Review: Barmy in Wonderland

Barmy in Wonderland by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If there was one thing Wodehouse knew well, it was the New York theatre scene, since his first great success, before he became a popular novelist, was writing lyrics for New York musicals. He once had five running on Broadway at once, and claimed that his royalties from the song he contributed to Showboat would keep him in whisky and cigarettes for life.

This isn't the musical theatre, though, but the "legitimate" theatre. Cyril Fotheringay-Phipps, known to his friends in the Drones Club as "Barmy" because, even in that dim-witted environment, he stood out as particularly slow, loses his job as a hotel clerk thanks to the drunken shenanigans of a Hollywood actor who is in New York to perform in a play. Through a series of events involving a supposed fortune teller and a young woman who Barmy thinks is his destiny, Barmy ends up investing a legacy he recently got from his grandfather into the play that his friend is performing in.

There follow confusion, conflict, drama (more offstage than on), the looming threat of failure and some actually rather cunning work by Barmy, who isn't always quite as green as he is cabbage-looking, ably assisted by friends and well-wishers. It's as bright and sparkling as a good musical, like all of Wodehouse's stuff, and if the Hollywood actor sounds a bit like every English-literature-and-the-Bible-quoting smart young fellow in these books, well, it's an amusing way to sound.

Even though this was published in 1952 and refers to the contemporary actor Gregory Peck, whose career began in 1939, it's still, somehow, implicitly set in the pre-war world of Wodehouse. Barmy is still a young man, for one thing, as he was in the pre-war Drones stories, and a young woman refers to the Volstead Act (the Prohibition law), which might have been on her mother's mind a generation earlier but would hardly have been brought up by someone who was young in 1952. In fact, the book is based on a play by Wodehouse's friend George S. Kaufman, written in 1925. (Wodehouse split the royalties with Kaufman 50/50, in contrast to the plot point late in the novel where a novella writer has to sue for a share in the proceeds of the play, which was apparently based on his work without permission.) And yet it feels entirely Wodehousian from start to finish, even if nobody pretends to be someone else.

It's a cheerful short novel, and I solidly recommend it.

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