"Service with a smile" by P G Wodehouse

 Another Blandings novel and yet again there is a plot to steal the Empress of Blandings, the prize pig about which Lord Emsworth is obsessed. Once again there is a pair of cross-matched lovers and once again there is an imposter ("Blandings Castle had imposters the way other houses had mice"; 6.3). Wodehouse recycles his plots even more than he recycles his lines.

But you don't read these books for the farce. You read them for the moments when the prose turns into liquid jewellery.

So here are some of those selected quotes:

• "the large brown eyes ... had something in them of the sadness one sees in those of a dachshund which, coming to the dinner table to get its ten per cent, is refused a cut off the joint." (1.1) PGW doesn't just say 'she had the eyes of a dachshund but he elaborates; that's his secret.
• "South Kensington? Where sin stalks naked through the daek alleys and only might is right." (2.1) PGW likes exaggeration and likes to juxtapose it with the least likely comparison.
• "He had a face that would stop a clock." (2.1)
• "He, too, had lived in Arcady." (2.1) PGW isn't afraid of making oblique obscure cultural references and just leaving it at that, for some readers to appreciate, and others, presumably, to pass by.
• "Hell has no fury like a woman scorned, and very few like a woman who feels she has been tricked into entertaining at her home a curate at the thought of whom she has been shuddering for weeks." (5.2) PGW enjoys taking metaphors literally and stretching them.
• "She could, he estimated, be counted on for at least ten thousand words of rebuke and recrimination, administered in daily instalments over the years." (6.1)
• "The ideal person with whom to plot is the furtive. shifty-eyed man who stifled his conscience at the age of six and would not recognize a scruple if you served it up to him on an individual blue plate with bearnaise sauce." (7.2) PGW keeps the elaboration going by adding detail after detail.

July 2022; 224 pages

Here you can find a link to other P G Wodehouse books reviewed in this blog 

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God