Review: Uneasy Money

Uneasy Money by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been reading a few of the Wodehouse books from his early New York period (roughly 100 years ago), and if they have a fault it's that, in a city of four million people, the same half-dozen keep bumping into one another by pure chance, at times, and in ways, that transparently serve the progression of the plot.

This particular book has that fault to an especially high degree, but it doesn't have many others.

Detailed plot summary follows in the spoiler tags:

(view spoiler)[The hero, Lord Dawlish (who everyone sooner or later ends up calling Bill, because he's one of Nature's Bills) is a genial, generous, and deeply honest fellow who, although his ancestors have lost all the family's wealth and he doesn't have a great deal of money, is always willing to "lend" a friend a bit to get by on. He would be quite happy with his life except that his beautiful fiancee, Claire, is a querulous and ambitious woman who would like him to be much wealthier, so that he can keep her in the style to which she feels she ought to be accustomed, and so that she doesn't have to live with her mother and her noisy little brother.

By one of the coincidences that litter the plot, he inherits a lot of money from a chance acquaintance, just as Claire has gone to America to advance her acting career. He feels, though, that the money ought to have gone to the man's niece, Elizabeth, and goes to America himself (using a different name) in order to see if she's a deserving recipient, first writing to offer her half, which she indignantly rejects as "charity".

In America, by another coincidence, he meets her brother, who by coincidence finds out who he is, and invites him down to their place to stay, intending to marry Bill to his sister and reclaim the money that way. The thing is, though, that Bill and Elizabeth get on extraordinarily well from the start. But Bill is not the kind of man who will be untrue to Claire, despite the fact that Elizabeth is a better person in every respect, and convinces himself that he is not in love with Elizabeth but with Claire.

However, by coincidence, Claire saw him dancing (as a matter of passing social obligation) in New York with a friend of a friend of Elizabeth's brother's, and has decided that this means she can entertain the advances of a dull but wealthy automobile manufacturer that her friend Polly is trying to set her up with. Despite this magnate's lack of forwardness in courting her, they eventually become engaged, before Claire has formally broken off the engagement with Bill or even communicated with him (and also before his letter advising her of the inheritance reaches her, since she hadn't bothered telling him she was going to America and it has to pass through multiple hands to get to her).

By coincidence, where Elizabeth lives is the same part of Long Island where Polly's summer home is, and Claire and the manufacturer are her guests. By coincidence, just after getting engaged to the industrialist, Claire meets Bill, and breaks off their engagement on the excuse of the dance partner.

There then follows a great deal of drama and running about involving Polly's pet monkey, a plot device which leads Elizabeth's brother to sobriety (under the impression that it's illusory), and is the occasion for Bill and Elizabeth getting together finally, and for Claire (who has now received Bill's letter about the inheritance) having an excuse to break the engagement to the industrialist, in the hope of going back to Bill. Bill has seen through her now, and tells her politely that he loves someone else. But she takes the occasion to attempt to sow doubt in him about Elizabeth's motives, suggesting that she is only after the money.

Claire then wins back the unfortunate industrialist, against his better judgement, which we know will be a bad outcome for him. But Elizabeth, whose brother told her who Bill is before they confessed their love for one another, adamantly insists that they can't build a marriage with the doubt that Claire has raised sitting between them, even though Bill doesn't believe it for a moment. Unable to convince her, he leaves by train.

By coincidence, the lawyer (a friend of Bill's) who originally told all of them about the will turns up just after Bill has left, and tells Elizabeth of a later will, in which the money is left to her. She goes in pursuit of Bill, and manages to get on the same train, and they reconcile and go on to their HEA.
(hide spoiler)]

Apart from the over-reliance on coincidence, it's a pleasant, sweet romance, with the right degree and number of trials, two appealing people as the couple, a truly nasty alternative love interest in the mercenary Claire, and sound work on the minor characters. This is from the period where Wodehouse was doing relatively straightforward plots and drawing his characters a bit less from stock, where the language and the humour were already enjoyable, but not as foregrounded as they would be later on, and where there were real economic and emotional stakes for the characters and some serious emotional beats and genuine conflicts.

The Project Gutenberg text is in good shape, and all in all it encourages me to continue reading these early Wodehouse works. None of them have quite risen onto my Best of the Year list, but a couple have been close, and this is one.

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