Review: Mike and Psmith

Mike and Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Early Wodehouse (1909), in the period where he was still writing school stories. Judging by this sample, though, even his school stories weren't the cliched, tropish school stories he occasionally references within this book, but novels that an adult can enjoy over a hundred years later.

It's hard to imagine much that's more trivial than the adventures of a teenage cricketer from a privileged background in early-20th-century Britain, who resents being taken away from a medium-sized public school and put in a small one because of his poor academic performance, and refuses to play cricket there out of pique. And yet Wodehouse demonstrates the skill he was later to use with the similarly trivial (and often self-imposed) struggles of Bertie Wooster to make those struggles important to the reader because they're important to the character, and the character is, for all his faults, likeable. (Not that Mike is the kind of prize idiot Bertie is; he's just a decent solid chap of simple character.)

Playing a kind of proto-Jeeves role is Psmith (the P is silent, and he has newly adopted it to distinguish himself from other Smiths), a young man sent to the same school as the protagonist Mike for similar reasons; he has performed poorly at his previous school, in his case Eton. They form an immediate friendship, and Psmith quickly demonstrates his ability to charm and manipulate adults and fellow teenagers alike. He's a kind of anti-Ukridge. Ukridge is a scruffy confidence trickster who's always complaining about his hard life and whose grand schemes for his own enrichment at the expense of others never work out; Psmith, on the other hand, is impeccably dressed, urbane, unfazed, always spinning some line or other, and his schemes, which tend to be for the benefit of his friends as much as himself or more, succeed beautifully in a way that's enjoyable to watch.

The minor characters, as always with Wodehouse, are a delight, and this lacks the besetting flaw of a lot of other early Wodehouse books: the plot doesn't rely excessively on coincidence to make it progress. This is probably because it's set in the closed environment of a boarding school, which was, apparently, the reason J.K. Rowling chose a boarding school as her setting: you can make sure the characters keep interacting with each other without resorting to coincidence.

The events are trivial enough that I'm not quite prepared to put it on my Best of the Year list, but I am giving that distinction to the sequel, Psmith in the City .

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