Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse

This review is ostensibly about the first novel in the series, Something Fresh, but could be about any of the nine books in the series, which are all equally joyous and in some ways remarkably similar. During my last Wodehouse binge the penny finally dropped that the author had more or less reused the same plot nine times: boy meets girl, there is a mutual attraction, a complication arises, this is resolved – everything runs along the time-honoured and utterly soothing grooves.

Pleasantly reassuring though this may be, nobody reads Wodehouse for plot. The reason for reading – and rereading – Wodehouse is that he remains unsurpassed as a comic stylist. The annual Wodehouse prize for comic fiction is testimony to this, and part of the prize – a Gloucestershire Old Spots pig to be named after the winning novel – is of course a tribute to Blandings.

The comedy in PG Wodehouse can probably be boiled down to his gifts for character creation, farcical set pieces and panache for sentence creation and choice of just the right word. Something Fresh introduces us to the endearingly eccentric Lord Emsworth, whose existence revolves around fattening up the Empress of Blandings (the aforementioned prize pig). Other regulars are his formidable sister Constance (a force Lord Emsworth regularly fails to reckon with) and his brother Uncle Fred, ever ready in an attempt to relive his cosily dissolute youth. Their relative peace at Blandings Castle is regularly shattered by characters with names like Pongo Twistleton, Galahad Threepwood and Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe and high jinks reliably ensue – in Something Fresh these revolve around a valuable scarab that Lord Emsworth somehow manages to pocket absent mindedly and various characters subsequently try to steal back….

Most memorable moment

It is difficult to do justice to the perfection of Wodehouse’s style in a short review, but as an illustration here is an extract – more or less at random – from the first pages of Something Fresh, describing how one of the characters feels compelled to maintain his fitness regime even though he has to exercise in the street close to Leicester Square (a situation that now has a bizarre contemporary resonance):

The first time he appeared in Arundell Street in his sweater and flannels, he had barely whirled his Indian clubs once round his head before he had attracted the following audience:

Two cabmen (one intoxicated),
Four waiters from the Hotel Mathis,
Six waiters from the Hotel Previtali.
Six chambermaids from the Hotel Mathis,
Five chambermaids from the Hotel Previtali,
The proprietor of the Hotel Mathis,
The proprietor of the Hotel Previtali,
A street-cleaner,
Eleven nondescript loafers,
Twenty-seven children,

A cat.

They all laughed, even the cat, and kept on laughing. The intoxicated cabman called Ashe ‘Bill Bailey!’ And Ashe kept on swinging his clubs.

A month later, such is the magic of perseverance, his audience had narrowed down to the twenty-seven children. They still laughed, but without that ringing conviction which the sympathetic support of their elders had lent them.

And now, after three months, the neighbourhood, having accepted Ashe and his morning exercises as a natural phenomenon, paid him no further attention.

What more can I say? My only warning is not to binge too fast – it is important to keep a Wodehouse in reserve in case of need.