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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