Not that conditions at the eponymous farm are much above Depression-level! But there is also the absence of the Depression, which I and many readers know best through Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London set at about the time this was being written. Could I write a review of Cold Comfort Farm as Science Fiction? I thought about it but it was beyond me.īy being set in 1946 or 7, Gibbons’ failure to predict WWII leaves a hole, which of course most readers, ignoring that it’s set in the future, don’t notice. What made me go back and check though was when Flora, our protagonist, phones a friend in London from a phone box in the wilds of Sussex, he is able to observe her on his television screen, talking and fidgeting. Given the book’s publication date, the reader can assume that the year is 1931”, ignoring that one character is mentioned as having fought in a war in 1946. One set of notes for students says “The events described in the novel take place over a five-month period from February through June. It seems to me that many of the commentators on Cold Comfort Farm (1932) missed the Note at the beginning: “The action of the story takes place in the near future”.
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