Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (Vintage Classics)
£4.70
Robert Poste’s child is back at Cold Comfort Farm. But all is not well. Flora finds the farm transformed into a twee haven filled with Toby jugs and peasant pottery, and rooms labelled ‘Quiete Retreate’ and ‘Greate laundrie’. It is, Flora winces, ‘exactly like being locked in the Victoria and Albert Museum after closing time’.
Worse, the farm is hosting a conference of the pretentious International Thinkers Group – a group made up of the ‘sadistic owl’ Mr Peccavi, loathsome Mr Mybug and the overpowering Mrs Ernestine Thump.
And worst of all, there are no Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm. All the he-cousins have gone abroad to make their fortunes and the female cousins are having a pretty thin time of it. Once again the sensible Flora decides to take the situation in hand.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Vintage Digital (4 Aug. 2011) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| File size | 1083 KB |
| Text-to-Speech | Enabled |
| Screen Reader | Supported |
| Enhanced typesetting | Enabled |
| X-Ray | Not Enabled |
| Word Wise | Enabled |
| Sticky notes | On Kindle Scribe |
| Print length | 176 pages |
by Nick Landon
I enjoyed reading this book again after many years. Stella Gibbons had not lost her sense of satire, but it does not reach the heights of the original Cold Comfort Farm itself.
by Mrs. K. A. Wheatley
Poor Stella Gibbons had a lot to live up to, what with the adoration people felt and still feel about Cold Comfort Farm. Nothing else she ever wrote was going to come close to it. This short novella set much later in the history of Cold Comfort Farm than the original attempts to recreate the magic of the first novel, but doesn’t quite pull it off. Flora is now a married woman with five children, and Cold Comfort Farm has been handed over to an agency like the National Trust in all but name. Reuben is beside himself with worry about what has happened to the farm, as is Flora when she finds out that a convention for futurists is being held there. She nips back down to the farm to sort things out and restore the Starkadders to their rightful legacy. There are elements in the book that work very well, and there are times when I found myself enjoying it immensely, but it is very patchy, and at times rather rushed. The ending is forced and you feel that by that stage Gibbons has realised she isn’t quite going to pull it off, and wants shot of the whole thing.
by Westmount
This book confirms the view that you should not try to ‘gild the lily’. Compared to Cold Comfort Farm, it seems contrived and the humour forced. It’s in a different league to the original.
I suspect it would have read much better at the time it was first published. Its readers would have been more likely to ‘get’ the oblique references to some of the left-wing artists and pseudo-intellectuals around at that time. It’s a measure of the wonderful ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ that it has never dated in this way.
I don’t understand why Gibbons felt the need to write it. (Probably pressure from her publisher to try to replicate the success of her sensational first novel)It seems to strike a discordant note in comparison to her other work, and certainly doesn’t measure up to the excellent ‘Westwood’ and ‘Nightingale Wood’which are terrific.
by DJJ
Readers expecting a rehash of the original, beware. Reading Conference is like meeting a lover after many years apart – bittersweet memories mixed with dismay at what they have become. Other reviewers tell of the misfiring, heavy handed satire, the loss of everything that made CCF such a long lasting delight, but despite everything wrong with this novel – and boy there is so much wrong with this novel – you can’t in the end fail to love it simply because of all the love we feel for Flora, the Starkadders, the Hawk-Monitors, (we meet Elfine and sons just once, and it is worth the wait) and all the deep-Sussex madness. Incidentally, having just reread Wuthering Heights, I now recognise the debt Gibbons owed EB in many of her depictions of rural larks.
by hucky
Looking forward to reading this. Loved the film. This book arrived quickly and it’s a lovely edition.
by Noura
Having a family background that unnervingly resembled the Starkadders, I read the original cold Comfort Farm again and again with relish and grest amusement. I often think that sequels never work and the subject gets done to death especially in films but also in books. This didn’t catch my attention or make me laugh or want to read on. I abandoned it in the end and read something more interesting,
by FatBat
Again, this is a book I read many years ago, and I was delighted to be able to buy my own copy. Flora Fairford (nee Poste) returns to Cold Comfort Farm, leaving the children to the care of her vicar husband and “the spiv” (a prescient glimpse of Community Service by the author?)to find things horrifically changed. All the male Starkadders except the faithful Reuben have decamped to South Africa to work Grootebeeste, the farm they bought by mail order, taking with them Big Business, the bull,(who has disgraced the name of Starkadder) but not the Starkadder maidens who are living unhappily in the Greate Barne. The farmouse itself, now a home to all things twee is a conference centre, and Flora is supposedly helping out at a gathering of the International Thinkers’ Group (it is perhaps enough to say that delegates include the artists Hacke, Messe and Peccavi (plus the latter’s girl friend who has a habit of appearing in a mink coat with nothing on underneath…). Flora of course devotes her considerable energies to Putting Things Right,and restoring the Starkadders to Cold Comfort and even the watervoles to Ticklepenny’s Well..
Most enjoyable.
by Brian Oshea
Excellent value good condition.