2,338: Jeeves and the Wedding Bells by Sebastian Faulks

Jeeves and the Wedding Bells is the result of the commissioning of Sebastian Faulks by P.G. Wodehouse’s literary estate to write a new official Jeeves and Wooster novel.  To be fair to Mr Faulks, a fine author when using his own voice, it’s a pretty tall order to try and follow one of the greatest stylists of English literature.  Does he carry it off?  Well, in this Wodehouse fan’s opinion, not quite.  Does this make it a bad book?  Not at all.  It’s just that it’s not Wodehouse.

It opens with Bertie carrying out (or rather trying to carry out) a most unusual task – making a cup of tea, a turn of events that becomes even stranger when it transpires that he is taking said cuppa to Jeeves, who is in bed of all places.  We gradually find out that Bertie and Jeeves are at Melbury Hall, the country pile belonging to Sir Henry Hackwood, an impoverished baronet hoping to save himself by marrying his ward, Georgiana, off to a wealthy (but dull) man.

But things aren’t as they should be.  For Jeeves is pretending to be Lord Etringham and Bertie is masquerading as Wilberforce Berkeley, his Lordship’s valet in an attempt to save another set of impending nuptials – those of Amelia Hackwood, Sir Henry’s daughter, and Beeching P., a childhood friend of Bertie’s.

As can be guessed even from the brief lead-in I’ve given, plenty of Wodehousean hi-jinks ensue.  We get impersonations, break-ins, a village cricket match and fete, romantic mix-ups and the ghastly presence of two of Aunt Agatha’s old school-friends.

There is plenty to enjoy in Jeeves and the Wedding Bells both in terms of plotting, set pieces and language.  Mr Faulks adopts many of Wodehouse’s stylistic tricks with some success and, all in all, it’s a pleasant and easy read.

On the other hand, the pacing isn’t quite right.  The first part of the book was sluggish in comparison to Wodehouse but warms up in the second part, which has a much lighter and sparkly feel to it and it is more a reflection on the genius of Wodehouse than anything else to say that Mr Faulk’s imitation of Wodehouse’s style seems slightly laboured by comparison.

One of the interesting features of Jeeves and the Wedding Bells is that the main characters are imbued with more psychological depth than in the original novels.  We see far more of both Jeeves and Wooster’s inner lives than we ever did in Wodehouse’s stories and, indeed, there is almost a slightly sombre feel to parts of the book, with both Bertie and Georgiana referring to the deaths of their parents on occasion and Jeeves telling the story of his (real life) namesake, a cricketer who dies in the First World War.  This is not the only reference to the war, as Georgiana’s parents turn out to have died on the Lusitania, sunk by a U-boat.  It’s a different approach to Wodehouse’s world – not necessarily a criticism but certainly a real point of difference.

The most jarring moment for me, and I accept that, in matters Wodehouse, I am a near-fundamentalist, comes at the end of the book.  As usual, I am trying to avoid spoilers and so can’t expand on this cryptic comment save to say that Mr Faulks goes where Wodehouse would never have trodden with Bertie and Jeeves.

Mr Faulks is a self-confessed Wodehouse aficionado and bills Jeeves and the Wedding Bells as an homage to Wodehouse.  He makes the good point that he wanted to avoid parodying the master or just writing a pale imitation and he has achieved that.  His differentiation may not always work for me but I can appreciate what he is doing.  I also want to reiterate – this is a good book; I enjoyed it greatly but probably had invested too much hope in it for it ever to satisfy me fully.

Interestingly, Mr Faulks says that the Wodehouse estate want the book to attract a new generation of Wodehouse fans.  Hopefully, the publicity surrounding the new book will achieve this.  I can’t help feeling though that new readers would do far better to grab a copy of, say, The Mating Season or The Code of the Woosters.  I actually believe it is the old lags who will find Jeeves and the Wedding Bells most interesting.

Consequently, having thanked Random House for allowing me to read this via Netgalley, I’d like to end by recommending it as an interesting read to those familiar with the original, whilst strongly encouraging the curious neophyte to go straight to the fons et origo of Jeeves and Wooster before returning to Jeeves and the Wedding Bells.

2,471: Psmith, Journalist by P.G. Wodehouse

I do believe that, given the glorious Wodehouseaness (d’you like my neologism?) of Psmith as a character, the Psmith novels comprise a very rum collection.  Taking them in order, Mike and Psmith only introduces him in the second half and is really the ending of his boarding school phase.  Psmith in the City is the closest Wodehouse ever really got to autobiographical writing (and is by far the best Psmith novel.  Psmith, Journalist we will turn to shortly and Leave it to Psmith is as much a Blandings novel as a Psmith novel.

So what is Psmith, Journalist’s peculiarity?  On the surface, it seems a typically Psmithian plot.  Accompanying Mike Jackson on his cricket tour of the east coast of the USA, Psmith happens to come across one Billy Windsor, editor of a particularly saccharine weekly magazine.  With typical gusto, Psmith appoints himself Billy’s assistant, sacks the magazine’s dreadful columnists and sets about transforming the magazine into a crusading investigative publication.

In pursuit of this, Psmith and his new friends begin a campaign against one of the Rachman-like slum landlords and the condition of his tenement empire.  This set up leads nicely into a lively series of capers involving boxers, gangsters and other assorted characters.  All in all, a worthy Psmith plot and, seemingly, a classic Wodehouse story.

And yet, Psmith, Journalist is unusual.  You see, one of the hallmarks of Wodehouse’s work is his steadfast refusal to engage with the real world and real world issues.  In many ways, it can even be difficult to put a date on any given Wodehouse book just by reading the text.  His last books still inhabit the same golden fantasy England of his first novels.  Granted, there is the occasional reference to changing times and the odd character, such as Spode, an explicit dig at Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts.  But, on the whole, social and political issues are strangers to the pages of Wodehouse.

Apart from in Psmith, Journalist, that is.  In this one book, Wodehouse raises and tries to deal with the social ills of slum housing in New York where, even at this relatively early stage of his career, he was spending much if his time.  There is one passage in particular, where Psmith and Billy are walking through a tenement, in which even Wodehouse’s light, humorous style cannot disguise the outrage.

And guess what?  It doesn’t really work.  Of all the Psmith novels, even taking into account their respective oddities, Psmith, Journalist is clearly the weakest.  Wodehouse’s talents simply do not lend themselves to serious matters.  The outrage is smothered in the writing and he just isn’t able to make the bad guys really bad.  So it becomes too  un-Wodehousean to be funny and too Wodehousean to be a serious novel.

Unfortunately, there’s more.  For someone who spent a lot of time in the US (and who would later live there and take out citizenship), the New York of Psmith, Journalist is strangely unbelievable and even a bit cheesy.  It’s inhabitants seem mostly to speak with weirdly contorted accents and, even allowing for changes in social attitudes and linguistic usage, it comes across as uncomfortable and even borderline offiensive.

Of course, Wodehouse being Wodehouse, it’s not wholly bad – funny in parts and with some moments of authentic Wodehouse genius.  It’s just not one of his best, although it’s still worth reading, even if only as a curiosity.

2,474: Ukridge by P.G. Wodehouse

Stanley Featherstone (pronounced “Fanshawe”) Ukridge is not the first Wodehouse character who would spring to the mind of a casual reader but he is one of the minor Wodehousian protagonists, like Uncle Fred, whom I count as a secret pleasure.  Other than Love Among the Chickens, Ukridge is a denizen of Wodehouse’s short stories, appearing in nineteen of them over the years, of which ten constitute Ukridge.

For those of you unfamiliar with him, Ukridge is a large, untidy kind of fellow who is forever scheming to make his fortune in a variety of improbable manners, without having to go to the inconvenience of actually doing any real work.  Whilst waiting for his plans to come to fruition, he survives by sponging off his redoubtable Aunt Julia, a novelist, and various long-suffering friends, notably Jimmy Corcoran, the narrator of the stories in Ukridge, and George Tupper, a well-meaning, if too earnest, member of the Foreign Office.

Ukridge seems both to annoy and charm his social circle in equal measures and, despite his friends knowing full well that he is both impecunious and a bit of a blagger, he never fails to persuade at least one of them to pay for supper or to invest in his latest scheme.  He floats through life with sunny optimism, interspersed with disappointment as his best laid plans for wealth fail dismally.

There is much amusement and enjoyment to be had in reading an Ukridge short story and watching how the implausible plan at first seems, against all logic, to be proceeding nicely, before the inevitable happens and he loses everything.  There’s no serious message here or exploration of emotional themes, just pure fun.

To give you a flavour of Ukridge’s world, his schemes involve running a dog training college, in which he intends to train dogs to appear in music hall productions and to live off rentals from the music hall owners.  This scheme turns to dust when his aunt discovers he has purloined the dogs from her.

Other doomed plots involve him acting as manager to an immensely talented but soft-hearted boxer and a conspiracy to take advantage of an accident insurance policy by having the beneficiary, an acquaintance of Ukridge and Jimmy, deliberately get injured.  The plot backfires spectacularly when the chap in question gets run over but, on waking can’t remember the existence of the conspiracy and keeps the payout himself.

Despite Ukridge’s moral failings, one can’t help rooting for him and I would recommend these short stories to anyone who’d like an undemanding but amusing read.

2,492: Psmith in the City by P.G. Wodehouse

When I was a younger man and used to drink in a very suburban members’ club, one of the other members – a blue-rinsed widow of the pearls and twinset variety – once offered to give me her late husband’s complete set of P.G. Wodehouse novels as she had no use for them.  Now obviously, I accepted with alacrity but shortly afterwards she had a change of heart and kept them after all, which I completely understood.

Nevertheless, I’ve always hankered after a complete set and have often thought of the near complete set in the library of my old school, where I first became enchanted by the glories of Wodehouse’s writings.  So I recently took the plunge and decided to start collecting the Everyman edition of Wodehouse.  Everyman has, for some years now, been publishing a number of Wodehouse novels each year in a distinctive and attractive hardback format, with the intention of creating a complete set and I am purchasing them at the rate of about three a month in order to try and build my collection in a reasonable amount of time (given that Wodehouse published over 90 novels and short story collections).

One of the first to arrive was Psmith in the City, one of the earlier novels and one that features two of Wodehouse’s first recurring characters, Psmith (the ‘P’ is silent) and Mike Jackson (of the cricketing Jacksons).  Although Mike had first appeared in Mike at Wrykyn, a classic Wodehouse public school story, the two meet in Mike and Psmith, which, in my opinion, can be seen either as the last of Wodehouse’s old-fashioned school stories or as the first of his adult novels, despite its school setting.  Becoming firm friends, they then travel together through the City of London in Psmith in the City, New York in Psmith, Journalist before exiting stage right at the conclusion of Leave it to Psmith, which has the distinction of being both the last Psmith book and the first in the Blandings Castle saga.

The Psmith books show, in neat microcosm, Wodehouse’s developmental arc as a writer as they move from school story to amusing adventure to the romantic comedy of Leave it to Psmith which more closely resembles the mature Wodehouse.  The character of Psmith is also interesting from this perspective as he foreshadows elements of Jeeves, Uncle Fred and even Gally Threepwood.  It is difficult to write sensibly about any Wodehouse novel without including spoilers so if you have a problem with them (and I can’t see why you would with Wodehouse – after all, they aren’t exactly cliff-hangers or full of clever twists!), look away now.

As Psmith in the City opens, we find that Mike will not be going up to Cambridge like his brothers as his father has lost a considerable amount of money.  Instead, Mike’s father has called in a favour and obtained a position for Mike in the New Asiatic Bank in the City of London.  Coincidentally, and unbeknownst to him, Psmith also begins to work at the bank on a whim of his father and the two move in to Psmith’s comfortable flat and begin to enjoy London life.

The two of them soon fall foul of the tyrannical manager, Mr Bickersdyke and it is only through the efforts of Psmith to forge friendly relations with his immediate superiors that trouble is averted, culminating in him saving the job of Mr Waller, Head of the Cash Department, after a dodgy cheque is chased, through the simple expedient of blackmail.

As summer arrives, the call of the cricket square becomes too much for Mike and when, one day, his brother Joe calls from Lords’ as their county is a man down for the match against Middlesex, it all becomes too much and he absconds from his desk.  Mr Bickersdyke, seizing his chance, dismisses Mike but, as is only to be expected, Psmith comes to the rescue and, at the end of the book, both are off to Cambridge after all.

Although, over the course of the Psmith novels, Psmith himself rapidly edges Mike out of the limelight – to the point where he doesn’t even make an appearance in Leave it to Psmith, I actually find Mike, the stolid cricketer, the more intriguing character.

In many ways, I see Mike as a semi-autobiographical character and Psmith in the City as the closest Wodehouse gets to revealing his own past in his fiction.  Like Mike, Wodehouse was a good schoolboy cricketer, playing for the Dulwich College 1^st XI, although Mike is depicted as being of an even higher standard than this – a piece of wish fulfilment maybe.  Again, like Mike, Wodehouse was prevented from following an elder brother to university (Oxford in Wodehouse’s case) due to family money problems (a fall in the rupee reduced the value of Wodehouse senior’s colonial pension) and, just like Mike, Wodehouse is sent to work in a bank – in his case the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (a thinly disguised New Asiatic Bank) – which he detested and quit as soon as his writing would permit.

In this light, as well as being an amusing story, there is a certain amount of light shed upon the workings of banks in the twilight years of Britain’s banking supremacy.  Mini-Falaise is currently a big fan of Mary Poppins and I see some similarity between the new Asiatic Bank and the Dawes Tomes Mouseley Grubbs Fidelity Fiduciary Bank at which Mr Banks toils.  Incidentally, in these days of economic uncertainty and stagnation, there is a certain amount of nostalgia in Mr banks’ self-satisfaction at eh strength of the pound and the glory of British banking and finance.

Returning to Wodehouse to finish, however, Psmith in the City is a typically entertaining read – not nearly as great as his later works but worth a read, especially if you are interested in Wodehouse as well as his world.

2,542: Leave it to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse

OK, quick question for you:  What do Rupert (aka Ronald) Psmith and Ray Langston from CSI have in common?  Go on, have a guess.  No idea?  Give up?  Well, I shall enlighten you.  You see, it turns out that they are both crossover characters.  Dr Langston appeared in episodes of CSI: Miami and CSI: New York in 2009 and, in Leave it to Psmith, Wodehouse engineers a trip to Blandings Castle for Psmith, thus bringing him into contact with Lord Emsworth and other Blandings Castle inmates in what became the second in the Blandings Castle series and the last of the four Psmith books.

And make no mistake.  Despite the title of the book, Leave it to Psmith is very much a Blandings Castle tale.  Whereas the three previous Psmith stories  form part of Wodehouse’s “school” phase and tend to hinge on Psmith’s peculiarly superior attitude to life, Leave it to Psmith is a romantic comedy, more representative of Blandings and Wodehouse’s mid-career style.

Indeed, the plot of Leave it to Psmith has so many similarities to that of the first Blandings novel, Something Fresh, that it could be used as exhibit A in the oft-raised accusation that Wodehouse simply used the same plot over and over again.

At the outset of Leave it to Psmith, we find Psmith (the “P” is silent as in psychic, ptarmigan and phthisis) in reduced circumstances.  His father’s money has gone and he has just resigned from a promising career as a monger of fish for his uncle, a mogul in the piscine world.  Freddie, Lord Emsworth’s imbecile younger son is desperate for cash to invest in a bookmaking business and his uncle, Joe Keeble is also in need of cash to give to his niece Phyllis Jackson to enable her husband, Mike to buy a farm without his wife, Lady Constance knowing.  To complete the circle, Mike is Psmith’s best friend from school.  All clear?

Psmith and Freddie come into each other’s life when Freddie answers a personal ad placed in the paper by Psmith, wherein he offers to take up any job for cash.  Psmith agrees to steal a necklace belonging to Lady Constance, Freddie’s aunt.  Joe will then be able to draw a large sum of money to replace the necklace with Lady Constance’s blessing.  He will then split the cash with Freddie and return the stolen necklace to Lady Constance.

At this point, enter Lord Emsworth.  Despatched to the Senior Conservative Club in London by Lady Constance to bring a Canadian poet back to Blandings, he manages to offend said poet, who storms off in a huff.  Psmith, who happens to be in the club at the same time steps into the breach as Emsworth, having lost his glasses, is under the impression that Psmith is actually the poet.  Although unaware that Emsworth is Freddie’s old man, Psmith is desirous of visiting Blandings as he has fallen in love with one Eve Halliday, who has been engaged to catalogue the Blandings library and is, again unbeknownst to Psmith, a childhood friend of Phyllis.

The scene is thus set for a typical Blandings story, a mixture of romantic comedy and high farce.  After misunderstandings aplenty and despite the best efforts of the Efficient Baxter, Emsworth’s secretary, and a couple of American thieves, one of whom is at Blandings in her capacity as a leading poet, Psmith ultimately prevails, getting the girl and ensuring that both Phyllis and Freddie are put in funds.  All’s well that ends well, apart from Freddie’s love life, which remains unfulfilled.  Even Lord Emsworth is left happy as he is able to sack Baxter, who ends up throwing flowerpots through Emsworth’s bedroom whilst wearing lemon-coloured pyjamas, in a scene that should be read in private lest you be thought mad for laughing out loud in public.

Leave it to Psmith is a pacey, madcap story that shows both Wodehouse’s weaknesses and his strengths.  As well as recycling some of his standard plot devices, the plot is over-dependent on coincidence and one really shouldn’t think too hard about the logic and plausibility of the plot, which at times are tissue-thin.

On the other hand, not only are many of the set piece scenes laugh out loud funny but Wodehouse’s writing style is, in Leave it to Psmith, approaching its full majesty.  In truth, never mind the plot, just feel the fluidity and precision of the writing.

Psmith was not to appear in Wodehouse’s writing as he freely admitted that he could not think of anything else to do with him.  He’s never been one of my favourite Wodehouse characters as he mainly features in Wodehouse’s early books which are a bit too much like school stories for me.  Nevertheless, as a valedictory appearance, he could have done much worse than Leave it to Psmith.

2,570: Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse

The many references to P.G. Wodehouse and the Blandings Castle books in particular have prompted me to start re-reading them in chronological order to see whether I still feel justified in praising them so frequently.

Something Fresh is the first book in the series and was published in the UK and US in 1915.  Prior to its publication in book form, it had been serialised in the Saturday Evening Post.  The book introduces us to several of the recurring characters in the series including Lord Emsworth himself, his half-witted younger son, the Hon. Freddie Threepwood, Beech the butler and Lord Emsworth’s secretary, the Efficient Baxter.  Most of these are, at least to begin with, typical Wodehousian archetypes – Freddie, the half-wit younger son, Beech, the majestic butler and Emsworth, the muddle-headed old gentleman and Baxter.

The plot too gives us several of the Wodehouse standards. There is a stolen object to recover (in this case the valuable scarab owned by Freddie’s prospective father-in-law) and the settling of various romantic entanglements (in this case, Freddie’s engagement and the partnering-up of his former fiancée with her soul mate, George Emerson and the bringing together of the book’s nominal protagonists, Ashe Marson and Joan Valentine).  As with the character types, these themes crop up so often in his books that one could form the view that they tend to blend into one after a while.

That would, however, be to miss the point.  The glories of Wodehouse derive from his use of language, from the farcical nature of the situations into which he plunges his characters and the sheer lack of malice or pessimism in his writings.  He described his writing in the following terms:

“I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.”

I can’t actually think of a more precise way to describe what it is that Wodehouse actually does.  Reading his best work is like ice skating, gliding over frictionless ice with ease and grace.  There is a smoothness about it that disguises the rich and complex way he structures sentences.

Again, the relatively limited plot variation is almost irrelevant given the sheer verve and inventiveness of the detail of each plot.  The bizarre schemes that his characters come up with to achieve their goals are wickedly funny and rarely repeated.

There are other aspects to Wodehouse’s novels and stories that I will talk about in future posts but which do not really crop up in Something Fresh.  Although, as I have already said, it contains many of the Wodehouse hallmarks, it is somehow a bit flat and a little unsatisfactory.  Prior to Something Fresh, Wodehouse’s fictional output had been limited to his public school stories (which are really juvenilia), the Psmith stories that were born out of the school stories and some of his earlier “one off” novels.  These, like Something Fresh have an anachronistic feel to the language.

One of the things that strikes me most about Wodehouse is the agelessness of his voice.  Once you accept his English upper-class, inter-war milieu, the language of his books is remarkably timeless.  Wodehouse’s first novel was published in 1902 and his last (excluding a couple of posthumous publications) in 1974, shortly before his death.  Over this period of time, English (and, I would guess, American) speech patterns and language use changed quite significantly and yet if you were to pick up almost any of the books he wrote between, say the late 1930s to the end of the 1960s, I think you would, taking his settings into account, have a hard time pinpointing when it was written. His earlier books, however, including Something Fresh, do have a very “period” feel to the writing.  It is not just the archaic slang but the overall feel of the writing.  At this early point in his career, his unique voice has not yet been fully realised and I think that this detracts from the book.

Also, and again by comparison to the bulk of his work, the characters are a little lightweight.  As opposed to the later books in the series, Blandings is merely a location.  The focus is not on Emsworth and the rest of the Blandings household but more on the other characters like Ashe, Joan, Mr Peters and Empson.  None of these recur in other books and there is little character development. I feel it is only technically part of the Blandings saga rather than a real part of it, if that makes any sense.

Overall, Something Fresh, whilst a pleasant enough read is very clearly a rough draft for later Blandings books and is a definite part of Wodehouse’s early period before the true flowering of his talent.

One final curiosity about the book.  The American edition was called Something New and was actually published a few months before the UK version.  In the US version, the two main characters are Americans and there are differences in dialogue to reflect this.  There is also an entire scene that was included in the US version but omitted from the UK version.  I don’t know if that remains true of later editions but it is slightly peculiar.

Literary Book Blog Hop: A Book Before Dying

It’s Literary Book Blog Hop time again, hosted by The Blue Bookcase.  This week’s question is posed by Mel U from The Reading Life who asks:

“If you were going off to war (or some other similarly horrific situation) and could only take one book with you, which book would you take and why?”

These days, I suppose one could take an e-reader with a thousand different books but that is probably a bit of a cheat and slightly defeats the purpose of the question!

I have actually recently read a couple of books that do actually address the relationship of soldiers (or at least officers) to literature.  From an American perspective, Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point by Elizabeth Samet is a fascinating account of her experience as an English teacher at West Point and her relationships with the young men and women whom she taught there.  A more English viewpoint is provided by Patrick Henessey in his account of Sandhurst, Afghanistan and Iraq in The Junior Officer’s Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars.  Both are definitely worth a read (although the latter is as much a war memoir as anything else) but neither is at hand to assist me in this post.

I started by thinking I might take something that I could turn to during the tough times to remind me of my reasons for fighting and for having joined up in the first place or to rekindle any feelings of honour or patriotism that had been extinguished in the field.  This might be David Selbourne’s The Principle of Duty, in which he restates a philosophical principle that appears to have largely been forgotten, namely that, as individuals, we owe duties and obligations to our fellow citizens and to our communities as much as we have individual rights.  Alternatively, I might go for something less dry and more emotional, such as a volume of poetry from the early days of the First World War when poets such as Rupert Brooke could still write un-self-consciously about sacrifice:

“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.”

On reflection, however, I may have become too heartsore or hardened in spirit for this kind of writing to speak to me.  I may be frightened and, in anticipation of death, may rediscover the faith I lost as a teenager in which event a copy of The Bible or The English Book of Common Prayer may be what I need.

I’m not convinced that this would actually happen though and, even if it did, I can still remember sufficient to be able to pray and console myself from memory.  I guess that, to answer this question properly, I have to face up to the fact that it would be entirely possible that the book I choose might well be the last book I would ever read.  What book would I want to be fresh in my mind when I go to meet my Maker?

Should it be a Great Classic, a volume from the canon of world literature?  Something of great merit and wisdom so that, should I cease upon the midnight (although I suspect with rather than without pain), my mind would be filled with deep thoughts?  Shakespeare, maybe, or Homer?  Dumas? Trollope? How about some Victor Hugo? Dickens might well work – possibly Oliver Twist or The Pickwick Papers.  Not too heavy but just heavy enough.  I’ve never read Don Quixote, Ulysses or War and Peace and I could die with a sense of satisfaction if one of these were my last read.

But, no.  I don’t think so.  I would want some comfort and relief with my final book.  I would have my mind fly away to a better, warmer place than a muddy foxhole.  There are so many to choose from, too many really.  The Lord of the Rings would be a strong contender.  I used to read it once a year and, as well as being a great story, it would bring back happy memories of my childhood.  Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers similarly has an entertaining plot, is set in my old university and brings back enjoyable memories.  What else?  Well, as anyone who has read any of my other posts will know, I am a P.G. Wodehouse nut and so one of his Blandings books would be a true mental flight to a sunnier world.  I’d like to be greedy and take one of the several omnibus editions but, if I am pinned to a single volume, it would be Summer Lightning, a classic tale, in which the Empress has disappeared, leaving Lord Emsworth devastated and Gally writing his memoirs which have the potential to embarrass almost the entire aristocracy.  This would definitely transport me away from the battlefield.  I could read this over and over again and not be bored.

Yes, that’s it.  In war, I would want humour and escapism so Wodehouse gets the nod.  But actually, were I on the front line and facing death, the final thing I would want to read would be a letter from Mrs Falaise and mini-Falaise, sending their love and thoughts, with a nice photo of the pair of them.  That would be more precious than any author’s writings could be.

The Books of my Life II

I wasn’t going to write this, the second of my posts on important books in my life, for a while.  I have a backlog of reviews to write and a rather busy schedule at the moment so getting this one written is a bit of an ask.  Given the date, though, it feels right to do it now.

Back in the mid-1980s, I was a pupil at a small public school in the East of England.  Although the school itself had been founded in the 16^th Century, most of the main school buildings had been built in the Victorian period and were pretty fine examples of Victorian Gothic architecture.  The school library was in one of these buildings and was exactly how you would imagine an old library to be.

In the summer, the sun used to shine in through the leaded windows and it always seemed that there were motes of dust dancing in the beams.  A smell of wood polish pervaded the entire room and, if it was a hot day, sleep came very easily to any boy bored with his work.

When I wasn’t in lessons or out on the sports field, I loved spending hours in there, rummaging around in the shelves.  It was full of slightly odd volumes as well as the expected sets of classic authors and academic texts.  There was an excellent collection of early 20^th Century drama and a wide range of general fiction, largely ignored by most of the school, which was only interested in books relating to their schoolwork.

Once we were past the first year at school, there was a system by which, depending upon the academic options you chose, you would have a certain number of free periods during the week, known as “spares”.  As I was taking an unusual combination of subjects and had  also taken some exams early, I always managed to end up with more spares than anyone else in my year and, although they were intended for use as time for study, I spent mine reading random books from the library (except when I was sneaking in an extra sleep).

Anyway, one warm day in the summer, I was pottering about amongst the fiction shelves when I saw two shelves filled with books by one author, a writer I had never come across before.  I picked one out at random, thinking that if I liked him, there was plenty of reading material for me to get stuck into.

I started reading this book in my next spare and it was the start of a love affair that has lasted to this day.  I have read most of his 96 books, many of them several times.  They never stale although the world that they depict has long since vanished, if indeed it ever really existed.  They are guaranteed to raise a smile, to cheer up a sad soul and to make the world seem a lighter and better place.

The author?  P.G. Wodehouse.  That first book?  The Code of the Woosters.  A classic instalment in the Jeeves and Wooster canon, The Code of the Woosters sees Jeeves somehow extricate Bertie from being thrown into prison, being beaten to a pulp by Roderick Spode and he has preserved two engagements and ensured that Bertie’s Uncle Tom obtains possession of a prized silver cow creamer from the aforesaid Spode.

I was hooked from page one.  The characters, the stories, the ridiculous scrapes that the younger characters are continually getting into are all captivating but, above all, Wodehouse’s use of language is simply other-worldly.  His turns of phrase are justly legendary.  Just a couple of examples to whet your appetite:

“I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.”

“Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.”

“A certain critic -- for such men, I regret to say, do exist -- made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.”

“As a rule, you see, I'm not lugged into Family Rows. On the occasions when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps and Uncle James's letter about Cousin Mabel's peculiar behaviour is being shot round the family circle ('Please read this carefully and send it on Jane') the clan has a tendency to ignore me. It's one of the advantages I get from being a bachelor - and, according to my nearest and dearest, practically a half-witted bachelor at that.”

I could – and, given a little encouragement, would – go on all day like this.  Having started with Jeeves and Wooster, I rapidly worked my way through Lord Emsworth, Psmith, Ukridge, Ickenham, the Golf stories, the school stories, Mr Mulliner and his many other works.  It is difficult to pick a favourite but I think now that the Blandings stories have overtaken Jeeves and Wooster in my heart.

Wodehouse self-confessedly was not interested in serious issues or writing deep and meaningful books.  He wanted to entertain and delight and still does so today.  I hope that I am preaching to the choir about him but, if you have not already tried him, please do so I implore you. 

I mentioned above that I felt I had to write this post today.  You see, thirty-six years ago today, roughly a decade before I found him, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse died, aged 93, six weeks after being knighted for his services to literature. Thank you, Sir Pelham, for all the joy you have given me.