Review: Mr Mulliner Speaking

Mr Mulliner Speaking by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mr Mulliner is always an entertaining storyteller, recounting some unlikely adventure of one of his vast crowd of relations, and here that includes Roberta "Bobbie" Wickham, that red-headed young menace, who leads her many admirers such a dance that they quickly cease to be admirers; that's the case with three stories in this collection. She's a classic 1920s girl, with shingled hair, who's described here as looking like an unusually good-looking schoolboy who's dressed up in his sister's clothes. She also comes into one of the later Jeeves and Wooster books, where Bertie is foolish enough to fall in love with her but, like her other flames, comes to regret it, and emerges from the experience a sadder and a wiser man. Her problem is that she can't resist a practical joke, and has no respect whatsoever for the truth, and will put a young man through hell without a second thought if she thinks it will be amusing or even just convenient for her. She is, in fact, a pot of poison. However, she is the slightly indirect cause of the wonderful line uttered by her mother's butler when presenting a snake to her current wooer on a salver: "Your serpent, sir."

There are other stories here too, though, often, as Mr Mulliner stories tend to be, about worms turning, or men who have been trying to impress a woman by doing exactly the wrong thing finally finding out that she wanted them to do something else, which came more naturally to them. There's an apparent contradiction in that one of these women is described here as living with an aunt, her parents being implied to be dead, while in Young Men in Spats the same woman's parents are very much alive and central to the story. Do we care? We do not. The ups and downs of these lunatics in pursuit of often inadvisable love are hilarious in the way only Wodehouse can be hilarious.

View all my reviews