PG Wodehouse: Sublime Comic Novelist

It's always hard to say one novelist or another is your favourite. Ideas and moods change. Tastes in literature change. So does judgement. Comparing novelists in different genres is all but impossible.

I have no hesitation, though, in saying that my favourite comic novelist is PG Wodehouse. His Jeeves and Wooster novels are so entertaining and so cheerful that I envy anyone who has yet to discover them. They have a terrific experience waiting for them.

Many people know the Jeeves and Wooster stories through the excellent TV series starring the wonderful Hugh Laurie - star of the "House" series - and Stephen Fry. Both were perfectly cast as the two most famous characters Wodehouse dreamed up. Stephen Fry played the inscrutable English butler, Jeeves, to a tee and Hugh Laurie was the endearing and foppish Bertie Wooster in that series.

The TV programmes were excellent but the books are just as good. In some ways they're better because Wodehouse had such a wonderful turn of phrase.

The plot of each book rattles along. The settings vary between Bertie's smart bachelor pad in London, his louche drinking and dining club, the Drones, and his friends' large and gracious stately homes in rolling English countryside. There are occasional side trips, too, to the French riviera and New York.

The stories take the reader back to a gentler era of wealth and privilege when English gentlemen had valets and passed their time downing cocktails and avoiding marriage. Bertie constantly gets into trouble with the women in his life and men suspicious of his innocent intentions. Throughout, he is sustained by his coterie of pals and saved by his enigmatic and super-intelligent butler, Jeeves.

The wonderful world created by Wodehouse in the Jeeves and Wooster novels makes for a wonderful escape from daily life for the reader. It's not entirely unrealistic though. Wodehouse's gentle humour is all the more effective because he knows human nature so well. He skewers Bertie's weaknesses and those of his friends as well as revealing their passions, problems, hopes, fears and strengths.

In Jeeves, Wodehouse created the sort of ally we would all like to have in our life and on our side. In Bertie, he created someone in whom we can all see some of our own doubts and weaknesses. Jeeves is eternally unflappable and reliable. Bertie is eternally good-natured.

Wodehouse once wrote this - tongue in cheek - of his own style of writing:

"I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn."

It's a very good thing that Wodehouse wrote in his own way and created Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. It's hard to give a real idea of these great books but I'll end with an abridged snippet from one ("Right Ho, Jeeves") in which Bertie describes Jeeves' remarkable hangover cure, home-made to a secret recipe. He's relating its effect on him when he's spent a late night drinking at the Drones or elsewhere and is:

"hanging onto life by a thread on the morning after...The results of swallowing one are amazing.
For perhaps the split part of a second nothing happens. It is as though all Nature waited breathless.
Then, suddenly, it's as if the Last Trump had sounded and Judgment Day set in with unusual severity.
Bonfires burst out in all parts of the frame.The abdomen becomes heavily charged with molten lava. A great wind seems to blow through the world, and the subject is aware of something resembling a steam hammer striking the back of the head. During this phase, the ears ring loudly, the eyeballs rotate and there is a tingling about the brow.
And then, just as you are feeling that you ought to ring up your lawyer and see that your affairs are in order before it's too late, the whole situation seems to clarify. The wind drops. The ears cease to ring. Birds twitter. Brass bands start playing. The sun comes up over the horizon with a jerk."

Source: "Right Ho, Jeeves." PG Wodehouse. Arrow Books, 1990 edition.