny. they are records of intense spiritual struggles, staged in the wild setting of mere, berg or fen." It is clear that she finds them laughable and that Pookworthy represents a type of author who is to be wickedly lampooned in what is to come.
