What ho, old chap, and all that rot

[bloodygranuaile]

In preparation for our trip to France last year, I raided Project Gutenberg for a load of classic French lit and, in case I wanted something that required less brain, a bunch of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster books (these were on the particular recommendation of a friend who was also part of the France party). Sadly, my Kindle proceeded to die on that trip, leaving me stranded on a trans-Atlantic flight with nothing but the tiny tourist's book from the Comptoire des Catacombs. Now, armed with a new Kindle and plumb out of middle-grade white girl fantasy books, I finally got around to cracking the cover—metaphorically speaking—of Wodehouse's My Man Jeeves short story collection.

I have two minor quibbles about this book; mainly, about half the stories are about Jeeves and Wooster, and another two or three are narrated by another, extremely similar sort of character named Reggie something-or-other, who has a different (and less funny) valet. Secondly, despite only containing about six short stories, quite a number of jokes, tropes, and plot devices have already appeared multiple times, leading me to suspect that the Jeeves and Wooster canon as a whole might be even more repetitive than I had been already warned about. But since they're all quite a load of fun, I don't mind all that much.

As someone with a strong interest in dialect and slang, one of my favorite things about this compendium is the style. Bertie Wooster (and his apparent doppleganger Reggie wossname) is a particular type of guy—chappie, rather—and his diction is quite strongly rooted in his class, ethnicity, time period, and general fatheadedness. Since he is an upper-class English twit from somewhere around the Edwardian era, and the book is written in a chatty first-person POV, the whole book is infused with a slightly drunk, plummy tone that causes you to read it in an accent as thick as Marmite on toast. It's full of "chappies" and "old boys" and "rummys" and expressions like "full of beans" and all sorts of other Edwardian British slang that is just really ridiculously delightful to read. I could really go for a good excuse to read it out loud.

The plots, so far, usually involve Bertie (or Reggie) and/or one of their equally hapless buddies getting into some sort of ridiculous scrape, often involving either engagement or interruption in the flow of money from a rich relative or both, and Jeeves pulling out some brilliant scheme to fix the situation, which appears to go badly off-course at least once, but which further brilliance manages to coax into shape and work out unexpectedly well for everybody. Sometimes, there is a tense subplot in which Bertie does something sartorially offensive to Jeeves, such as wearing a pink tie or growing a moustache, in an attempt to assert his independence, but at the end he always defers to Jeeves' judgment, if only out of gratitude for his help in getting all the "chumps" out of their sticky situation.

I'm quite looking forward to reading the other Jeeves and Wooster books I nabbed from Project Gutenberg, and I may also have to check out the Jeeves and Wooster TV show, if it's still on Netflix.