Review: Indiscretions of Archie

Indiscretions of Archie by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Archie reads a little like a dry-run for Bertie Wooster, without a Jeeves. In other words, he's a prize idiot in much the same way that Empress of Blandings is a prize pig.

He's good-looking, good-natured, and good-hearted, which is why the daughter of a hotel mogul marries him prior to the start of the story, but he has no money, no skills, and no brains, which is why the hotel mogul is less than enthusiastic about his new son-in-law.

He does have a character arc, though. He starts out messing up everything he tries. Then things go wrong for him in ways that mostly aren't his fault for a while, and then things start going right for him by lucky chance more than by his action, and finally he starts doing things that are actually effective. It's like Wodehouse has plotted the book on a clock; the vertical line from 12 to 6 is the division between "things go poorly" and "things go well", and the horizontal line from 3 to 9 is the division between "Archie takes action" and "things just happen".

He was a second lieutenant in World War I, and served courageously, if without any intelligence. In the real world, this would probably have meant that he led a number of men to unnecessary deaths, but this is Wodehouse-world, and the war's horrors are kept at a safe distance. Not only violence, but also sex, is implied but not stated.

Speaking of which, Archie's beloved wife loves Archie dearly, and is attractive in a 1920s way, and does for-the-time-conventional wife things, but she never rises to the status of a fleshed-out character. She's more of a plot device.

There are genuine funny (and occasionally dramatic or touching) moments, though, and the newspaper poem about the pie-eating contest is by itself worth the price of admission. (In my case, the price of admission was dealing with the need for more proofreading in the Project Gutenberg edition.)

If you are a Wodehouse fan, you will probably enjoy this. It's not his greatest work, but it's still entertaining.

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