Review: Uncle Fred in the Springtime:

Uncle Fred in the Springtime: by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Uncle Fred (Lord Ickenham) is equipped by nature with the skills, personality and moral outlook of a successful con man, but by heredity with the rank of an earl in the peerage of England. Firmly instructed by his countess that he is not to leave his country estate while she's away, he of course nips up to London almost immediately, and becomes involved in the money troubles of his nephew and the romantic troubles of his niece. The obvious solution to these problems is for him to impersonate Sir Roderick Glossop, the prominent loony doctor, at the Earl of Emsworth's Blandings Castle. Blandings (as one of the characters makes note of in the course of the story) seems to attract imposters like other houses attract mice.

Published in 1939, and unusual in that it has a couple of references to the existence of World War I, which Wodehouse usually ignored; with the Second World War looming, perhaps he couldn't quite manage that. But it's still set in his classic idealized inter-war world of country estates, harmless deceptions and farcical events. The pig Empress of Blandings gets stolen (of course), the Efficient Baxter literally gets egg on his face, young love goes through vicissitudes and finally prospers, people who need money end up with it by complicated means, and the whole thing sparkles with genial language play covering Shakespeare, the Bible, Keats, Tennyson and Dickens, among other literary references, mingled with both British and American slang of the period.

It's a Wodehouse novel, in short, and a good one, though not, for me, one of the very greatest. I lost track of some of the convolutions of the plot through not being sufficiently rested when I read it, but since a Wodehouse plot always works out more or less the same way, I was confident that I'd end up all right, along with the deserving characters, and that no real harm would come to anyone.

The edition I read could have done with a couple of additional commas (perhaps it was set from the edition which notoriously removed too many of them), and has "soups-willing" where it should be "soup-swilling," but is otherwise generally well edited.

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