Review: Laughing Gas

Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm reasonably sure I've read this one before, but long enough ago that it was a fresh experience.

It's another standalone Wodehouse, technically in the Drones Club series, though that is a very loose series linked only by the fact that the stories' main characters are members of that frivolous club. This one, Reggie, has recently inherited an earldom that he wasn't expecting (a number of relatives had died in the necessary order), and he's been sent off by the family lawyer as the new "head of the family" to lay down the law to his alcoholic Cousin Egbert, who has got engaged to someone in Hollywood, of all ghastly places.

On the way to Los Angeles by train, he meets (by what seems to him like a coincidence, but clearly is planned on her part) a popular film actress who's as fake as a rubber chicken, but takes him in completely. Drones Club members are not noted for their intelligence. He refuses to hear a word against her from anyone, including Ann, his former fiancée, who turns out to be his cousin's current fiancée.

People swapping bodies was a staple of pulp fiction at the time, no doubt inspired by F. Anstey's Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers (1882). The book Freaky Friday, now the best-known example thanks to the movie (which recently got a sequel), drew on Anstey, and here, so does Wodehouse, introducing a rare supernatural element that never gets explained - because it's a plot device, and not at all the point of the story. While under the laughing gas of the title for dental surgery, Reggie accidentally swaps bodies with Joey Cooley, the child star, who is having a similar procedure next door, and shenanigans ensue.

The weedy Joey, now in an adult body with the build and experience of an amateur boxer and a face like a gorilla, goes around punching people in the snoot who he has long felt deserved it. Reggie, on the other hand, has to cope with Joey's unenviable situation: he lives with the head of the studio and the studio head's sister, who can't stand Joey at any price and makes no secret of it, and he also inherits Joey's youthful enemies.

But what he does discover is that Ann, who looks after Joey, is genuinely fond of the child and a good person, and that April June, the film star he had fallen in love with, is the viper that everyone has warned him about. Meanwhile, Cousin Egbert believes Joey is some kind of hallucination brought on by alcohol, and is drawn as a result to the temperance preaching of the Temple of the New Dawn. (There's a bit of tongue-in-cheek Wodehouse playfulness in that the Temple's services are described as if it's an Anglican church, with matins, evensong, and prayer books, though he certainly would have known that a nondenominational church in Los Angeles would have none of those things.)

Because this is Wodehouse, everything is sorted out in the end, and people get their comeuppance or their reward according to what they deserve. But it's the journey that matters, and it's full of reversals and comedic moments ranging from slapstick to sophisticated wordplay.

I will note that I've given it my "casual-racism" tag, though I hesitated whether to do so or not. By the standards of the 1930s, it's not virulently racist, not like some other popular books such as John Buchan's or I Pose, but it's more racist than Wodehouse usually gets. The racial stereotypes are undermined in a couple of cases, and yet the attitudes and language are there, and if this is something you're extra sensitive to, it would be best to avoid this particular Wodehouse.

View all my reviews