Review: Joy in the Morning

Joy in the Morning by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this one in the BBC full-cast audio adaptation featuring Richard Briers (Tom in The Good Life) as Bertie, and Michael Hordern (who I know best from his King Lear and for playing Gandalf in the BBC Lord of the Rings full-cast audio series) as Jeeves. Although they, and the rest of the cast, did an excellent job, I still want to read the text version, since it alternates between dialogue and narration, and typically in Wodehouse's dialog sequences, there's a good deal of amusing description and commentary on people's expressions, stage business and the like, which is dropped here because of the format.

I hadn't previously read this Jeeves and Wooster, even though I thought I had, and while not my favourite (that would probably be either Right Ho, Jeeves or The Code of the Woosters ), it's a strong entry. The spectre of Bertie's Aunt Agatha looms constantly offstage, his difficult uncle-by-marriage drives a lot of the plot with his attempts to have a secret business meeting, Bertie's bad-tempered old school friend Stilton Cheesewright is constantly threatening him with awful consequences if he should interfere in Cheesewright's romance with Florence Craye, a woman to whom Bertie had once been engaged and escaped only with Jeeves' help, and the possibility that Florence will resume her engagement to Bertie is itself an awful consequence barely to be thought of.

Where it's a little weak is that Jeeves isn't very prominent in the plot or even onstage much, and spends a lot of the book professing himself "baffled" and not providing his usual level of help. I did wonder whether he was trying to let Bertie handle things for himself using Jeeves' methods, which he's had plenty of exposure to by this time, but maybe Jeeves just wanted to have a fishing holiday. It's still a lot of fun, regardless.

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