This book is awfully putdownable. After reading "Cold Comfort Farm", a work that I immensely enjoyed for its humour and writing style, I picked this book, hoping that Gibbons would still entertian me. I was wrong.

Maybe it’s because I read it immediately after Cold Comfort Farm, but the effect is not the same, the humour, characterisation, etc. I felt a bit underwhelmed.

Even though this is pretty slight and I feel like I probably didn't get a lot of what/who Gibbons is poking gentle fun at here, it was delightful to visit Cold Comfort again and see a handful of the familiar characters. Still very funny and so glad I finally got to it.

“In this brilliant sequel” begins the blurb somewhat optimistically and the book itself ends on triumphant note, but as for everything in between… the problem is I don’t recognise many of the arty types depicted, and the dialect is a trial, so despite the odd brilliant line the rest feels like rather a mess. I can see why no one recommends the follow-up, although it was nice to find out what happened to Cold Comfort Farm.

I was given a copy of Conference at Cold Comfort Farm for Christmas by someone who said that I reminded them of Flora Poste (which I took, as I'm sure it was intended to be, as the nicest compliment I have ever received) and they were sure I would have read the original so they were giving me the sequel instead. I think I had actually read it some years ago, but I didn't remember much about it, and didn't have a copy in any case, so I thought it was an excellent present.

Conference at Cold Comfort Farm is set sixteen years after the original Cold Comfort Farm. Flora Poste, now Flora Fairford, is living quietly in London with her husband and five children when she receives a letter from Mr Mybug asking her to help with the organisation of a conference he is running at Cold Comfort Farm, which is now bereft of Starkadders and transformed into a conference centre owned by a heritage trust, full of twee rustic charm and complete with rooms named the "Greate Barne" and the "Quiete Retreate". Flora, of course, can't resist the challenge, and heads for Sussex to spend a week organising a motley collection of artists, intellectuals and "Managerial Revolutionaries" (apparently this was a real political philosophy, even if Gibbons makes it seem so absurd it's hard to believe) and restoring the Starkadders to their proper place at Cold Comfort Farm at the same time.

The sequel is undoubtedly not as good as the original, and despite featuring several of the same characters and having the same setting is really a very different book; apart from anything, the main target of Gibbons's ridicule here is not the rural novels of writers such as Mary Webb but modern artists and intellectuals. I can see that it wouldn't find favour with readers looking for more of the same, but Irather enjoyed it. I thought Gibbons did a lovely job of skewering pretentious intellectualism in the Conference and its attendees (including the artists Hacke, Messe and Peccavi and the leader of the Managerial Revolutionaries, Mr Claud Hubris) and I loved Flora being just as calm and unflappably capable as ever.