cold comfort farm: a kind of book review

I've just finished reading the book Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. It's a parody of the "rural novel" popular at the time when it was written (the 1930s) and basically satirizes overdramaticness in a very, very funny way.

I like Cold Comfort Farm because it makes fun of all the things I like to make fun of - pessimism, intellectualism, Freudian psychology.

The main character, the impeccably clean and brisk and light-hearted Flora Poste, goes to live with relatives in a terribly run-down and dirty farm, and then proceeds to straighten out the messy lives of the farm's inhabitants. Everyone who lives there thinks that his or her life is pretty much a deep dark pit of misery - and they are all presided over by Aunt Ada Doom, who pretends to be mad, providing only the explanation, "I saw something nasty in the woodshed!"

The character I liked to make fun of the most was one Mr Mybug, an intellectual who stops over in the country while writing his sweeping biography of Branwell Bronte, in which he proposes several very far-fetched theories, including one that says Charlotte, Emily, and Anne plagiarised Branwell's novels to pay for liquor. The author of Cold Comfort Farm also made Mr Mybug an obvious satire of the eternally annoying and aggravating Freudian outlook that everything has to do with sex. Mr Mybug wanders the countryside connecting disgusting metaphors to everything he sees, and is always promptly shot down by Flora's quick common sense.

And so, if you, like me, are tired beyond tired of reading long and unlikely theories filled with the densest academic language [ahem, that thesis on Hamlet] - if you also feel that reading one more jumbled and stretched thesis will be more like being repeatedly hit over the head with a sugar-spoon... then I do heartily recommend Cold Comfort Farm for a bit of very witty relief.