Review: The Coming of Bill

The Coming of Bill by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

First of all: not a comedy, although it does start out with some satire on the eugenics movement. In case you're happily unaware, eugenics was a pseudoscientific idea very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially in the US, until the Third Reich took it to its ultimate extreme and it became (rightly) tainted by association. It then quietly faded from mainstream popularity, though it remains a fringe idea, and a subtle, unexamined influence on some other political philosophies, even today. Instead of attributing measurable differences between the rich and the poor, and between different races, to the very different social and economic conditions they lived in, eugenics attributed them (in the absence of any real understanding of genetics much beyond the Mendelian level) to heredity. In other words, the kind of people who wrote books about eugenics believed that the reason they were, in general, healthier and wealthier and less likely to be in jail or mentally challenged than the poor was not that they had lived all their lives in better conditions, but that they were inherently a better kind of people. The appeal of this idea is fairly obvious.

[Plot spoilers follow; I'm putting them in spoiler tags, but without knowing what happens my commentary won't make as much sense.]

(view spoiler)[One of these eugenics cranks is the formidable aunt in this book (Wodehouse did love his formidable aunts, having had several of his own). She decides, on meeting a well-built young man when she runs the man's servant down with her car (and completely denies responsibility), that he ought to marry her beautiful niece, who has turned down a number of young men because she's under the influence of her aunt's eugenic views and believes she's too good for them. They do marry, and have a child together, who (fortunately not from birth, but from about the age of two) comes under another of the aunt's crank theories and is obsessively protected from disease by being kept in a sterile environment and not physically touched. We know today that this is the worst possible way to rear a child, that exposure to germs builds a healthy immune system and helps prevent allergies, and that children require positive physical touch for emotional health, but in those days (1919; there is no sign that World War I is a thing, but that's usual for Wodehouse), these scientific facts were unknown.

Ordinary, sensible people at the time suspected, though, that this was a stupid way to raise a child, and several sensible people in the book (including the child's father) do believe this and conspire to break him out. Meanwhile, his parents' marriage is breaking down, his mother having inherited a large amount of money from her father while her husband was incommunicado in Colombia, failing to make a fortune in gold and almost dying from debilitating fever; when he returns, she has become a silly socialite under the sway of her aunt's crackpot ideas, and he has been sobered by his struggles, and they have very little in common anymore. They eventually separate for a time.

Fortunately, she loses her money right as her husband's staunch friend kidnaps their son to get him away from his artificial existence and perhaps bring the couple back together, which it does; the aunt is discredited, and they return to their previous happiness as a family. (hide spoiler)]

Honestly, most Wodehouse romances would, in reality, have led to marriages like this; the couples get engaged, and then married, on minimal acquaintance, and some of them are intensely unsuited to marry one another, perhaps even to marry anyone (the couple from The Girl on the Boat comes immediately to mind). Wodehouse had never explored this domestic-drama territory previously, and didn't again. There were other writers doing it better, and there were things he himself did much better (namely farcical comedy, of which there are only hints in this book).

We do get the well-drawn supporting characters; Wodehouse's supporting characters, early on, have much more personality than his principals. Steve, the ex-prize fighter, is especially wonderful, and the awful Aunt Lora is also vivid and believable. The couple themselves have, by the nature of the plot, a bit more interiority than his usual romantic leads, but they, and especially the wife, remain more types than individuals. Still, Wodehouse is very good at depicting types, and showing their absurdity, and even if he gets a lot more serious with it in this book than ever before or since, there are still flashes of his wit and facility with language throughout.

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