The star is life and death

Mark reading Terry Pratchett has been the highlight of these many last long work-filled weeks since I have returned from Paris. He has just finished The Light Fantastic, which I read yea these many long years ago. I think I have read it twice, actually, once in high school and once in college, but that doesn’t mean I remembered it all that well.

The change in quality from The Color of Magic to The Light Fantastic is noticeable. All the things that are awesome about The Color of Magic are still awesome, like the puns, the cinematic writing, the puns, the absurdly logical worldbuilding conceits, the puns, the Luggage, and did I mention the puns? But the plot starts to look a lot more like a plot in this one, and Pratchett starts developing his wonderful gift for sending up fantasy tropes by adding an unusually-seen element to them rather than just parody-exaggeration. For example, TCoM had Hrun, who was funny, but mostly his sword was funny; TLF has the octogenarian warrior Cohen the Barbarian, a lifetime in his own legend, who is hilarious and a much more memorable character.

I had somehow managed to completely forget what the climax of the story was—this is surprisingly usual for me since Pratchett’s climaxes are always very chaotic and strange—so I was pleasantly surprised at how adorable it was and I will never forget it again, I hope.

I feel like I ought to have more to say on this book but it was rather short and a lot of my favorite stuff about Discworld hasn’t really been developed yet at this point in the series.
 

When I am fifty I shall write a novel as good as Persuasion

There is a bit of a long story about me deciding to reread Cold Comfort Farm right now but the short version involves me excitedly fobbing it off on a friend and then realizing that I don’t remember it half as well as the movie version, since I’d only read it once but I’ve seen the movie a good ten times. This is in part because Cold Comfort Farm is one of the very few stories where the movie adaptation is actually quite as good as the book, largely due to its stellar cast. But it’s an odd thing to have that opinion and yet be unable to remember enough about the book to remember why one has that opinion, so I went to reread it to see if it still stands.

The answer is yes. Cold Comfort Farm, the book, is delightfully silly. It is a bit overwritten at times, mostly on purpose.  The genre it is making fun of has a history of also being dreadfully overwritten, even while a number of them have gotten to be Classic Works of Literature, basically all the ones by Thomas Hardy. The genre in question is nineteenth-century-ish earthy English moor romances, of which I would never recommend reading a single one that isn’t written by Thomas Hardy, and even then, only read one every couple of years.

The basic storyline is such: Miss Flora Poste, a well-educated, neat, and thoroughly modern twenty-year-old, finds herself orphaned and with only a hundred pounds a year. Rather than work, which she suspects she wouldn’t be very good at, Flora decides to live off her relatives, of which she has rather a lot. She winds up living with her aunt Ada Doom’s family, the Starkadders, at a dreary mess of a farm named Cold Comfort, in the town of Howling, Sussex, where everyone and everything has ludicrously dramatic names. They all have what novelists of the time called “rich emotional lives,” which, to Flora, looks very much the same thing as being a bit stupid and unhealthily fixated on very specific ways of being miserable. Flora takes it upon herself to “tidy up,” poking and suggesting and cleaning her relatives into less dysfunctional lifestyles. For a number of them this means getting away from Cold Comfort Farm, an activity which has been strictly forbidden by Aunt Ada Doom, reclusive matriarch of the clan, who had seen something narsty in the woodshed when she was two and pretends to be mad.

While my modern copy-editor’s eye really wants to excise about fifteen or twenty percent of the descriptions for being utterly unnecessary (and I have a high tolerance for worldbuilding and backstory and infodumps and general minute detail), the rest of it is all absurd in the best possible way, featuring painstakingly dramatic use of eye-dialect, some highly judgmental but pretty astute inner dialogue by Flora, and excellently weaponized manners. The secondary characters have a tendency to be distinctly Types, but this is absolutely on purpose, and very effective for comedy. Also, sadly, some Types are not mere tropes invented by novelists, but tend to exist in real life, and it is quite satisfying seeing Flora fob off Mr. Mybug, the epitome of That Weirdly Sexist Pseudo-Intellectual Guy Whose Only Interest In Life Is Sex But He Keeps Trying To Dress It Up In Fancy Language In Order To Make It Sound Like There’s Some Appreciable Difference Between Him And A Mayfly And You Should Pay Attention To Him. (And they really do always insist in falling in love with one and it really is MOST TRYING. Ahem.)

Flora Poste is a literary character very dear to my heart, especially since I have admitted to myself that I am definitely fussy and concerned about doing things Properly, for all that I style myself all subcultural and shit. Her monologue on being bad at lacrosse is one of the single passages in literature that I have most identified with, ever. I aspire to ever be a quarter as socially ept as she is, and her powers of managing people are positively inspiring.

Despite minor flaws with lack of editing, this book gets A+ thumbs up all the stars would read again, and I recommend it and the movie to all human persons with any sense of humor.