2011-12-21
This is science fiction!
I first read this book about 45 years ago, as a callow youth, on the recommendation of several friends who spent a long time persuading me that Cold Comfort Farm was a masterpiece, and should be compulsory reading for the entire population. At the time, I rarely read anything other than science fiction (I still read a lot of it but do now understand that other genres are just as entertaining and educational).
So because in the 70s I had a blinkered view of literature, I did take some persuading. There were no distant worlds, no dilemmas concerning alien races. What, I thought, could interest me in a book about simple country folk, a cross between Jane Austen and Emmerdale?
And yet, what none of my friends and few reviews of CCF ever mentioned (or, I think in many cases realised) was that CCF IS science fiction!
The novel is set in the near-to-then-future, and casually mentions TV phones and air taxis. There is a rather incompetent and authoritarian government, and Mayfair in London has become a sum area!
But this is not central to the novel; the main focus is an inbred rural community, whose many and complex problems the book's heroine, city girl
Flora Poste, sets out to resolve, and succeed, by various improbable means, in every respect.
This is a comic masterpiece which parodies rural historical novels about "simple country folk" and should be required reading for all callow youths who believe that literature begins and ends with science fiction!