Review: Psmith in the City

Psmith in the City by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Having set up the character of Psmith in Mike and Psmith , which is worth reading as an introduction and in its own right, Wodehouse takes him to new heights in this novel from 1910.

School friends Mike Jackson and Rupert Psmith (the P is silent), instead of going on to Cambridge as Mike had hoped, are stuck working in the City of London for the New Asiatic Bank. Mike's father's finances have taken a turn for the worse, and Psmith's father gets fads, and the outcome is that they end up as juniors in an enterprise that neither of them has any real interest in.

There's an autobiographical element here. After leaving Dulwich College (which gets an affectionate cameo), Wodehouse was expecting to follow his brother to Oxford, but his father's pension from his civil service career in Hong Kong was paid in rupees, and suddenly devalued against the pound, meaning that Wodehouse had to go into the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank instead. He was not an enthusiast, and the picture of the New Asiatic Bank as a dull place where people were trained up to be sent to the East (so there was never actually much work to do, since the London branch was not the headquarters) is, I'm sure, drawn from life.

Psmith, with his calculating charm, soon makes himself, and by extension Mike, popular with their immediate bosses, though his charm offensive on the senior manager (who they've both offended at Psmith's family home before being sent to work for him) notably fails, and has to be supplemented by other forms of manipulation, including blackmail. Psmith claims (unconvincingly) to be a socialist, which happens to be the political position of one of the managers, and there's a satiric sequence involving socialist speakers, an angry mob, and an awkward dinner.

Overall, it's a fun ride. Mike is a simple-hearted, well-intentioned blunderer, and Psmith has to keep expertly extracting him from the soup, in a prototype of the Bertie Wooster/Jeeves dynamic (though these are not simply the same characters; Bertie, in particular, is much more outgoing and less principled than Mike). For the cleverness and the fun, it makes it onto my Best of the Year list for 2022.

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