Review: Aunts Aren't Gentlemen

Aunts Aren't Gentlemen by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The final Jeeves and Wooster book, and while not the best of them, certainly well up to standard.

Admittedly, the formidable woman that Bertie has to struggle not to marry might as well be Florence Craye, and her jealous, thuggish fiancé might as well be "Stilton" Cheesewright, except that both of them are out of circulation following events in a previous book, so these are new characters (or, at least, have new names). Wodehouse's socialists and Communists always seem to be hypocrites, in it for what they can get (ever since Psmith), and these two are no exception.

Major Plank returns from another previous book; he was always a stock character (the colonial military man/intrepid explorer), and remains one, but he does provide some tension as Bertie wonders whether he will remember their previous encounter accurately (to Bertie's detriment).

The author doesn't seem to have re-read previous books before writing this one, which he wrote late in life and many years after some of the earlier entries in the series, and gets several details from them wrong; the cosh is the property of the wrong cousin (Aunt Dahlia's Bonzo instead of Aunt Agatha's Thos), for example, and the wrong location is given for the fight between Spode and Gussie in which Gussie hits Spode over the head with a painting. This makes no difference, but it is a bit jarring.

The title (and the alternate title, The Catnappers) refers to Aunt Dahlia's scheme to nobble a racehorse by stealing a cat that it's fond of in order to send it into a decline. This is achieved with the help of the local poacher, Harold "Billy" Graham. The reference to the American evangelist (who became known internationally in the 1940s) is one of the occasional anachronisms in the series. Wikipedia claims that the Jeeves and Wooster books have a floating timeline, that they are always set in the present day as at publication date. The technological and sociological milieu, though, is always that of the 1920s or 1930s, so my theory is that they are always set then, but Wodehouse occasionally dropped in an anachronistic reference because he wanted to evoke a particular image in the minds of his audience, and one that would have been correct for that increasingly distant time period wouldn't have cut it because it wouldn't have been familiar enough.

The cat subplot supplies freshness to the formula, and all in all this is a successful Jeeves and Wooster for my money.

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