Review: Blandings Castle and Elsewhere:

Blandings Castle and Elsewhere: by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Prime Wodehouse from his classic period (1920s and 1930s). All of his books are implicitly set in what at least feels like the 20s and 30s, but these short stories were actually written and published in that period, so they don't ever feel (as the later ones occasionally do) that he was imitating himself.

I felt like I'd read at least some if not all of the stories in this book, but I don't seem to have it recorded on Goodreads, so perhaps it was a long time ago, or in a different format. I enjoyed the read in any case.

There are three sections to the book. The first is a set of Blandings Castle stories, with all of the things there are to love about that setting - the dithery, harmless Lord Emsworth, who does manage to stand up to his domineering sister, Lady Constance Keeble, once or twice; his beloved pig, Empress of Blandings; his extremely Scots gardener, with whom he has several battles of wills; and, of course, people pretending to be other people for purposes of romance resolution. It's a lovely place to spend time, and the hijinks are hilarious.

Then there's a story in which that red-haired menace to society Bobbie Wickham plots to free herself from her mother's plan for her to marry a stuffy politician through bare-faced lies and manipulation, in the process setting the politician and an American publisher at each other's throats, each believing that the other is mentally unbalanced. Even though I'm sure I'd read that one before, it had me chuckling.

Finally, there's a set of Mr Mulliner stories about Hollywood, in which Wodehouse genially sends up that very silly place. He had spent some time there himself, trying to get film versions of his musicals made, but the craziness of the studio system had defeated that plan; this is his revenge, if something so basically good-natured can be called revenge. Mr Mulliner, of course, is an elderly raconteur in the bar-parlour of a pub called the Angler's Rest, and usually makes some distant relative the protagonist of his stories, which immediately alerts you that these are probably tall tales. They evoke an exaggerated version of Hollywood in the period of Prohibition (the existence of which contributes to the plot of a couple of the stories).

There's a running theme, as there often is in Wodehouse, of formidable women (probably modelled on his aunts) and diffident men who sometimes grow a spine, or at least manage to give that impression, and either stand up to or stand up for the women. Sometimes, though, it's the intelligent, ruthless women who triumph over foolish men. I don't want to give the idea that it's a constant battle of the sexes, though; men and women are allies as well as adversaries, often against their stiff and unsympathetic elders. There's generally conflict in a Wodehouse story, and if it's not always resolved by the determined actions of the protagonist - if there are sometimes fortunate events that bring an unlooked-for resolution - it's still always a fun ride, because he somehow manages to engage the reader's sympathies for even the most trivial dilemmas of his most foolish characters.

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Review: Whisky Galore

Whisky Galore by Compton Mackenzie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My late father was a fan, though the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that he was a fan of the film (which I haven't seen) rather than the book. If he'd liked the book, we probably would have had a copy, and I would have read it years ago.

I was not a fan of the book particularly. I listened to the abridged BBC version read by Stanley Baxter, who does an excellent job; other reviewers suggest that it needed abridgement, and I probably got a better version than the wordier original. I certainly didn't feel like it needed to be longer.

It's very slice-of-life. The first part consists of various people on a Scottish island during World War II moaning about how all of their problems would be solved if only there wasn't a shortage of whisky. Then a ship carrying whisky wrecks nearby (with no loss of life), the islanders "salvage" the cargo, and all their problems are, in fact, solved. The rabbity school principal, with a few drams on board, finally stands up to his mother, the English sergeant-major gets to have an engagement party and to fix his wedding date, and everyone else is, by Scottish standards at least, in a good and hopeful mood, apart from the man whose daughters tipped out all his whisky to hide it from the excise inspector.

I found it mildly amusing at best.

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Review: The Mystery of the Peacock’s Eye

The Mystery of the Peacock’s Eye by Brian Flynn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This author appears to have loaded a shotgun with punctuation and discharged it at close range into his manuscript. He should have included fewer dashes, fewer hyphens, fewer exclamation marks and a lot more commas (some of them in places that he uses dashes, some in places where he puts no punctuation at all). Proof, if it were needed, that some publishers a century ago sometimes put out badly edited work, just like many publishers today.

Neither the amateur detective nor the police inspector has a lot of personality, and I kept confusing them, because they both have names starting with B.

A bookie is introduced at one point as a minor character. Before we even meet him, the author alludes to his maid's appearance as indicating that she's Jewish. Then he similarly indicates that the bookie himself is Jewish. After that, he points out his Jewishness, and then after stereotyping him two or three times, concludes by making the point (in case you had missed it) that he's Jewish. If this isn't quite antisemitism, it's a close cousin to it, especially since his ethnic origin has nothing to do with anything.

The plot doesn't make a ton of sense. It's sometimes unclear which parts were coincidence and which parts were planning, especially since (view spoiler)[the murderer steals a suitcase from a luggage trolley at a hotel, possibly at random, so that the victim won't be identified immediately to give him time to do something I've forgotten, and registers the victim at a different hotel under the name of the suitcase's owner, who, as it happens, is acquainted with the victim, even though neither of them are anywhere near their hometown. The victim then apparently signs in under that name, which can't be accounted for by anything other than some prearrangement with her that the resolution of the plot never mentions and that isn't especially plausible (hide spoiler)]. The twist is unusual, but I don't think the author played very fair with the reader in leading up to it. And one of the two motives for the crime is muddied by a backstory that comes almost straight out of one of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

For me, it was a bit of a miss, and I won't be reading more from this author.

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