JEEVES AND THE TIE THAT BINDS

Background: Published in 1971 (British title was Much Obliged, Jeeves)—when P.G. Wodehouse was 90 years old.

This is the one where: We learn Jeeves’ first name! (It’s Reginald.) (Bertie’s reaction: “It had never occurred to me before that he had a first name. I couldn’t help thinking what embarrassment would have been caused if it had been Bertie.”)

The action takes place at: Brinkley Court

Bertie accidentally gets engaged to:

• Madeline Bassett, “as mushy a character as ever broke biscuit, convinced that the stars are God’s daisy chain and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born. The last thing, as you can well imagine, one would want about the home.”

• Florence Craye, “as imperious as a traffic cop”

But she’s really in love with:

• Madeline: Roderick Spode, aka Lord Sidcup (“Our views on each other were definite. His was that what England needed if it was to become a land fit for heroes to live in was fewer and better Woosters, while I had always felt that there was nothing wrong with England that a ton of bricks falling from a height on Spode’s head wouldn’t cure.”)

• Florence: Bertie’s friend Harold “Ginger” Winship (“He had the...poetic look, as if at any moment about to rhyme June with moon, yet gave the impression…of being able, if he cared to, to fell an ox with a single blow. I don’t know if he had ever actually done this, for one so seldom meets an ox, but in his undergraduate days he had felled people right and left, having represented the University in the ring as a heavyweight for a matter of three years. He may have included oxen among his victims.”)

The task at hand: Help Ginger earn Florence’s respect by getting elected to the House of Commons in the Market Snodsbury by-election, recover the Junior Ganymede club book (in which valets write secret information about their employers; there are 18 pages on Bertie) from Bingley’s nefarious clutches (he wants to use it to blackmail Ginger), convince L.P. Runkle to pay Tuppy Glossop the money his father earned for inventing headache pills called Runkle’s Magic Midgets so that Tuppy can afford to marry Aunt Dahlia’s daughter Angela

Other characters include:

• Aunt Dahlia: “My Aunt Agatha, for instance, is tall and thin and looks rather like a vulture in the Gobi desert, while Aunt Dahlia is short and solid, like a scrum half in the game of Rugby football…Aunt Agatha is cold and haughty, though presumably she unbends a bit when conducting human sacrifices at the time of the full moon, as she is widely rumored to do, and her attitude toward me has always been that of an austere governess, causing me to feel as if I were six years old and she had just caught me stealing jam from the jam cupboard; whereas Aunt Dahlia is as jovial and bonhomous as a pantomime dame in a Christmas pantomime.”

• Mrs. McCorkadale, a lawyer running against Ginger in the by-election: “She had a beaky nose, tight, thin lips, and her eye could have been used for splitting logs in the teak forests of Borneo.”

• Bingley (formerly Brinkley, the violent drunken Communist temporary valet who burns down Bertie’s cottage in Thank You, Jeeves; apparently, Wodehouse renamed him to avoid confusion with Brinkley Court), “a smallish, plumpish, Gawd-help-us-ish member” of Jeeves’s Junior Ganymede club
  

• Magnolia Glendennon, Ginger’s American secretary, with whom he eventually elopes
  

• L.P. Runkle, a financier, “an extremely stout individual with a large pink face and a panama hat with a pink ribbon”

Bertie’s trials and tribulations include: Once again being pegged as a kleptomaniac after getting caught with Runkle’s camera and then his silver porringer (which Aunt Dahlia stole in an attempt to gain leverage over him, but Bertie tries to return)

Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s: N/A

First paragraph: “As I slid into my chair at the breakfast table and started to deal with the toothsome eggs and bacon which Jeeves had given of his plenty, I was conscious of a strange exhilaration, if I’ve got the word right. Pretty good the setup looked to me. Here I was, back in the old familiar headquarters, and the thought that I had seen the last of Totleigh Towers, of Sir Watkyn Bassett, of his daughter Madeline and above all of the unspeakable Spode, or Lord Sidcup as he now calls himself, was like the medium dose for adult of one of those patent medicines which tone the system and impart a gentle glow.”

Bertie fashion moment:
Jeeves: “Pardon me, your tie.”
Bertie: “What’s wrong with it?”
Jeeves: “Everything, sir. If you will allow me.”
Bertie: “All right, go ahead. But I can’t help asking myself if ties really matter at a time like this.”
Jeeves: “There is no time when ties do not matter, sir.”

Slang I’d like to start using: “one for the tonsils”; i.e., a drink: “I found him in the lobby where you have the pre-luncheon gargle before proceeding to the grillroom, and after the initial What-ho-ing and What-a-time-since-we-met-ing, inevitable when two vanished hands who haven’t seen each other for ages reestablish contact, he asked me if I would like one for the tonsils.”

Bertie gets no respect: “You must be as big an ass as you look, which is saying a good deal.”—Spode

Best Jeeves moment:
Bertie: “Shakespeare said some rather good things.”
Jeeves: “I understand that he has given uniform satisfaction, sir.”

Best bit of description: “Recent events had caused me to perspire in the manner popularized by the fountains at Versailles.”

Best bit of dialogue:
Runkle: “Girls will be girls.”
Spode: “Yes, but I wish they wouldn’t.”

My review: Four stars. As always, I love Aunt Dahlia, Madeline, and Spode, and this book might have the most satisfying ending of the whole series, in which Jeeves tears all the pages about Bertie out of the club book after they both agree that he should remain permanently in Bertie’s service. Awww.

Had I read it before? No.

Next up: The Cat-Nappers (the final Jeeves book!)