Review: The Intrusion of Jimmy

The Intrusion of Jimmy by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I really, really wish that early Wodehouse had used some other tool for progressing his plots apart from blatant coincidence (which, in narration, he justifies as "fate" favouring the hero). Protagonist agency, for example, would be an excellent choice.

But that isn't the main reason this gets three stars from me. That would be the love interest.

It's a classic love-at-first-sight scenario for the otherwise sensible and capable Jimmy, who spots Molly on a transatlantic liner. She's in first class and he's in second, so they can't even interact; he just stares at her, probably a little creepily, over the railing that separates them.

Then, by a series of unlikely events, he participates in a home invasion of her father's house, and meets her again, creating a misunderstanding in the process that will come back to bite him later.

And then, as by now I was expecting, out of absolutely nowhere he meets her again in a completely different country, just walks round the corner and finds that she's staying at the same English country house, by massive coincidence. And now they actually start to have conversations, though not very extensive ones; not that they really need to, from his perspective, because he already knows he's in love with this woman who he's spoken to once, briefly, and knows absolutely nothing about.

And we don't know much about her either. We're told that she's a determined, independent, capable woman, but what we're shown is her being bullied, first by her father, and then by Jimmy, into courses of action that she resists ineffectually. The first course of action is obviously a bad idea; we're supposed to think that the second is not, but I didn't think that.

So, for me, the romance side was a bit of a dud. The complications around it, though, showed hints of the intricate plots that Wodehouse would later perfect, rife with misunderstandings, agendas, people learning to stand up for themselves, twists, ironies, idiocies, and concealed identities.

A couple of historical notes that struck me. One was the way in which it was just taken as read that New York cops were hopelessly corrupt on a massive scale. The other was the use of the expression "because of reasons," which I had thought had a recent origin. ( The Girl on the Boat includes a scene in which a young New York girl is addressed as "queen," also a current usage a hundred years later.)

I'm finding these early Wodehouse books a mixed bag. I haven't yet read one that is good enough to go on my Best of the Year list, though there are some I've enjoyed more than others. This, though, despite the more intricate plotting, falls down in a couple of key areas and isn't a favourite.

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