Review: Cocktail Time

Cocktail Time by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think Uncle Fred (the Earl of Ickenham) is my favourite Wodehouse character now.

He has the aristocratic amiability of the Earl of Emsworth, but the intelligence of Jeeves, the easy way with all comers of Psmith, the complete lack of shame and scheming nature of Bobbie Wickham or Ukridge (but always in the service of "spreading sweetness and light"), and an ability that's all his own to improvise a role at a moment's notice, with a confidence and commitment that enables him to carry the impersonation off, however unlikely.

In this book, he first knocks his half-brother-in-law Sir Raymond "Beefy" Bastable's top hat off with a Brazil nut using a borrowed catapult from the window of the Drones Club, and then, when his dignified relative later complains about the youth of today as a result of this incident, suggests he write a novel about it to relieve his feelings, and (knowing his man) says that of course he wouldn't be able to, which spurs Sir Raymond on to do exactly that. He writes under a pseudonym, since he wants to stand for Parliament as a Conservative and being known to write novels, at least of this nature, would not go down well with his prospective constituents.

The resulting novel, Cocktail Time, is doomed to the obscurity of so many first novels until a bishop catches his daughter reading some rather racy stuff in Chapter 13, and condemns it from the pulpit. The novel is thus rescued from obscurity, and becomes a bestseller, making it even more important for Sir Raymond to hide his authorship.

Cue shenanigans involving Sir Raymond's useless nephew Cosmo, multiple couples who have various impediments to their marriage, an already-married couple of con artists who try to get in on the money that's now floating around, and, of course, the cheerful manipulations and easy, convincing falsehoods of Uncle Fred. All in the trademark breezy, sparkling Wodehouse prose, combining slang with quotations from a wide range of English literature and giving us a constant scintillation of clever imagery.

Incidentally, this is the book that convinced me that Wodehouse time does actually work the way that Wikipedia says it does, and not the way I had previously theorized. I believed that all of the Wodehouse stories were implicitly set in the inter-war years, in a reasonably self-consistent continuity, even the ones written after World War II, but that the author occasionally dropped an anachronistic contemporary reference to make it easier for his then-present-day readers to relate. But this one reveals - by unambiguous references to World War II - that it's more like Batman or Superman comics, in that the continuity is continually rebooted so that the characters are always about the same age as in previous stories, even though we are now in a different decade. Uncle Fred, for example, is perpetually about 65, even though by this point he should be well into his 90s (having been about 65 at his first appearance in 1935; this book came out in 1958). Also, everything in England, more or less, is as it was when Wodehouse last lived there, before moving overseas permanently for tax reasons in the 1930s. There's reference to change, of course, but it's still the same landscape of country houses and the hereditary aristocracy that we're familiar with from his classic period. So in a way it's, at one and the same time, the 1930s and the year in which the book came out. Better not to think about it too hard.

Above all, these books are lighthearted fun; everyone gets what's coming to them, based on their various characters, as the intricate interlocking of the plot threads works itself out, and the journey to that resolution is always amusing.

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