Very Good, Jeeves!

Do I really need to introduce Jeeves? If you haven't read it, read it. If you've read it, you already know why this has such mass appeal, even 90 years after it was first publshed.

Most of the Jeeves short stories (and arguably most of Wodehouse's humourous works) follow a certain formulae: our narrator, Bertie Wooster, gets into some entanglement or mess because he's bungling and silly. His valet, Jeeves, swoops in to save the day through some roundabout method that has everything put back into its place with oddly satisfying precision, and along the way he always manages to fulfill his own agenda without Bertie even realising it, like finding a way to get rid of a particular clothing item that Jeeves disapproves of, or to resume a trip that Bertie had earlier cancelled and which Jeeves had been keen on going.

Wodehouse's humour is legendary. It's honestly a pretty scathing reflection on the careless superficiality of the British upper class of the 1930's, but it's still hilarious to read today. With such names as “Cyril Bassington-Bassington”, you just can't take a lot of things seriously with Wodehouse, nor should you be. Bertie is your regular air-headed childish foppish gentleman who relies entirely on Jeeves, who is in a conventionally lower middle-class position as valet, to run his life and solve his problems because he simply doesn't have the mental capacity to do so. As the reader, you are on the outside seeing Jeeves literally twisting Bertie around his little finger, and Bertie is happy to let him. Not only Bertie, but even his upper class foppish friends or his dragon-like aunts have come to rely entirely on the indubitable competence of Jeeves.

Slightly unrelated to the book, but it is testament to the perfection of the casting choices of Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster and Stephen Fry as Jeeves that I read the entire book with both their voices in my head. I intend to go catch up on some of their Jeeves episodes, which are no less iconic than the stories themselves.