Some Comfort

 The problem with comic novels is that one knows they are intended to be funny and so I, for one, have some resistance to them. Go on, then, make me laugh. I bet you can't.

Ulysses and A la Recherche are comic novels but there's more to them than that. Somehow, art should be sad to be great but, certainly, comedy can be sad, too.

Cold Comfort Farm has been upstairs for years unread. Not even looked at. It came in a bundle of other Penguin funny novels but wasn't the point if why I was gifted them. I wasn't overly impressed with any of those I looked at and only now does the cloud reveal its silver lining. Stella Gibbons was doing nicely enough until that moment when something clicks and you decide it's a fine thing indeed which happened in this instance on page 93 with a description of a film with an,

audience [that] hadf run to beards and magenta shirts and original ways of arranging its neckwear...made by a Norwegian film company in 1915 with Japanese actors, which lasted an hour and three-quarters and contained twelve close-ups of water-lilies lying perfectly still on a scummy pond and four suicides, all done extremely slowly.

Humour is a dark, conservative thing. Liberal, 'woke' types might want to understand and empathize with the reasons for the suicides but in this ironic take on art house cinema, as early as the 1930's, they make it funny by being representative of serious issues being laboured more than somewhat.

The farm is a place the family know they can't leave, like the inertia or paralysis of those characters in Dubliners. The pest, Mr. Meyerburg, has a radical theory that Branwell Bronte wrote all the books while the sisters were dissolute,

'You know how dreadful intelligent people are when you take them to dances.'

and Aunt Ada Doom, the dominant matriarchal presence, 'saw something nasty in the woodshed' when she was two, the deep Freudian legacy of which has thwarted the family ever since.

I'm perhaps sometimes tempted to laud such enjoyable things beyond their true value in the excitement of finding them and it's possible that our sensibilities by now ought not to find fun in a clever girl's depiction of non-cosmopolitan rural types but, as we've noted already, she doesn't spare sophistication, either. So, let's not appoint Cold Comfort Farm 'best comic novel ever' just yet or make a list of favourites just so that it can be included but it's always great to discover something so good in the library that one hadn't known was such.