A Blandings novel. As usual, Blandings Castle, the seat of the Earl of Emsworth, is infested with imposters, on this occasion the Earl of Ickenham who is pretending to be a psychiatrist for reasons which escaped me. As usual there is a plot to steal Emsworth's adored prize-winning sow, the Empress of Blandings. As usual chaos ensues.
The characters may be thin (and too many - I lost count of who was who and why) and the plot over-convoluted. The joy of Wodehouse lies in the language.
Selected quotes:
- "Like all English springs, the one which had just come to London seemed totally unable to make up its fat-headed mind whether it was supposed to be that ethereal mildness of which the poet sings or something suitable for ski-ers left over from the winter." (Ch 1)
- "Nature, stretching Horace Davenport out, had forgotten to stretch him sideways, and one could have pictured Euclid, had they met, nudging a friend and saying: 'Don't look now, but this chap coming along illustrates exactly what I was telling you about a straight line having length without breadth.'" (Ch 1)
- "She was the sweetest thing that had ever replied 'Yes' to a clergyman's 'Wilt thou'?" (Ch 3)
- "'Who was the chap who was such a devil with the other sex? ... Donald something.' 'Donald Duck?' 'Don Juan'." (Ch 5)
- "You've got the stuff my boy. It's the penalty you pay for having an ancestress who couldn't say No to Charles the Second." (Ch 5)
- "Poets, as a class, are business men. Shakespeare describes the poet's eye as rolling in a fine frenzy from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, and giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name, but in practice you will find that one corner of that eye is generally glued on the royalty returns." (Ch 13)
- "He sat down heavily. And some rough indication of his frame of mind may be gathered from the fact that he forgot to pull the knees of his trousers up." (Ch 18)
Delightful nonsense. April 2022
Other books by P G Wodehouse reviewed in this blog can be found here.
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