Is this the funniest novel ever written? Yes.

Oh, I know, I know, you have an opinion. I'll admit, there's strong competition: anything by P.G. Wodehouse. Evelyn Waugh. (I have been scarred by my loathing of the TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, and I really must overcome that, and read either Scoop or Vile Bodies, and get back to you.) There's Douglas Adams, of course, but Hitchhiker's Guide started its life as a radio program and -- as delightful as it is -- the novel remains, in my heart, a novelisation of that original transcendent experience. Diary of Nobody, Three Men in a Boat. The Third Policeman. There are contenders for genre tastes, like Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, or The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick deWitt. But, for me, Cold Comfort Farm wins hands-down because its humor manages to be both completely and perfectly of-its-time, and timeless, simultaneously.

Of its time, CCF is a charming little time capsule of 1930s characters and attitudes (some pretty offensive), poking fun at all sort of contemporary manners, mores and sacred cows: smug intellectuals, high-brow literature, low-brow Hollywood, fashion, religion, family .... Probably 9/10s of the jokes and references go over the head of the modern reader, and an annotated version, that explains some of Gibbon's targets, might be fun. But there are enough remaining that are perfectly clear (the Brontes, DH Lawrence, even Jane Austen, Clark Gable & Gary Cooper, Dr Freud, self-help books and international evangelical preachers .... I've almost certainly missed some.) Gibbons is spoofing a style and attitude and genre of writing -- bucolic gothic? --that now may be thoroughly out of fashion, but has lingered, and spawned enough copycats that it still resonates.

And her half-hearted effort to set the action 20 years in her future (Why? Dear God, why?) is all part of the fun: she anticipates video phones, airplanes as common as motor cars, post dropped on your doorstep by air, the gentrification of certain unlikely parts of London -- That happened!!! -- a brutal war in the late 1940s with Nicaragua (Nicaragua?) and wonderful advances in brassiere technology. But rather misses the fact that there's going to be a bit of bother with some funny-looking guy in Germany, at the end of the decade. It ought to be an embarrassing debacle -- but it's not.

And that's because her targets -- smug intellectuals, high-brow literature, low-brow Hollywood, fashion, religion and family, yes most of all FAMILY -- are completely timeless and seem almost unchanged, and her aim is true. The Mr. Mybug in your life may not argue that Branwell Bronte wrote the sister's novels -- but you will almost certainly have a Mr. Mybug somewhere in your life, who is constantly "sharing" his/her hare-brained ideas about life, the universe and everything. Your Adam Lambsbreath may not insist on clettering the dirty dishes with a thorn twig, instead of using a proper dishmop, as God intended. But just try to suggest that he/she could upgrade their phone, or move from VHS to dvd ... Your family, god love'em, may not be the Starkadders -- but just try to tell me that there aren't some Starkadder-ish tendencies there.

And Flora Poste is the most delightful creation: the tireless agent of restoring balance to the universe, who would be very exhausting to know in real life. And who, I suspect, we'd be happy to avoid like the plague -- but safely confined between the covers of a novel, we can delight in her setting everything and everyone straight, and just imagine her convincing our very own Aunt Ada Doom that, whatever it was that she saw in the woodshed -- just get over it ... ( )