A highly comic romp with the English gentry, you know, those fellows of Eton, living in Manors (and having impeccable ones,I am told), with little to do but receive social approval for whatever they do; all with the quietly dignified, prescient aid of their butler. Pleasant enough, but P.G. Wodehouse masterfully parodies the upper crust and their sometimes foolish pretences as he skewers one Bertram Bertie Wooster (A lesser man, caught in this awful snare, would no doubt have ceased to struggle; but the whole point about the Woosters is that they are not lesser men.); often through the verbal and psychological ingenuity of Jeeves, the almost obedient servant who masters the master (I fear, sir, that I was not entirely frank with regard to my suggestion of ringing the fire bell). <p> Wodehouse (who belongs with those other two-initialed humorists of the era, A.J. Leibling, S.J. Perelman, and T.E. White) created icons and, perhaps, an entire genre through Bertie and Jeeves. The dialogue is, as they say, splendid: Droll and dry, understated yet preposterous. Perhaps nowhere else have the strictures of etiquette been exposed with such wit: A touch of salmon? Thank you With a suspicion of salad? If you please. Wodehouse manages this satire through the first-person narrative of the object satirized-no mean feat, what? (You may find yourself uttering Wodehousian English phrases for a few days after reading this.) The plot is a bedroom farce without the bedroom, with lots of the usual twists and turns, but the ending is a little too neat. One reads Wodehouse, however, mostly for his delicious language, his assortment of odd, engaging (and oddly engaged) personalities, and, above all, his adroit sense of humor and timing. <p> Right ho! Highly recommended.
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