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A review by regnarenol
Cocktail Time by P.G. Wodehouse
5.0
"Sunlit perfection", Stephen Fry said once (probably) of P.G. Wodehouse's prose, and sunlit perfection it is.
In a time of fretful melancholy, when the whole world seemed to spin out of control, I reached out for humour to salve the wound. Nothing I watched from the endlessness that is youtube and instagram survived my black mood, until one night, in a state of half-asleep genius, I accidentally downloaded a Wodehouse audiobook: this one.
Before I dive straight into gushing praise: this is not my first Wodehouse. I own many omnibuses of Jeeves and Wooster, dog-eared now from being read too often, but this is my very first Wodehouse with this set of characters. Frederick, the Earl of Ickenham, is the trickster god with a kind heart that looms large, using carefully seeded chaos to give everybody their happy endings. But the everybody else - the other characters - are all unique in their own hapless and hilarious ways.
It's PG's comic poetry, his mastery of the English language for perfect ironic effect, that I most love. I've realised now that my attempts at writing satire only but steal a sideways gleam off Wodehouse's glitter. I had never read Wodehouse, or indeed Douglas Adams after him, when I started writing, but clearly I'd read books that themselves were inspired by Adams, and Wodehouse before him. So yes, every page, every paragraph and nearly every sentence had me smiling foolishly, but what I realised while reading this book is that this man PG Wodehouse is a master of plot.
There's genius in the convolutions of farce that he builds up, as Ickenham's machinations seem to get away from him until all seems too tangled to fix. But not totally, because just when the whole plot is about to collapse in a tangle of confusion, with a smart bit of wit and a clever bit of madness, it all clears up quite nicely. The introduction of the character of Saxby midway through is a case in point. When he shows up, it seems like a diversion from the matters at hand. But when through his particular brand of buffoonery he ends up becoming the key that unlocks Ickenham's puzzle, it is a moment of pure gratification.
Now, there's something more. At the risk of clouding sunlit perfection with overanalysis, there's something in the philosophy of Wodehousean characters that I miss around me today. There's no hero's journey here. This isn't a world full of people who're special and beautiful and magical in their own ways. And yet, in their haplessness and ordinariness and in their unprotectedness from PG's satirical fire, they're relatable. They're an antidote to a narcissistic world, a world where we're united not by our specialness, but by our ordinariness. Sigh.
At least PG Wodehouse was prolific. I've read a lot of him, but not all ninety of his novels. On to the next one!
In a time of fretful melancholy, when the whole world seemed to spin out of control, I reached out for humour to salve the wound. Nothing I watched from the endlessness that is youtube and instagram survived my black mood, until one night, in a state of half-asleep genius, I accidentally downloaded a Wodehouse audiobook: this one.
Before I dive straight into gushing praise: this is not my first Wodehouse. I own many omnibuses of Jeeves and Wooster, dog-eared now from being read too often, but this is my very first Wodehouse with this set of characters. Frederick, the Earl of Ickenham, is the trickster god with a kind heart that looms large, using carefully seeded chaos to give everybody their happy endings. But the everybody else - the other characters - are all unique in their own hapless and hilarious ways.
It's PG's comic poetry, his mastery of the English language for perfect ironic effect, that I most love. I've realised now that my attempts at writing satire only but steal a sideways gleam off Wodehouse's glitter. I had never read Wodehouse, or indeed Douglas Adams after him, when I started writing, but clearly I'd read books that themselves were inspired by Adams, and Wodehouse before him. So yes, every page, every paragraph and nearly every sentence had me smiling foolishly, but what I realised while reading this book is that this man PG Wodehouse is a master of plot.
There's genius in the convolutions of farce that he builds up, as Ickenham's machinations seem to get away from him until all seems too tangled to fix. But not totally, because just when the whole plot is about to collapse in a tangle of confusion, with a smart bit of wit and a clever bit of madness, it all clears up quite nicely. The introduction of the character of Saxby midway through is a case in point. When he shows up, it seems like a diversion from the matters at hand. But when through his particular brand of buffoonery he ends up becoming the key that unlocks Ickenham's puzzle, it is a moment of pure gratification.
Now, there's something more. At the risk of clouding sunlit perfection with overanalysis, there's something in the philosophy of Wodehousean characters that I miss around me today. There's no hero's journey here. This isn't a world full of people who're special and beautiful and magical in their own ways. And yet, in their haplessness and ordinariness and in their unprotectedness from PG's satirical fire, they're relatable. They're an antidote to a narcissistic world, a world where we're united not by our specialness, but by our ordinariness. Sigh.
At least PG Wodehouse was prolific. I've read a lot of him, but not all ninety of his novels. On to the next one!