The Code of the Woosters (1938) by P. G. Wodehouse — novel #260

You can’t be a successful Dictator and design women’s underclothing. ~ a musing of Bertram Wooster; just a glimpse at the depths of his profundity
 

·      Author: P. G. Wodehouse (pronounced wood-house)

·      Comic novel, British lit

·      Published: 1938

·      My edition: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011 (eBook)

·      Setting: Totleigh Towers a fictional country estate in Gloucestershire, England, pre-WWII

 

Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, Bertie to friends and family, is twenty something, a bachelor, and idle rich, residing in London with his resourceful valet Jeeves. The Code of the Woosters is "Jeeves #7": stories that were serialized in The Saturday Evening Post and The Strand magazines. They can be read in any order. Wooster has a talent for getting in trouble; Jeeves has a talent for getting him out.

 

In this story, a desperate telegram from Bertie’s old chum Augustus “Gussie” Fink-Nottle pulls him into the fray. Gussie has fouled things with his fiancé, Madeline Bassett, and now the engagement is off, threatening Wooster’s happy bachelorhood, as Madeline was previously, rather irrepressibly inclined for Bertie, and is likely to re-engage, literally!

 

According to Wooster, she is a ghastly girl.

I call her a ghastly girl because she was a ghastly girl. The Woosters are chivalrous, but they can speak their minds.

 

He admits…

…Madeline Basset was undeniably of attractive exterior—slim, svelte, if that’s the word, and bountifully equipped with golden hair and all the fixings.

 

But…

She was definitely the sort of girl who puts her hands over a husband’s eyes, as he is crawling in to breakfast with a morning head, and says” ‘Guess who!’

 

Bertie is called to the scene, ostensibly to clear things up. The reader who is familiar with Bertie’s tact and delicacy cannot be hopeful, but for the knowledge that Jeeves will accompany. There are other complications, involving blackmail, theft, arrest, assault, and a second imperiled engagement of another Wooster chum.

 

It is all quite ridiculous, preposterous, and yet—in Bertie’s world—somehow perfectly plausible.

 

It is great fun, a great read, a laugh-out-loud read, with one minor detractor: I’ve seen it all portrayed flawlessly by Stephen Fry (Jeeves) and Hugh Laurie (Bertie) in the wonderful television adaptation Jeeves & Wooster. I wholeheartedly recommend both the written format and the TV series. If you read first, picture Fry and Laurie in their respective roles.

 

My rating 4/5 stars

 

 

This was title #29 of 50 for The Classics Club Challenge –Round IV

 

Much of the charm is Wooster’s first-person narrative. A female acquaintance compares Wooster to Sydney Carton, the self-sacrificing hero of A Tale of Two Cities. Wooster is unimpressed.

 

Stiffy Byng thought me like Sidney Carton. I had never met the chap, but I gather that he was somebody who had taken it on the chin to oblige a girl, and to my mind this was enough to stamp him as a priceless ass.

 

Or this bit of dialogue, when Bertie discusses a hostile brute he had to blackmail. This brute was the leader of an intimidating fascist group making noise in England. Bertie, through Jeeves, learned he was also secretly the prorietor of a women’s lingerie boutique. (Bertie speaking first, then Jeeves)

‘You can’t be a successful Dictator and design women’s underclothing.’

‘No, sir.’

‘One or the other. Not both.’

‘Precisely, sir.’

For the record, the “code” of the Woosters is…

"Never let a pal down"

Have you read The Code of the Woosters, or other stories in the series. What did you think? I bet you are not neutral.

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