It’s been a long while since I read any more of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster books, but I don’t know why because they must be some of the greatest stories I’ve ever read. I’m struggling for suitable words to describe Wodehouse’s sense of humour; it’s the sort of paralyse-you-waist-down, grapple-for-air, try-hopelessly-to-relate-this-hilarious-quote-to-bemused-family kind of humour. Right Ho, Jeeves was a great big bundle of laughter just waiting to trap the unfortunate reader in its inescapable snare. Approach with caution.
In moments of discomfort, as I had often told Tuppy, he wears a mask, preserving throughout the quiet stolidity of a stuffed moose.
Bertram Wooster is up against it once again, and this time it’s a more complicated plot than ever. Wooster is about to get almost as entangled in the many layers of Brinkley Court storyline as I did when reading about him. He’s going to inadvertently get engaged, break off the engagements of four old school-friends, accidentally convince the world’s greatest chef to hand his resignation in to Wooster’s aunt, and learn a great deal about the courting habits of newts.Two parts of this book were my favourite, though the whole thing was dashed enjoyable, as Wooster might say. One of these was when the aforementioned cook, Anatole, woke up one night to find a drunken Brinkley guest pulling faces at him through the skylight. Anatole, being French and not speaking English very well, composed a complaint some six pages long to the owner of the manor, concluding with the formidable words: “If such rannygazoo is to arrive, I do not remain any longer in this house no more. I buzz off and do not stay planted.”My other favourite part of Right Ho, Jeeves is when Wooster is sent off on an eighteen-mile bicycle ride in the middle of the night with no lantern─a bicycle ride that he would later find would be entirely unnecessary. Wooster narrates with some desperation how the darkness terrified him, filling his dilated imagination with visions of countryside elephants and even feral goats.
Apart from the ceaseless anxiety of having to keep an eye skinned for elephants, I found myself much depressed by barking dogs, and once I received a most unpleasant shock when, alighting to consult a signpost, I saw sitting on top of it an owl that looked exactly like my Aunt Agatha.
Luckily, the book concluded with a happily-ever-after, but only after Wooster’s newt-studying friend Gussie Fink-Nottle found his engagement with a lovely young lady broken off because of something that happened on Wooster’s part. When he heard about this, Wooster worried that, robbed of his one slim chance to marry, Gussie might “spend the rest of his life brooding over his newts and growing long grey whiskers, like one of those chaps you read about in novels, who live in the great white house you can just see over there through the trees and shut themselves off from the world and have pained faces.”But Wodehouse finishes this Jeeves & Wooster story, as he always does, with a happy ending─for the characters, at any rate. As for me, I’m going to sit down with some tissues for a while and then start on the next one.