Review: Piccadilly Jim

Piccadilly Jim by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(Vague spoilers follow, mostly for things that are fairly predictable if you know the author/genre.)

Published during, but set presumably before, World War I, this book is one of the best of the early Wodehouse novels I've read lately. It still has the besetting fault of overuse of coincidence, so that both London and New York feel like villages because key characters keep meeting each other by chance when the plot requires them to, but it's not quite as strained as in some of the others.

Also, the couple (most of these early Wodehouse novels are, or at least prominently include, romances) are more appealing than some of the others I've read. The woman in The Girl on the Boat is silly and flighty, the woman in The Intrusion of Jimmy a blank screen onto which the hero projects his desires without actually knowing her, but this heroine, Ann, is both more developed than the latter and more appealing than the former. She's more like the heroines of Jill the Reckless , The Adventures of Sally or Uneasy Money in that regard.

We meet Ann first, and get our first impressions of the title character through her memories of him acting in a thoughtless and cruel way towards her five years previously; it seems he's a typical young Wodehouse waster, except that he's not amiable. I was braced for a bad time, in which he won Ann's hand somehow despite continuing to be a toad, because most of Wodehouse's characters change very little. However, he did manage a heel-face turn, motivated by someone he cared about (not Ann), relatively early on, and stuck to it.

Along the way, we get some of the complicated, farcical scheming and multiple intersecting plots that Wodehouse was later known for; Jimmy ends up impersonating himself, his father impersonates a butler, aunts and uncles abound, there are criminal and technically-criminal-but-well-intentioned schemes afoot (with a couple more impersonations and some ordinary posing), worms turn, a repellant child (also featured in the earlier book The Little Nugget ) gets his comeuppance, and an exciting time is had by all.

Apparently there were movie versions made in 1919, 1936, and 2004. I haven't seen any of them, but it seems the 1936 movie changed the plot considerably, while the 2004 version was all over the map in terms of the time it was apparently set in and the tone, and lost what is, to me, the saving grace of the novel, Jim's reformation, while also making him a womanizer.

The Project Gutenberg version, which I read, has taken the odd editorial decision to follow the original US edition (rather than the UK edition) in not capitalizing "aunt" and "uncle" when they form part of a name (so, "aunt Nesta" rather than "Aunt Nesta"). This is now considered incorrect usage on both sides of the Atlantic, and it annoyed me mildly throughout. Otherwise, the copy editing was mostly not bad.

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