In high school, years and years ago, a friend of mine read Wodehouse and,
on her recommendation, I read a couple Bertie and Jeeves stories. They
were ok, I guess. I don’t remember much more than that. Then a couple
years ago our local PBS station ran or reran the Bertie and Jeeves
stories with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie and I loved them, especially
Stephen Fry as Jeeves. So when I started reading Will’s reviews, bells
went off and whistles whistled in the back of my head but I never got
around to buying any of them. Then last summer, I was looking for
Virginia Woolf in the used bookstore and found Wodehouse instead so I
bought a couple. But I never got around to reading them. So last week, I
was browsing the shelves in my sewing room where all my books are stashed
and I found the books I bought and read one. And then I read another. And
then I went to the Large Chain Bookstore and bought a bunch more. Which
is to say, I am hooked. Thanks, Will.

Anyway, I started with Pigs Have Wings, a Blandings story
published in
1952. The Blandings stories have at their center Blandings Castle and
it’s owner the slightly dim Lord Emsworth. And the center of his world is
the Empress of Blandings, his beloved pig, whom in this story he is
fattening up to win the prize at the local Fair for largest pig. And then
there is Sir Galahad Threepwood, his old but rakish brother, and Beach,
his port-drinking butler. His competition at the Fair is his grossly
overweight neighbor, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe and his pig, The Queen
of Matchingham. And he employs Lord Emsworth’s former “pig man,” George
Cyril Wellbeloved, who smells of, um, pig and has a mighty taste for beer.
There are love stories, deceptions, mistaken identities, pig thefts and
general rushing about in the two seater that fill in the plot of the
novel. Summer Lightning, published in 1929, is essentially the same
with different girls and a few other characters. In fact, whole passages
are repeated at the beginning of the book, which gave me a weird sense of
deja vu. I suppose Wodehouse thought it worked well one time, why not
repeat it again.

The first thing I noticed is the language. His puns are merciless. I
spent much of the time reading and chuckling out loud, to my husband’s
annoyance. Sir Galahad Threepwood has some of the funniest lines I have
read in a long, long time. And the descriptions of the way characters
move or look is priceless. I thought about underlining them so I could go
back and find them later. About half way thru the Pigs have Wings, I
realized that Wodehouse had woven a pretty complicated web of
interconnection between the characters that he then was peeling back one
by one in the final pages of the story. You know the ending will be
happy, you just don’t quite know how he is going to do it.

I can’t wait to read Bertie and Jeeves.