Review: Young Men in Spats

Young Men in Spats by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Worth reading just for the first Uncle Fred story, "Uncle Fred Flits By," in which that aristocratic menace causes his nephew Pongo Twistleton intense distress by improvising not one, not two, but three false identities in the course of a single afternoon, throws a middle-class family into complete and deserved uproar, and unites a worthy young couple with a generous gesture. But that's not to say that the rest of the book isn't also well up to the usual Wodehouse standard. Several of the stories are about the unfortunate love life of Freddy Widgeon, who always manages to mess things up somehow, and are told in the Drones Club by his friends, identified only as Eggs, Beans and Crumpets. Others are Mr Mulliner stories, which are always clever and funny and involve the unlikely exploits of Mulliner's large extended family.

Sadly, the electronic edition I got from my library has been scanned, run through OCR and then not properly proofread, or more likely not proofread at all; there are a lot of missing punctuation marks (full stops, quotation marks, practically all the apostrophes), "fiat" as an error for "flat," "fid" for "lid," "Camera" for "Carnera" (making a contemporary reference completely incomprehensible if I hadn't checked the Madame Eulalie annotations site), "musk" for "music" and even "sides" for "skies," not to mention surprisingly many instances of "1" that should be "I" and a couple which go the other way. A poor job by the publisher, Cornerstone Digital (= Random House, now Penguin Random House), who have had 15 years to fix this and clearly have not done so. Avoid their edition if you can; it's extremely distracting. I've read a couple of other Wodehouse books from the same imprint, and they were fine, so this one is hopefully an anomaly.

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