Something Fresh

How do you describe P. G. Wodehouse when he is so commonly used to describe other authors? Having read a number of Jeeves and Wooster stories, I'm trying out another series from him that I've not read anything from before, but which takes place in the same “universe” as Jeeves and Wooster, and this was absolutely raging good fun. Wodehouse is fast becoming one of my favourite authors.

Mr Peters, an American multi-millionaire, has lost a precious scarab and he suspects Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle to have stolen it. He secretly puts out a large reward, and it is up to Joan Valentine, posing as lady's-maid to his daughter (and Joan's good friend) Aline Peters, and Ashe Marson, posing as his own valet, to try and retrieve it from Emsworth's library during a house party. Aline is engaged to Lord Emsworth's son the Hon Freddie Threepwood, who has also had a past dalliance with Joan Valentine and has compromising letters with her, whom he hires private detective R. Jones to retrieve. In the middle of it all, Emsworth's secretary, the efficient Baxter, is convinced Marson isn't who he says he is, and is determined to catch him red-handed stealing the scarab.

If this all sounds confusing to you - don't worry, that is the intended effect. Wodehouse is absolutely masterful at creating these situations more tangled up than a ball of yarn that the cat's got at, but then resolving them so neatly and satisfactorily without even hitting 300 pages. His characters go stumbling about, tripping each other up, and the mess only just gets worse and worse until suddenly in the last 50 or so pages, Wodehouse pulls on what looks like a dead knot as if it was going to sink to rock bottom, and it all magically untangles itself. It's difficult to untangle this convoluted of a plot without deus ex machina or employing cheap tricks or shortcuts, but Wodehouse has not failed in all the stories I've read from him so far.

But what's perhaps more impressive than his plot machinations is his writing. Wodehouse is a brilliantly satirical and hilarious writer. Take when Ashe Marson manages to convince Mr Peters to start exercising and diet in order to be healthier, Mr Peters does so but asks Marson to read to him from a cook-book as a bedtime story so that he can vicariously relive his favourite dishes.

In [Mr Peters's] affliction it soothed him to read of the Hungarian Goulash and Escalloped Brains and to remember that he, too, the nut-and-grass eater of to-day, had once dwelt in Arcadia.

Or when George Emerson, in love with Aline Peters, buys food from the nearby village for her because he imagines that her wan and pale looks are caused by the paltry diet that she has suffered to undertake along with her father's new health regime, as a sort of moral support. He buys a commendable quantity of food and walks five miles back to Blandings Castle.

It was [at the Castle] that his real troubles began, and the quality of his love was tested. The walk, to a heavily-laden man, was bad enough, but as nothing compared with the ordeal of smuggling the cargo up to his bedroom. Superman as he was, George was alive to the delicacy fo the situation. One cannot convey food and drink to one's room at a strange house without, if detected, seeming to cast a slur on the table of the host. It was if one who carries despatches through an enemy's lines that George took cover, emerged from cover, dodged, ducked, and ran; and the moment when he sank down on his bed, the door locked behind him, was one of the happiest of his life.

I love it. Irreverent humour is everything I live for and Wodehouse dishes it to us in spades.

I also want to specially commend the audiobook narrator for my edition, Jonathan Cecil, who really highlights the absurdity of Wodehouse's characters and plays them with so much colour and flavour. I'd give an entire star just for his performance!