Review: Summer Lightning

Summer Lightning by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A re-read for me; I have the old Penguin paperback (not the exact one shown above this review), and have read it several times. I don't love the Blandings stories quite as much as the Jeeves stories, partly because their third-person narration isn't as deep into voice, but I do enjoy this one a lot.

The Blandings stories often feature someone masquerading as someone else, and here it's Sue Brown, a chorus girl who's engaged to Lord Emsworth's nephew Ronnie. Sue is pretending to be a Miss Myra Schoonmaker, who Ronnie's mother Lady Julia Fish is encouraging him to marry. The book is brim-full of memorable characters: the vague and benevolent pig-obsessed Lord Emsworth; his sister and hostess the redoubtable Lady Constance Keeble; the repellent and unethical detective Percy Pilbeam; the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, Lord Emsworth's disreputable brother, who has written a book of Reminiscences of his exploits in the Naughty Nineties that the companions of his youth, now solid and respectable, do not want published under any circumstances; the Efficient Baxter, Lord Emsworth's hapless former secretary, who keeps being placed in circumstances that make him look unhinged; and Beach, the dignified butler, who can nevertheless be prevailed upon by the younger members of the family to aid and abet shenanigans against his better judgement.

Unfortunately, three of the main characters, whose romances drive much of the plot, aren't as memorable as many of the minor characters, being Wodehouse types taken pretty much from stock and without distinct personalities of their own. The three I refer to are Ronnie Fish, a short, pink, jealous member of the Drones Club who doesn't have any discernable qualities other than the ones I have just listed, and yet has inexplicably won the level-headed and likeable Sue Brown's devotion; and the would-be couple Millicent Threepwood and Hugo Carmody. I sometimes had difficulty telling Hugo and Ronnie apart, honestly, they are so undifferentiated, and Millicent is also colourless, just an interchangeable Wodehouse young woman.

Still, the plot is farcical, the language is Wodehousian, and overall it's a good time, even if three of the lovers do put the bland in Blandings.

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Review: Right Ho, Jeeves

Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Depending on your reading order, this is the first novel-length Jeeves and Wooster, and the extra space really gives the author scope to complicate matters hilariously.

It features Bertie's one likeable aunt, Aunt Dahlia, who seems by her introduction in this book to be an aunt by marriage, but later on is portrayed consistently as a blood relative. Bertie is also very fond of her daughter (his cousin) Angela, and spends a lot of the book trying to repair the tiff between her and his old school chum Tuppy Glossop. Much more importantly, though, he's trying to get his other old school chum Gussie Fink-Nottle to get up the ginger to propose to the wet, droopy Madeline Bassett, not least because, while pleading Gussie's case to her, he accidentally leads her to the conclusion that he (Bertie) loves her himself, and if she doesn't marry Gussie there's a risk she'll fall back on Bertie. He regards this fate with horror, but his chivalric code prevents him from clearing up the misunderstanding; he'd rather end up married to a woman who he can't stand and who has made it clear to him that she loves someone else than insult her by letting her know that she's not at all his type.

From this unpromising and, on the face of it, unconvincing premise, not only one but several hilarious books unfold (I'm behind on my reviews, and I'm currently reading The Mating Season , in which Bertie is once again straining every nerve to prevent the Gussie/Madeline romance from busting up and leaving him next in line).

I think of this as peak Wodehouse, full of farcical incidents, misunderstandings, deceptions, stratagems, and looming disaster of the broken-engagement or unparallelled-French-chef-resigning level of seriousness - yet they somehow feel like matters of life and death, as if I'm reading a (completely hilarious) thriller in which the fate of nations hangs in the balance.

The incident in which Gussie, who normally only drinks orange juice, gets thoroughly drunk before going to give the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School is one of the best things Wodehouse ever wrote, which makes it one of the funniest passages in the English language. Not only what happens, but how it's described, is just one long riot from beginning to end. And Jeeves' schemes to resolve the complicated situation are things of beauty in themselves.

Very highly recommended, and it makes the Platinum tier of my Best of the Year for 2022.

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Review: Very Good, Jeeves!

Very Good, Jeeves! by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Third in a series of fix-up novels that are really collections of connected shorts. Some of the incidents from these stories are referenced again later in the series, such as the occasion when Bertie is finagled into addressing a girls' school (with predictably disastrous results). Several of them involve Tuppy Glossop, who in the next volume will be the recipient of Bertie's help, but here is mostly an antagonist.

There's a good deal of the usual knockabout shenanigans, impersonations, deceptions successful and otherwise, disapproving members of the older generation, and the course of true love not running smooth and having to be helped over the bumpy bits by Jeeves (providing the reliable plan) and Wooster (providing the unreliable execution).

By this point, Wodehouse had spent a good deal of time with these characters and had their voice and their business down to a science, to the point that he embarked on a novel-length treatment next time around which, for me, is one of the high points of his whole large output and of English literature in general. The more broken-up short story form can't rise to quite the same heights as a really sustained farce, but this collection is still full of varied hilarity and, if you like this sort of thing at all, you will probably enjoy it considerably.

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Review: Carry On, Jeeves

Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like The Inimitable Jeeves , this is a fix-up of connected short stories, rather than a novel as such, which does reduce the momentum of it somewhat; it's a series of scrapes rather than one long, complicated scrape. Each one is individually fun, though, and for variety, most of them are set in New York, where Bertie is escaping the consequences of disappointing his Aunt Agatha.

Especially of note is the character of Rockmeteller (Rocky) Todd, a free-verse poet who writes exhortations to young men to live a life of action and, by selling them to magazines, funds his preferred lifestyle of almost complete idleness in the wilds of Long Island. When his aunt, who provides him with an allowance, comes to New York and insists on enjoying the night life in his company, he is put through the wringer until Jeeves comes through with the rescue.

As always, Bertie is ever ready to help out a pal in need, and undergoes tribulations in the service of that goal. For me, that's a big part of why I like reading about him: yes, he's an idiot; yes, he's the very definition of the Idle Rich; but he will strain every sinew and take any risk to help a friend who's in trouble. Not, of course, without complaining about it bitterly to us, the readers, but usually with good grace towards the person concerned.

These early stories are often written to a formula, which involves a coolness between Bertie and Jeeves over some ill-advised purchase of an item of clothing or an accessory that Jeeves doesn't think is appropriate. When Jeeves gets Bertie (or a friend) out of a scrape, part of his reward is that the offending article is disposed of. Later on - I'm behind on my reviews, so I've read several more books after this one - that formula is less prominent, perhaps because, while it functions well in a short-story plot, at novel length the persistence of coolness between the two would derail things a bit.

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Review: The Inimitable Jeeves

The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Embarking on a Jeeves reread in order (I later discovered that there were books I hadn't read at all, which is a wonderful discovery). The first couple of outings are what were later known as "fix-ups," a series of short stories with continuity between them, loosely pulled together into something resembling a novel; so they don't get as much opportunity to build up a really tangled mess for Jeeves to extract Bertie from, but they contain the seeds of the later greatness.

Bertie's sense of noblesse oblige requires him to help old school friends like the very susceptible Bingo Little out of their romantic scrapes, and here he repeatedly does so, always ably supported (though sometimes used as a cat's paw) by the brilliant Jeeves. Along the way, we encounter other memorable characters like Bertie's formidable Aunt Agatha, Bingo's blustering uncle, and the many unsuitable love interests Bingo falls for.

It interested me to note that the older characters in Wodehouse speak in the formal periods of Victorian literature, which suggests that the answer to the question I've long considered, about whether Victorian literature in some way represents the way people actually talked at the time, may be "yes".

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Review: The Thin Man

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm a fan of the 1934 film version of this novel, starring Myrna Loy (playing against type as a playful, rather naïve heiress rather than a vamp) and William Powell. I'm also a fan of the strong, spare noir style. Turns out, though, that I'm not much of a fan of this book.

The film follows the book's plot reasonably closely for a film adaptation, and the characters are largely similar - except for Nick Charles, the detective, who narrates the book. Powell's movie Charles is lighthearted and hilarious; the book Charles is grim, hard-boiled and serious. Both versions have a drinking problem, but the movie plays it for laughs.

There's also such a thing, for me anyway, as a noir style being too spare and unornamented. A lot of the narration is bare and literal, just saying what people did and said, and there's clearly subtext going on, but we're given few clues to what anyone thinks or feels and are left to interpret as best we can. All of the characters, definitely including Charles, possibly excepting his wife Nora, are reprehensible to some degree, and the family at the heart of the mystery are thoroughly dysfunctional, not in the amusing way of the film but in a despair-of-human-nature way.

Despite the style usually not wasting a single word, there's an extended quotation partway through from a book about an incident of cannibalism, given as a response to the ghoulish teenage son's inquiry to Charles about the phenomenon; it doesn't really add anything, certainly not enough to justify the word count that's devoted to it.

However, this is definitely a master of his craft creating a work of enduring significance, and my three-star rating reflects its mismatch with my taste, not its quality.

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Review: Mr. Standfast

Mr. Standfast by John Buchan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Considered as an action novel, this is pretty good, despite the author's usual fault of getting his hero out of trouble using lucky coincidence. I was also genuinely moved at the end.

The problem is with all the bits that aren't an action novel. Both Buchan and his hero Hannay are narrow-minded, party-line-hewing early-20th-century British bigots for the most part, and given to pontificating predictably, though there's a positive presentation of a conscientious objector. There's a cursory gesture towards a romance plot, in which the love interest, we're told, is clever and courageous and resourceful, but it's a decal; we never see her do anything to justify this, and in a crisis she's completely passive, with no plan, and has to be rescued.

The idea that a major-general, who seems to have genuine military ability despite not being a career soldier, might be pulled out of the war at a critical stage in order to perform espionage, even though most of his previous success in that field appears to have been more by good luck than good management, is also difficult to swallow. Yes, despite his protestations that he's not courageous, he clearly is, and he does perform some effective feats of bravery and physical endurance, but he's not actually the best man for the job, especially since he's known to the opposition.

A mixed bag overall. Decent at being a thriller, but otherwise not so hot.

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