Review: Bachelors Anonymous

Bachelors Anonymous by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is another one of those Wodehouse books where the same few people keep coincidentally bumping into each other, because London (or, in other books, New York) is apparently a village with about 20 total inhabitants. I tend to blame the fact that a lot of his early work was in musical comedy, where you have to keep the cast tight, and sometimes this is how you do it. Most of the books where he pulls this kind of rannygazoo are early ones, but he wrote this one in 1975, seven decades into his career. So that's a strike against it, for me at least; I don't like seeing the author's hand too obviously adjusting things.

The story itself, though, is as sparkling and full of comedic ups and downs as I could wish, so I partially forgive the coincidences that drive it. The central couple are appealing, hapless and deserving of a happy ending, the interfering lawyer Mr Trout is hilarious, and if the film magnate and the actress are stock characters, and the nurse and the hero's friend, the woman detective and the indigent baronet get little development, they're still adequate for the roles they play. I didn't fully believe the efficient and matter-of-fact detective's motivation in wanting to marry the baronet (purely to get the title of Lady Warner, even though the baronet was, as she was well aware, a complete no-hoper), but everything else was at least at the usual Wodehouse level of plausible.

Trout, a member of Bachelors Anonymous (a support group along the lines of Alcoholics Anonymous, which helps its members - and non-members, not necessarily at their request - resist matrimony), is also the lawyer of Ivor Llewellyn, the much-married motion picture magnate, and after Llewellyn's fifth divorce promises to help him avoid getting married again. The hero is hired as a kind of bodyguard to help him, but is himself newly in love; Trout looks on this development with disapproval, and interferes disastrously, though not all of the main romance's vicissitudes come from his actions.

I was amused to see that one of the other bachelors was named Fred Bassett, and wondered whether Wodehouse was familiar with the comic strip about the dog of that name, which had been running for 12 years at the time; quite possibly not, since it ran in the Daily Mail, and even if Wodehouse had been living in the UK he probably wouldn't have read that paper.

The Everyman editions are good ones, well edited and cleanly typeset (though in a typeface a few points smaller than I would prefer), but I find the cover illustration style unattractive. I did spot one small typo, a full stop that should have been a comma, but otherwise it was impeccable.

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