This is the one where: Bertie thinks that Jeeves’ problem-solving powers are slipping and attempts to deal on his own with “the complex case of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, my Cousin Angela, my Aunt Dahlia, my Uncle Thomas, young Tuppy Glossop, and the cook, Anatole”
The action takes place at: Brinkley Court, Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia’s house in Worcestershire (near the town of Market Snodsbury)
Bertie accidentally gets engaged to: Madeline Bassett—or, as he refers to her, “the Bassett” (“I don’t want to wrong anybody, so I won’t go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don’t sometimes feel that the stars are God’s daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.”)
But she’s really in love with: Augustus “Gussie” Fink-Nottle, who is reclusive, obsessed with newts, drinks only orange juice, and “wears horn-rimmed spectacles and has a face like a fish” (“Nobody could love a freak like Gussie except a similar freak like the Bassett… A splendid chap, of course, in many ways—courteous, amiable, and just the fellow to tell you what to do till the doctor came, if you had a sick newt on your hands—but…I have no doubt that you could have flung bricks by the hour in England’s most densely-populated districts without endangering the safety of a single girl capable of becoming Mrs. Augustus Fink-Nottle without an anaesthetic.”)
The task at hand: Give away the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School (or, as Bertie says to Aunt Dahlia, “strew prizes at this bally Dotheboys Hall of yours”—yay for Nicholas Nickleby allusions!); mend the rift between Cousin Angela and Tuppy Glossop; help Gussie propose to Madeline; get Uncle Tom to give Aunt Dahlia more money to print her magazine, Milady’s Boudoir (she has gambled away 500 pounds playing baccarat in Cannes); keep the brilliant but temperamental chef Anatole from quitting
Other characters include:
- Hildebrand “Tuppy” Glossop (“In build and appearance, Tuppy somewhat resembles a bulldog, and his aspect now was that of one of these fine animals who has just been refused a slice of cake.”)
- Cousin Angela Travers (“This cousin and I had been meeting freely since the days when I wrote sailor suits and she hadn’t any front teeth, yet only now was I beginning to get onto her hidden depths. A simply, jolly, kindly young pimple she had always struck me as—the sort you could more or less rely on not to hurt a fly. But here she was now laughing heartlessly…like something cold and callous out of a sophisticated talkie”)
- Aunt Dahlia Travers (“If Aunt Dahlia has a fault, it is that she is apt to address a vis-à-vis as if he were somebody half a mile away whom she had observed riding over hounds. A throwback, no doubt, to the time when she counted a day lost that was not spent chivvying some unfortunate fox over the countryside.”)
- Uncle Tom Travers (“all those years he spent making millions in the Far East put his digestion on the blink, and the only cook that has ever been discovered capable of pushing food into him without starting something like Old Home Week in Moscow under the third waistcoat button is this uniquely gifted Anatole”)
- Anatole (“This wizard of the cooking-stove is a tubby little man with a moustache of the outsize or soup-strainer type, and you can generally take a line through it as to the state of his emotions. When all is well, it turns up at the ends like a sergeant-major’s. When the soul is bruised, it droops.”)
Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s: white mess jacket with brass buttons, which Bertie has brought back from Cannes. (To Bertie’s assertion that such jackets are all the rage in Cannes, Jeeves replies, “The code at Continental casinos is notoriously lax, sir.”) The jacket meets its fate when Jeeves “accidentally” leaves the iron on it too long.
First paragraph:
“‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘may I speak frankly?’
‘Certainly, sir.’
‘What I have to say may wound you.’
‘Not at all, sir.’
‘Well, then—’
No—wait. Hold the line a minute. I’ve gone off the rails.”
Bertie fashion moment: None, but he makes several proud mentions of having written an article for Milady’s Boudoir on “What the Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing”
Slang I’d like to start using: Bertie’s jaunty abbreviations; for example, “I could see at a g. that the unfortunate affair had got in amongst her in no uncertain manner. Her usually cheerful map was clouded, and the genial smile conspic. by its a.”
Bertie gets no respect:
- “Ask anyone who knows me, and they will tell you that after two months of my company, what the normal person feels is that that will about do for the present. Indeed, I have known people who couldn’t stick it out for more than a few days.”—Bertie
- “I wonder, Bertie…if you have the faintest conception how perfectly loathsome you look? A cross between an orgy scene in the movies and some low form of pond life.”—Aunt Dahlia, to a hungover Bertie
- “I am not pulling your leg. Nothing would induce me to touch your beastly leg.”—Aunt Dahlia
- “I might have known that some hideous disaster would strike this house like a thunderbolt if once you wriggled your way into it and started trying to be clever.”—Aunt Dahlia again, handily summarizing the plot of just about every Bertie Wooster story
- “Ass,” “maddening half-wit,” “fathead,” “greedy young pig,” “idiot nephew,” “treacherous worm and contemptible, spineless cowardly custard,” “abysmal chump,” “dithering idiot”—also Aunt Dahlia
- “To look at you, one would think you were just an ordinary sort of amiable idiot—certifiable, perhaps, but quite harmless. Yet, in reality, you are a worse scourge than the Black Death. I tell you, Bertie, when I contemplate you I seem to come up against all the underlying sorrow and horror of life with such a thud that I feel as if I had walked into a lamp post.”—a final coup de grace from Aunt Dahlia
Best bit of description: “Conditions being as they were at Brinkley Court—I mean to say, the place being loaded down above the Plimsoll mark with aching hearts and standing room only as regarded tortured souls—I hadn’t expected the evening meal to be particularly effervescent. Nor was it. Silent. Sombre. The whole thing more than a bit like Christmas dinner on Devil’s Island…What with having, on top of her other troubles, to rein herself back from the trough, Aunt Dahlia was a total loss as far as anything in the shape of brilliant badinage was concerned. The fact that he was fifty quid in the red and expecting Civilization to take a toss at any moment had caused Uncle Tom, who always looked a bit like a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow, to take on a deeper melancholy. The Bassett was a silent bread crumbler. Angela might have been hewn from the living rock. Tuppy had the air of a condemned murderer refusing to make the usual hearty breakfast before tooling off to the execution shed. And as for Gussie Fink-Nottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming him on sight.”
Best bit of dialogue: Madeline Bassett: “Don’t you love this time of evening, Mr. Wooster, when the sun has gone to bed and all the bunnies come out to have their little suppers? When I was a child, I used to think that rabbits were gnomes, and that if I held my breath and stayed quite still, I should see a fairy queen.”
My review: Five stars! This one includes all my favorite characters from the Bertieverse—awesome Aunt Dahlia (who, despite her bluster, is usually quite cheerful and has an affectionate relationship with Bertie), hilariously drippy Madeline Bassett, cringe-worthy Gussie Fink-Nottle, and Anatole, whose cooking inspires reverence and whose allegiance is the center of many Wodehouse plots. In contrast to Thank You, Jeeves, where most of the characters seemed to hate Bertie and I felt a bit sorry for him, he fares much better in this one, serving more as an inept advisor to his friends and family and an audience to the hijinks rather than as a victim (except at the end, when, as usual, Jeeves’ scheme to solve everyone’s problems requires a sacrifice from Bertie—in this case, a long and unnecessary bicycle ride in the dark). The plot was funnier, the characters were more vivid, and even the language seemed to sparkle more brilliantly; as you can see, I had difficulty restraining myself from quoting the entire book to you. This one is definitely required reading for Wodehouse fans and a good intro for newbies.
Had I read it before? Definitely yes. My parents own it (in fact the edition that I got from the Pasadena library happened to be the exact same cover and everything), so my father read it to me when I was a kid and I read it myself at least once or twice while growing up. But it has been at least ten years since my last reading, and since I didn’t remember how the plot worked itself out, it still felt fresh to me this time around. Wodehouse bears much rereading, especially when you are older and can better understand the slang and literary allusions.
Next up: The Code of the Woosters
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