Review: Spring Fever

Spring Fever by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have this in paperback and have read it a number of times, but not all that recently, so in a temporary lack-of-new-books emergency I dug it out of the basement. It's classic Wodehouse, probably underrated because it's a standalone rather than being in any of the series, but if you like the Blandings Castle books you will most probably enjoy this.

Published after World War II, but showing little sign of it apart from the impecuniousness of the Earl thanks to various taxes, it's still very much in the peak Wodehouse style. The Earl of Shortlands, like the Earl of Emsworth, isn't particularly bright, but there the resemblance ends; he looks remarkably like a butler, while his butler, Spink, looks like an earl (and is not a faithful old retainer like Blandings' Beach; he's a bit of a snake). The butler and the earl are rivals in love, both wanting to marry the castle cook, but she will only marry someone who has two hundred pounds to set her up with a pub, and neither of them has this sum - the earl because he's financially dependent on his eldest daughter, who married money and is one of those managing Wodehouse women who stands no nonsense (very like the Earl of Emsworth's sister Lady Constance Keeble); Spink because he has a weakness for horse racing and is a poor judge of form.

Just like a Blandings story, we soon get someone who comes to the castle pretending, for several excellent reasons, to be someone else, and then the person they're impersonating comes to the castle impersonating a third person, all because of complicated circumstances involving two young couples hindered from uniting by the disapproval of a parent in one instance and the hesitation of the woman in the other. Her hesitation is for a sensible reason: She thinks her wooer is too good-looking, and has been burned before by a good-looking man who was inclined to spread his affections around rather freely. Her suitor, Mike Cardinal, is Psmith without the affectation, a bit of a mastermind who's not at all modest about it (though he doesn't agree with his love interest that he's unusually good-looking). He drives much of the plot through his schemes and manipulations. There's even a reformed criminal, a spiritual cousin of "Chimp" Twist, whose safecracking abilities are key to the plot; the scene in which he gets riotously drunk and messes up the whole operation is one of Wodehouse's best.

There's that old Wodehouse flaw, the coincidental existence of far too many ties between the various characters, accompanied by at least one coincidental meeting between two of them, but it's in the service of complicating the plot, not simplifying it, so it passes the Pixar test. The prose sparkles, the plot twists (many times), the characters, while types, are enjoyable and beautifully portrayed types, and in general it's a solid piece of entertainment, recommended for anyone who wishes there were more stories along the lines of the Blandings ones.

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