Spineless Reviews

This farce: so good

Ronald Fish loves Sue Brown. Hugh Carmody loves Millicent Threepwood. Ronald Fish thinks Sue Brown loves Hugh Carmody, but Percy Pilbeam is the real threat. Lord Galahad Threepwood is writing his memoirs, the mere prospect of which sends Lady Constance into spasms. Speaking of spasms, if Baxter doesn’t return to the position of personal secretary at Blandings Hall, which Carmody has filled since the unfortunate flowerpot incident, her ladyship will have one, or at any rate wish one upon Emsworth, lord of the hall. But Baxter is too busy stealing that manuscript, while Carmody steals his lordship’s prize pig; or did Sir Gregory steal the animal, to distract from Pilbeam, under his employ, finding those damn memoirs that he too wants destroyed? Well, over all this nonsense presides the woolgathering Lord Emsworth; or at least he would, if Lady Constance didn’t try to do it for him. Besides, everyone knows Beach the butler is really in charge. But now, suddenly, he’s hiding the pig and saving the manuscript and matchmaking the couple and fixing the drinks: something has to give.

Being spontaneously farcical is easy, as almost every character in Summer Lighting proves to him or herself sooner or later. Composing and executing the perfect farce as a writer, however, takes skill, effort and an innate recognition of the perfect balance of all your characters’ desires and detractions against each other. The result of Wodehouse’s hard work whizzes round at breakneck pace like a crazed fairground ride, out of control and with the glorious, whirring machinery just visible as it pirouettes its way down the hillside into the lake. The stored energy is released in a rush, and what could have been a foolish throwaway holiday read is both that and a complicated, enjoyable firework display.

The novel is eventually, easily, discarded. Of course: that’s the point. But the short stories accompanying the novel, bound together in an out-of-print Heron edition, are a little too easily forgotten. The series, based around Lord Emsworth and his wayward son Freddie, disappoints. Each one’s brevity reduces the possibility of complexity and energy that makes Wodehouse worth reading. You don’t see the three chapters of winding up and clicking pieces in place; then any unwinding happens all too quickly and the pace is all wrong. Still, Wodehouse’s writing still bangs a gong for a genre often condemned for its shallowness and silliness. Or was that Beach, calling us in for another course?

posted at: 20:21 | path: / w / wodehouse_pelham_grenville | permanent link to this entry

What a terrible mess we’ve gotten in

Laughing Gas, by P. G. Wodehouse

£9.99, Everyman (2001)

Earl Reginald “Reggie” Havershot, dispatched to America against his will in order to save his dypsomaniac cousin from the clutches of both liquor and the woman to which he wishes to become engaged, finds himself in the same dentist’s waiting room as child star Joey Cooley. Both are to have a tooth out, and both find themselves under general anaesthetic in adjoining surgeries. But Reggie wakes up horrified to find that he and young Cooley have somehow swapped bodies during the otherwise routine clinical process of tooth extraction. Cooley, he soon finds out, is bolting around the place in the bulky body of the aristocrat bopping the noses of people he hates, and the police are gradually forming a pattern, while the Earl is prisoner to Joey’s curls, his miserable schedule of pranks and public appearances, and the curtailment of his adult activities by the formidable Miss Brinkmeyer and the surprisingly sinister aspect of his fiancée, April June. As the scales fall from his eyes he soon realises: he needs to get out, get his body, and get back to England.

Wodehouse spends much of the brazenly hackneyed Laughing Gas perversely turning his own techniques inside out: a rescue attempt aided by the apparently friendly butler ends in a failure that Jeeves could never conscience; the lead character ends up (apologies for spoiling what plot there is) engaged, albeit not to the quite obvious disaster he sets out to court. Moreover, he happily shatters some of the golden rules of farces. To keep up the pace, they ought to resort to high-speed, physical dynamics. Characters hare around, fall over, drop into the shrubbery, are chased by thundering, brachiating Spodes. However, Wodehouse has prevented himself from resorting to such literal speed increases, as the Earl is frequently trapped against his adult will by Cooley’s guardians. The result is a very stationary novel, compared to Jeeves & Wooster, or even to the Blandings series.

In places this static method works: the tension of the Earl bouncing off the walls, as Cooley in the Earl’s body bounces his fist off his erstwhile oppressors with gleeful, childish and increasingly illegal abandon, coils and uncoils like a spring, keeping the story moving even when the Earl does not. But frequently it feels as though Wodehouse’s usually powerful stroke of farce is treading water. The great strength of Wodehousian fiction lies in the author’s ability to tell a cracking story, with sparkling characters, in which nothing actually very much happens; that the lack of plot is almost the point, or that the plot has a lack of a point. But plot is not the same as activity, any more than steel girders or a network of lead counterweights are like popping, fizzing champagne. The moral behind the relative flatness of Laughing Gas is: if you’re not accomplishing anything, it’s best to look busy.

posted at: 21:02 | path: / w / wodehouse_pelham_grenville | permanent link to this entry