The Crooked Furrow

UK Publisher: Sampson Low, Marston and Co. Ltd. (London). First published  1937

In "The Crooked Furrow" Jeffery Farnol returns to the vigour and broad sweep of his famous "The Broad Highway," but here the material is handled with a new sureness and with an even deeper understanding of life. As in his other books, Mr. Farnol exhibits his lively art, his graceful talent for cloaking his characters in Romance without divesting them of sturdy Reality. The period and place - early nineteenth-century England - which the author has made his particular province, form a lusty, colourful background for the stirring action of his story. It is the story of two cousins, Roland Verinder and Oliver Dale. Roland was an aristocrat, "sired by an aristocrat of proud and ancient lineage," and to him Oliver was a "damned, dunghilly, yokelly yeoman." Oliver was a farmer, descended on his father's side "through a sturdy yeoman ancestry," and to him Roland was a "young, blind cur." We read what happened to them when their rich uncle, cold, aloof Sir Everard Matravers, gave them fifty-two guineas apiece and commanded them "to essay fortune and dare circumstance for one year and a day." How they fight and frolic, laugh and love, with the enchanting characters they meet along the way, makes this a delightfully original tale. Here is a meaty and full-blooded story, in the great picaresque tradition of Sterne (Tristram Shandy) and Smollett (Roderick Random, Humphry Clinker) and Fielding (Tom Jones): exciting, witty and gay.