Sunday 22 August 2021

Review: Uneasy Money

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)

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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