Review: Very Good, Jeeves!

Very Good, Jeeves! by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Third in a series of fix-up novels that are really collections of connected shorts. Some of the incidents from these stories are referenced again later in the series, such as the occasion when Bertie is finagled into addressing a girls' school (with predictably disastrous results). Several of them involve Tuppy Glossop, who in the next volume will be the recipient of Bertie's help, but here is mostly an antagonist.

There's a good deal of the usual knockabout shenanigans, impersonations, deceptions successful and otherwise, disapproving members of the older generation, and the course of true love not running smooth and having to be helped over the bumpy bits by Jeeves (providing the reliable plan) and Wooster (providing the unreliable execution).

By this point, Wodehouse had spent a good deal of time with these characters and had their voice and their business down to a science, to the point that he embarked on a novel-length treatment next time around which, for me, is one of the high points of his whole large output and of English literature in general. The more broken-up short story form can't rise to quite the same heights as a really sustained farce, but this collection is still full of varied hilarity and, if you like this sort of thing at all, you will probably enjoy it considerably.

View all my reviews