Review: The Girl on the Boat

The Girl on the Boat by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I came to this book after Uneasy Money , in which the hero and heroine were both instantly likeable people, so it was a disappointment to me that this book's heroine was instantly dislikeable and the hero quickly became so.

For me, real-life attraction requires that I know and like someone, and so when I read a romance I want the people involved to be people I want to cheer for. If they're not, I won't care about whether they succeed in getting together or not; I may actively hope they don't, or reflect that at least the miserable life they'll live together is well deserved. So it was with The Girl on the Boat.

When we meet the girl of the title, whose name is Billie, it's immediately established that she has a nasty, undisciplined little dog who bites people, and who she has named Pinky Boodles. This put me off her at once; her prettiness and red hair meant nothing in the face of these facts. As the book goes on, she gets engaged six times in a three-week period to three different men (she alternates between two of them for a while); her father, hearing about the first three of these occasions, accurately remarks that she shouldn't be allowed to run around loose.

Meanwhile, the apparent hero, Sam - we assume he's the hero because we largely get his viewpoint - is a man who the author openly admits is without a conscience, who practices deception and manipulation at every turn in order to gain his goals (which at least fits him well for his prospective career as a lawyer). It would be cruel and heartless to say that the two of them deserve each other, but I'm still tempted to do so.

The minor characters, to me, were much more interesting. The ugly but good-hearted law clerk Jno. Green, a kind of anti-Uriah Heep; the African hunter Jane Holloway, who wants nothing more than a gentle, fragile husband to look after; Mr Bennett, the hypochondriac American businessman with a love of natural beauty; his manservant, who reads very like Jeeves, down to his style of speaking and his offering of solutions (though he lacks Jeeves' competence in scheming); all of these, to me, had much more potential than the superficial and unpleasant main characters.

This book was originally published in 1920, by which time Wodehouse had begun to write Jeeves and Wooster stories. What he eventually realized, I think, is that when you write a romance, bringing it to a successful conclusion means having to start afresh in the next book with a new couple; but writing an anti-romance, in which the goal is to end up not engaged, is something you can keep going indefinitely with the same central character. Honestly, this romance would have been better as an anti-romance; it ends up feeling like the author is shoving the couple together despite the fact that they are a poor fit for each other or, indeed, anyone else. Not that Wodehouse would be the last author to do that; plenty of authors are still doing it today, more than a century later.

View all my reviews