Authors Electric

I can’t remember now how many years ago it was when I first read Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm, but I do remember the delight I felt in the cast of comical grotesques and the mad inventiveness of the wonky cows, the sukebind, the whatever-it-was in the woodshed that Aunt Ada Doom saw, that ‘something nasty’ that sealed all their fates.   My husband shared my enjoyment of the book but sailed a bit close to the wind when he christened my parent’s smallholding, which was indeed in deepest, darkest Sussex, Cold Comfort Farm. We’re still married and I am still inclined to mutter, on occasions when I’ve achieved something I alone find praiseworthy, ‘I ha’scranletted the bottom acre.’ I once sent a copy to a friend who was in need of cheering up and she phoned to say that at first she hadn’t realised it was satirical and wondered what on earth I had sent it for. I was reminded of the business of ‘not getting it’ recently by Bill Kirton’s humourless and dopey reviewer ...

I was recently sent a Q&A interview by a publisher for an upcoming anthology Into the Night Eternal: Tales of French Folk Horror,  ( which (shameless plug) will include my novella ‘ A Small Thing for Yolanda’ ). As always that online interview sheet included that old chestnut ‘Which books have influenced your writing the most?’ And, as always, I was at a loss for an answer. The books that had any effect on us at age four are never going to be the same at age fourteen, or forty-four, or sixty-four.   That said I am not sure that books read in adulthood ever affect us in the same way that they do when we are young. I suspect what the question is designed to portray authors as astonishingly erudite by naming the latest literary success or else one of the classic worthies such as Joyce, Naipaul or Woolf.   I have read and enjoyed my share of literary classics – ancient and modern, but I suspect the books that really influenced me the most will always be those fav...

          Parody is enormous fun, and I teach a class on how to write it each term in my creative writing courses Malden Centre and Surrey Hills Onward Learning   because the students enjoy it so much. It doesn't seem as daunting as starting something from scratch. It’s actually a very good way of finding out about other writers’ styles, although you have to choose someone with a distinctive voice. Hemingway is an excellent subject, with his absence of adverbs, and reasonably easy to do as a consequence. Chandler and Spillane are good targets as well. Probably the most famous parody of all is Cold Comfort Farm , by Stella Gibbons, which took the mickey out of the accounts of rural life by writers such as Mary Webb, D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, concentrating on sexual undercurrents, muddy fields and inheritances. This is one of my favourite passages: …He looked up as Judith entered, and gave a short, defiant lau...