Review: A Man of Means

A Man of Means by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Early Wodehouse (first published 1916), with a collaborator, but showing much of what was later to be the distinctive Wodehouse comic style. Even the scheming butler at the end sounds like Jeeves, though he pulls something that Jeeves might not have.

It's the story of a deeply undistinguished nebbish of a clerk who begins the book by asking his employer to lower his salary, since once it hits 150 pounds (per year, presumably) he will have to get married to his landlord's daughter. Being of weak and conventional character, he has got engaged to her despite not at all wanting to get married, because it seems to be expected of him.

He then, in the first of a number of coincidences, wins a large amount of money, and takes one of his few decisive actions in the whole book in order to escape the marriage.

This is a collection of six stories, each of which puts him in a different comic situation and (usually) extracts him from it by luck. For the first three stories, his capital increases each time, and several times he again finds himself expected to marry someone he doesn't really want to (who is after his money; he has no other perceptible attractions, or indeed qualities) because of his weakness of character.

Now, a main character who lacks agency (and personality, and much of a spine) and a plot driven by coincidence are usually fatal flaws for me, but somehow these stories make it work. The comic situations are so absurd, and the secondary characters so entertainingly depicted, that, like the little boy in Princess Bride with the kissing scene, I didn't mind so much.

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