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leifalreadyexists 's review for:
Conference at Cold Comfort Farm
by Stella Gibbons
Glad I got this one from the library. Like everyone else who picked up this book I was attracted by the promise of a return to Gibbons' prior Cold Comfort Farm. That novel, though holding unusually conservative sentiments as the basis of its still very funny send up of all things Modernist, especially in the vein of D.H. Lawrence, was an especially liberating read. Flora Poste was a brilliant machine of inhuman order amid the catastrophically neutered excesses of the rustic Starkadders and the balance of the book, including the timing of its jokes, seemed perfectly elegant. Thus it was that as a stylist Gibbons successfully challenged a vein of writing much more intelligently theorized than her own pragmatic realism and came away seeming not just momentarily victorious but acutely evenspirited. That she did it in the form of a novel; itself one of modernism's weapons of culture, makes the achievement particularly pleasurable.
Not so this novel. Tepid writing evokes the forms of Flora and the farm without the spirit that had previously energized them, and the targets are not lamed with predictable ease as Mybug was in the previous novel, but positively manufactured as an obvious dream of the ultimately reactionary unconscious. The humour, finding no true target, falls flat. Having travestied her own achievements Gibbons presents instead an abbreviated and predictable plot, cardboard names that do not seem to even merit names, and insipid writing.
Overall this book stands as a warning sign of a particularly vapid nadir for sequels everywhere, and, at its worst, casts a weak poison over the book which preceded it. Too bad, that.
Not so this novel. Tepid writing evokes the forms of Flora and the farm without the spirit that had previously energized them, and the targets are not lamed with predictable ease as Mybug was in the previous novel, but positively manufactured as an obvious dream of the ultimately reactionary unconscious. The humour, finding no true target, falls flat. Having travestied her own achievements Gibbons presents instead an abbreviated and predictable plot, cardboard names that do not seem to even merit names, and insipid writing.
Overall this book stands as a warning sign of a particularly vapid nadir for sequels everywhere, and, at its worst, casts a weak poison over the book which preceded it. Too bad, that.