Review: Mike and Psmith

For a short novel this has an abundance of titles. I've never read a novel with three to six (depending on how you count them) different titles before, and it's so confusing that I hope I never will again.

The novel currently called Mike and Psmith was first published under the name Mike in 1909. It was in two parts that were given different titles: Jackson Junior and The Lost Lambs. Both parts were later given new titles: Mike at Wrykyn and Enter Psmith. The second half, which had already had two titles, was then renamed again and became Mike and Psmith. What a mess!

Whatever you want to call it, the novel introduced one of P. G. Wodehouse's famous characters: Rupert Psmith, the hero of four novels. (His surname was "Smith" before he decided to alter the spelling, and it's still pronounced that way.) Apparently Wodehouse thought this book was his best work. I have to disagree. It's good, yes, but not as good as his Jeeves and Wooster stories.

The plot is a fairly straight-forward school story. Mike has been sent against his will to a new school, where he meets and befriends Psmith, has disagreements with a teacher, nearly gets caught climbing a drainpipe (it's a long story), is falsely accused of painting a dog (ditto), and eventually plays cricket for the school.

I greatly enjoyed the novel except for one thing. Too much cricket! As someone who knows nothing about any sort of sport, I was hopelessly lost during the lengthy passages devoted to the cricket games. When Mike talks about the results of a game he might as well have been speaking ancient Greek for all I understood. Unfortunately about half of the book is dedicated to cricket. I skipped as much as I could.

Apart from that this is a thoroughly entertaining novel with much of Wodehouse's trademark humour. The fiasco of Mike's shoes is my favourite scene, with the confusion over who actually painted the dog as a close second 😆

Is it available online?: Yes, on Gutenberg.

Rating: 9/10

Review: The Inimitable Jeeves (novel)

I'm so busy with Camp NaNoWriMo that I completely forgot there was supposed to be a review today. So I had to write one in a hurry. Luckily, I'd just finished this book 😄

The Inimitable Jeeves is the second of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster novels, first published in 1923. It isn't really a novel; it's a short story collection. The stories are all connected, and all revolve around the extraordinary situations Bertie Wooster gets involved in.

All Jeeves and Wooster plots are very similar. Someone close to Bertie falls in love with an unsuitable girl. Someone -- usually Bertie's Aunt Agatha -- orders him to sort it out. Bertie only succeeds in landing himself in the soup, as he puts it. Jeeves comes along and sorts everything out. Then the cycle starts all over again.

Usually this would be a criticism. But Wodehouse's sense of humour and brilliant narration makes each repetition of the plot fresh and amusing. The characters' idiocy provides much hilarity, but even it pales in comparison to the wonderfully sarcastic narration. I absolutely love the bit where Bertie complains most of a café's menu must have "been specially prepared by the nastier-minded members of the Borgia family for people they had a particular grudge against" 😆

My favourite scenes include Bertie returning his aunt's jewels, the ill-advised "pushing Oswald off a bridge" plan, and Bingo pretending to be a communist to impress a girl. But of all the stories, my absolute favourite has to be "The Delayed Exit of Claude and Eustace". (Every time Eustace is mentioned, I keep thinking "There once was a boy named Eustace Wooster, and he almost deserved it" 😆) The twins, who are supposed to be on the way to South Africa, stay in London to fight over a girl who can't stand either of them. Bertie has to try to get them to leave while keeping the family (especially Aunt Agatha) from learning where they are. And of course Jeeves comes along with an excellent solution that leaves the readers in stitches 😆😆

If you want original, unique plots, this definitely isn't the book for you. But if you want to roar with laughter at every line, this is the perfect book to read!

Is it available online?: Yes, on Gutenberg.

Rating: 8/10.

Review: A Damsel in Distress (novel)

I recently discovered a website called DailyLit. It emails daily installments of novels to its users, and it has a wide range of (mostly free) novels to choose from. I selected this one to start with because it's P. G. Wodehouse, and therefore guaranteed to be hilarious.

A Damsel in Distress was first published in 1919. It involves a case of mistaken identity, a match-making stepmother, an earl who prefers gardening to writing his family history, a walk through a ditch, and many more amusing characters and incidents. It's been adapted to film at least twice, and one of the film adaptations was turned into a stage musical in 2015.

P. G. Wodehouse's books are easy to recognise because so many of them use similar plots. Unlike many authors, he managed to turn this into part of the charm of his writing. It doesn't matter that basically every book has the same cast of characters with names and roles changed; the stories are still amusing and still manage to be original.

A Damsel in Distress revolves around the chaos that ensues when George Bevan falls in love at first sight with Maud, daughter of Lord Marshmoreton. Maud's already in love with a man she hasn't seen for over a year. Her aunt wants her to marry her step-cousin Reggie, who's in love with Alice, Maud's father's secretary. Maud's brother Percy mistakes George for the man she met a year ago, and sets out to foil their "relationship". As if that wasn't complicated enough, the servants have a betting pool on who Maud will marry, and they'll do anything, even destroy letters, to get her to marry whichever man they're betting on.

It's exactly as hilarious as it sounds. I couldn't even wait for the daily installments to arrive; I went to Gutenberg and read the rest of the book there. An hour later I'd finished it, and I had a stitch in my side from laughing so hard. The misunderstandings and tangled relationships are funny enough on their own, but when described with some of the best humourous writing in the English language, they become absolutely priceless. Take, for example, this excerpt about Percy's walk through a ditch:

There is nothing half-hearted about these ditches which accompany English country roads. They know they are intended to be ditches, not mere furrows, and they behave as such. The one that sheltered Lord Belpher was so deep that only his head and neck protruded above the level of the road, and so dirty that a bare twenty yards of travel was sufficient to coat him with mud. Rain, once fallen, is reluctant to leave the English ditch. It nestles inside it for weeks, forming a rich, oatmeal-like substance which has to be stirred to be believed. Percy stirred it. He churned it. He ploughed and sloshed through it. The mud stuck to him like a brother.

And this is only one short paragraph in a book full of hilarity. To quote Cranford, "I defy you not to roar."

If you need a book guaranteed to cheer you up, or if you just want to read something light and amusing, I definitely recommend this book!

Is it available online?: Yes, on Gutenberg as well as DailyLit.

Rating: 10/10.

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.