Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons

Cold Comfort Farm

The thing–well one of the things–about satire is that judging the book is more than just a matter of critiquing the plot, the style, and the characters. You have to look at how well it hits its mark. When the book in question is about 80 years old and it satirizes a genre that we don’t see much anymore, it gets harder to make a judgment. In the case of Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm, we’re pretty much left with asking, “But is it still funny?” I’m happy to report: It is. This may be because I have a warped sense of humor, but I was chuckling every few pages as I read it.

Written in 1932, Gibbons (for some reason I still don’t understand) chooses to set her story at least a couple of decades into the future. The book is littered with references to phones with TV screens and wars that never happened. If you ignore them and mentally reorient the story to the 1930s, it works a lot better. (This is what the movie version did.) Setting this bizarre problem aside, the book is fairly straight forward. In the first chapter, we meet a young woman, Flora Poste, whose father has recently died, leaving her with a small legacy and no place to live. As she has no ambitions beyond living an orderly life without too much effort, she decides to go live with relatives. Of the four invitations she receives, she chooses to go live on Cold Comfort Farm with her father’s people, the Starkadders, primarily because the invitation hints at irresistible family mysteries.

Cold Comfort Farm is a derelict place. The cows literally have pieces dropping off of them every few chapters. The inhabitants speak a strange patois of English farm language that takes more than a little getting used to. And they all have fascinating mental disorders or behavioral problems. Amos is a fire and brimstone preacher. Adam appears to be intellectually disabled. Elfine is a wood sprite. Seth is a misogynist nymphomaniac. Judith is depressed. And, the jewel in the crown, is Aunt Ada Doom, who saw something nasty in the woodshed when she was younger and who threatens to go mad if anyone leaves the farm or changes anything. Almost as soon as she arrives, Flora begins setting people to rights. Most of the novel covers her skillful manipulations of her relatives while avoiding the attentions of attempted writer Mr. Mybug (actually Meyerburg, but the local mispronunciation sticks).

Gibbons was mocking what Wikipedia refers to as the “loam and lovechild” genre. In this genre, the farms are miserable and the people doomed to the consequences of their own poor judgment and family curses. Think Wuthering Heights but with less style. Gibbons observes that if only there was someone to take them all in hand, everyone could end up with a happy ending. Just like Othello would have been a lot happier if one of the characters had been a marriage counselor.

While this “loam and lovechild” genre has (apparently deservedly) disappeared, I think Cold Comfort Farm still stands. You can’t really read it as satire anymore, but you can read it as a humorous novel. It’s sort of like an inverted soap opera, now that I think of it.If you have the right kind of humor, this book is hysterical.

Snuff, by Terry Pratchett

Reading Terry Pratchett’s books is a bitter sweet experience now. I love the stories. The setting is so rich, and the tone is uproariously funny and smart. But I know now that every book that comes out is one book closer to the end of the series. Sure, the stories are lively enough that you can easily imagine the characters carrying on–but I won’t get to read about them once Pratchett dies. No one can write the way he does.

Snuff

Snuff is the 39th Discworld novel (and I hope like hell there are a more than a few left) and features the terrific Sam Vimes, Commander of the City Watch. Vimes is a copper; he quite literally lives for his job. But in Snuff, Vimes is forced to go on holiday. Vimes being Vimes, however, he sniffs out murder and smuggling and injustice. And Vimes being Vimes, he doesn’t let something like jurisdiction stop him from hunting down the criminals.

Pratchett always satirizes something from the real world in his books, and it was fun to see the “Jane Austen” cameo. But Pratchett really goes after racism in this book. He’s tackled the idea before, but this book has a different angle on the issue. What if there were a group of people who everyone knew was bad, filthy, stupid, and incapable of bettering themselves? In Snuff, that would be the goblins. They’re used to being killed or kidnapped, but they long for justice, for a chance to be treated like the intelligent beings they are. It’s a little surprising that in a world as diverse as the Discworld, there is still anti-any sentient being feelings floating around. But the thing you learn is that people are people everywhere you go and it takes a lot of time for old prejudices to die.

Once I heard about Pratchett’s diagnosis, it was hard to me to not look for its effects in his work. In this book, I thought I maybe detected fewer jokes, maybe fewer cultural references. But the plot is intricate, logical, and a hell of a lot of fun to watch play out–especially the heart-stopping scene on the river. And this book still has enough funny to keep me chuckling and snorting from beginning to end.

Thank You For Smoking, by Christopher Buckley

Thank You for Smoking

I’ve been looking forward to reading this book since I watched the movie a couple of years ago. Thank You For Smoking is one of the most cynical, devlishly funny satires I’ve ever read. It was written over a decade ago, when anti-smoking legislation–banning smoking in restaurants, etc.–rolled through after studies started to diffinitively prove the link between smoking and a host of physical ailments. The story is narrated by Nick Naylor, a spokesman for the tobacco lobby, as he tries to delay the inevitable.

This book is full of dark humor, and I loved all the meetings between the members of the Mod Squad (Merchants of Death) and when Nick bending facts and half-truths until they scream when he debates with anti-smoking types. The movie was pretty terrific, too. I recommend it to the cynical types out there.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this book is the way that Nick tries to fight his battles. He keeps framing the debate as personal freedom fighters versus neo-Puritans. To be honest, I kind of see the point. How much can you really protect people from themselves? No matter how many warning labels you put on things or how much you tax them, people will still do things that are bad for their health. And that’s part of what I think this book is about: the power of words and ethics. If you have the gift of gab, you can use your powers for good or evil. Nick takes the third route, I think. He does it for the challenge of it. Like he says, “If you can do tobacco [meaning if you can lobby for tobacco], you can do anything.”

Another thing that struck me about this book was how much Washington, D.C. is its own little world, spinning around the twenty-four hour news cycle. And apart from the laws that end up being enforced across the country, I don’t really pay attention to what happens over there. Maybe I should, considering that the laws that end up affecting me are made by a relatively small bunch of legislators and talking heads. Kind of scary once you get a glimpse of all the wheeling and dealing that goes on.

Florence of Arabia, by Christopher Buckley

I don’t know how I feel about Christopher Buckley’s Florence of Arabia. I really enjoyed it as a piece of satire, but I have a hard time with the message of the book. The satire focuses on a couple of different topics: American dependence on oil, Islamic fundamentalism. It chiefly focuses on women’s rights in strict, Taliban-style sharia countries. One the one hand, I firmly believe that women should be treated equally–socially, economically, and legally–with men. But on the other hand, I don’t think I (or the Western world) has the right to tell other people how they should live. As a relativist and a liberal, I have never been able to reconcile this.

Buckley takes pains to have his characters point out ever now and then that not all Arab (meaning Muslim) women want to be “liberated.” It occurs to me, though, that everyone should be able to expect basic human rights. (Which begs the question, what are basic human rights? Well, the UN drafted and passed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.) Even though Buckley was trying to be humorous, and even though I really enjoyed this book, it makes me think unhappy thoughts, thoughts that are hard to put into words. Why are there places in the world where women are oppressed, abused, and not allowed to change their situation? Why are religions interpreted to create cultures like the Taliban?

I don’t know how he does it, but Buckley creates satires that work like they are supposed to: first you laugh, then you think. For days. And days. And days.

Distraction, Part II

Don’t you just hate it when either 1) the plot of the book you are currently reading goes completely off the rails and says, “Screw you!” to conventional narrative structure, possibly with a rude ethnic gesture, or 2) the characters decide to start acting like they’re Ph.D.s and everything they say evolves into a great debate about the sociopolitical factors of yadda yadda yadda and they all suddenly lack the capacity to speak in anything but pages-long speeches?

Me, too.

I just had both happen to me about half way through Distraction. I stuck with it, just out of curiosity to see where Sterling would go with it. Plus, I was still picking up interesting tidbits of future history. But hell, all that sociology talk wears you down after a while. And Sterling finished the book with a completely different plot that he started with. One the one hand, the guy needs to learn to pack more explication into less dialogue. But on the other hand, he’s great because he managed to get me completely in the dark about what was going to happen next. (This is turning into a Tevye-like monologue. Tcha.)

In the end…I enjoyed it, but it’s not a great book. I can see where Sterling could have run with his ideas a bit more. Plus, a lot of the dialogue in the second have really needed to be distilled down. If you’re going to write a political treatise, fine, but it really bogs down the storyline when you use the characters as your mouthpieces.

Distraction, by Bruce Sterling, Part I

As I continue not reading House of Leaves (sorry, Kris), I have been reading, appropriately enough, Distraction, by Bruce Sterling. It’s another book that’s set in the not too distant future in an America that has grown to resemble the last days of Rome, but without the bedsheets. It’s decadent, it’s not functioning, and the empire is about to topple.

Fun.

What Sterling has done in this book is to extrapolate the current trends in society and just follow them into a logical conclusion. While I think this scenario is entirely possible, I think that Sterling didn’t give enough time for things to get as bad as they are in Distraction. A shortened timeline seems to be common in these books. Maybe it’s because the author needs to get the plot moving or something, but I don’t think that they give enough time for scenarios like the one you find in this book to realistically develop.

But one thing I really like about this book is that it’s kind of a fictional equivalent to The Prince– a practical guide to manipulating the political landscape. The main character, Oscar Valparaiso, is the spin doctor of all spin doctors and his mind is as slick as an eel. It’s a treat to watch him work.

I’m about a third of the way through the book, but the plot still feels like it’s in its introductory phases, like everything is still getting into place and nothing much has happened yet. Hopefully, things will start to pick up soon. So far, the most interesting thing going on in this book is reading the little snippets of future history (the stuff that happened between our present and the characters’ present).

Two Books in a Weekend

Since I finished Great Expectations last wednesday, I’ve finished two more books. Man, is is fun to be back with 20^th century authors.

The first book I read is Boris Akunin’s The Winter Queen, the first Erast Fandorin novel. It’s a fun mystery in a Russia that is a refreshing change from something Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky would have created. Good, original mystery with fun and interesting characters. My only complaint is that the plot is a little twist-happy. I felt like I was going to get whiplash in the last chapters of the book.

The second book I read is Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide, which is exactly what it sounds like. And it’s funny–in a completely (un)deadly serious way. This guide is guaranteed to see any B-actress through a zombie flick. Fun reading…or scary if you forget the joke.