Review: JEEVES AND WOOSTER by PG Wodehouse

Original Publication Date: 1934

Genre: Mystery, comedy

Topics: Society, love, no good deed goes unpunished












Review by Sharky & Smiles:

Imagine you’re a pleasant, helpful, not very clever member of the upper class. Imagine your friends aren’t even that clever or that pleasant and helpful. And they keep getting into trouble and expecting you to get them out of it. Of course, they’re your pals, so you do, mostly based on plans your incredibly intelligent valet makes up. Same thing applies when you mess everything up and get into even deeper trouble.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster, needlessly overcomplicating a simple problem.

Simple problem you say? Now imagine if X loves Y but can’t meet Y so Z goes to make sure Y doesn’t get stolen away by Y’s charming guest while pretending to be A because A is engaged to B and B’s relatives are expecting A to visit and A can’t make it.

... what...

That’s the BASE plot of the book we read. It just gets worse from there until everything collapses on itself like an abused soufflé. Somehow into a happy ending.

The pattern is broadly the same in each book in the series, but they’re all uniquely absurd in their own ways. The nice thing is you can probably just grab any Jeeves and Wooster book (and there’s a lot of them) and enjoy it as a stand-alone, without having to worry about sequence or whether you have to read five other things to know what’s going on.

You’ll likely never know quite what’s going on anyway, and that’s the fun of it. It’s another one of those wild rides where you just have to trust the author. And if you can’t do that, if you keep stopping to roll your eyes or object to how silly things are getting, you don’t enjoy. These are SILLY books. So silly. Complete, absurd, slapstick, screwball comedy narrated with a style I’m completely in love with.

Remember what we said about Hitchiker’s Guide being weird with amazing narration? This is very like that, but without the freedom of weirdness of being set in space among aliens. And if you think a non-magical, non-alien setting doesn’t give you much leeway to be silly and strange, boy are you wrong.

The characters are more like caricatures, the plots are basically ridiculous, and the narration keeps going off on its own tangents in the most amusing ways. Great descriptions, run on confusions and liberal use of ‘dash it all!’

I’m 100% behind the way things are narrated. But I tend to lose patience with the characters sometimes, they’re all such idiots. They’re supposed to be but that doesn’t always help.

I caught Sharky yelling oh my God just tell the truth already at the book.

Oh my God just tell the truth already it’s not that hard but you’re making it harder what is happening why is nobody making any sense.

It got worse for him when someone tried to tell the truth, it got over-exaggerated by someone else, and now nobody believes the original truth.

WHAT IS HAPPENING WHY IS NOBODY MAKING ANY SENSE.

But that’s why you have to hold on and just trust the author. Everything has to go horribly for the main character, Bertie, before things can get better for anyone else, and always in the most ridiculous ways. It would almost be tragic if it wasn’t so funny.

Unlike Sharky, Jeeves is actually helpful. And objectively the smartest person in every book.

But even the stupidest characters can be really sarcastic and witty, even if Bertie can never quote anything properly even when he’s trying to act clever.

Someone somewhere once said something very profound about comedy and tragedy being the same. Kind of. Broadly. Probably.

Now you know what to expect when Bertie quotes anything.

I like the setting. There’s something nice about spending time in a little bubble where the biggest problem tends to be ‘my aunt is angry at me and she’s very scary’. It reminds me of those books where kids could have adventures because they didn’t really have to worry about anything else. Despite the fact that these books are set between wars and during, we’re in a sunny little patch where things are good, money- and status-wise, but love and family is confusing and people are unreasonable and sometimes there isn’t time to dress for dinner and you feel out of place.

Just so you know, Smiles has been shaking in place, trying not to spend the entire review just spouting off quotations rather than talking about the book.

I just want to quote so many things! ... which I do with every book. Tell you what, between this review and the next one, we’ll do a mid-week upload with a quote from each of the books we’ve reviewed!

Wha- we didn’t discuss that!

Oh Sharky, when do I ever discuss what we’re going to do with you?




Download Right Ho, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse at Project Gutenberg|Librivox