Review: Love Among the Chickens (novel)

What ho there! Jolly glad to see you! Have a spot of tea and join me in reviewing this frightfully spiffing novel! (Can you tell how much fun I had thinking of these opening lines? 😊)

Love Among the Chickens is one of P. G. Wodehouse's many humourous novels, revolving around a misguided attempt to start a chicken farm. It was originally written in 1906, then almost entirely rewritten in 1921.

You can always tell when you're reading a book by P. G. Wodehouse (pronounced "wood-house", illogical though it seems). There's always the long-suffering narrator who gets dragged into a scrape through no fault of his own, and inevitably manages to make it worse. There's always the well-meaning but utterly wrong-headed friend who drags the narrator into the aforementioned scrape. There's always a background cast of colourful, eccentric characters, usually including a love interest for whom the narrator does all sorts of strange things. And of course there's always the comical, unexpected solution to the seemingly-hopeless mess the main characters have gotten themselves into.

Love Among the Chickens is a good example of the typical Wodehouse plot. It has narrator, friend, love interest, eccentric background characters, unexpected ending, and as many amusing moments as the average Laurel and Hardy short.

The plot begins when Jeremy Garnet, an author working on his next book, gets dragged off to Dorset to help his friend Ukridge start a chicken farm. Garnet knows nothing about chickens. Neither does Ukridge, or Mrs. Ukridge. To make things more complicated, Garnet falls in love with a girl staying nearby, he arranges for her father to fall out of a boat (...it makes sense in context), and the Ukridges are getting deeper and deeper into debt...

I first discovered this book while looking for Jeeves and Wooster books in the local library. There were none, but instead there was a copy of this. I sat down to read it. Two hours later I'd finished it, and my badly-muffled giggles had probably convinced the other library-users I was crazy.

There are so many hilarious moments. The incident of the cat stuck in the chimney, for one, and the ill-advised boat rescue for another. And then there's the final lines, when poor Garnet finds he's going to be dragged into yet another of Ukridge's madcap schemes 😆

This book might not be as well-known or quite as well-written as Wodehouse's Jeeves or Blandings books. But it's still very funny, and a good choice if you want something light to read!

Is it available online?: Yes, on Gutenberg.

Rating: 7/10.