"A Pelican at Blandings" by P G Wodehouse

Another Blandings novel. Once more Galahad, the younger brother of Lord Emsworth, must reunite  sundered lovers. Once more the antagonists are Lady Constance and the truly awful Alaric, Duke of Dunstable. Once more there are imposters. And if no-one has any plans to kidnap the Empress of Blandings, there are plans afoot to steal a painting of a nude lady that looks a bit like the fat pig herself.

So the plot and the characters are the same as all the other Blandings novels. Never mind! What makes Wodehouse adorable is the way he twists our common language into absurdity:

• "A man, to use an old-fashioned phrase, of some twenty-eight summers, he gave the impression at the moment of experiencing at least that number of very hard winters." (6.1)
• "Something had told Lord Emsworth that this interview might prove to be a difficult one, and it was plain to him that something had known what it was talking about." (7.3)
• "'I wouldn't marry him if he were the last man on earth.' 'Well, he isn't, so the question does not arise.'" (9.2)

One of the other joys of this book is the way he teases his fellow authors:

• "A stylist like Gustave Flaubert, with his flair for the mot juste, would have described her as being as mad as a wet hen." (8.1)
• "Thomas Hardy would have seen in the whole affair one more of life's little ironies and on having it drawn to his attention would have got twenty thousand words of a novel out of it." (10.2)
• "Like all authors, she knew that her output was above criticism." (13.1)

And one of the characters is called Abercrombie Fitch!

Selected quotes:

• "She belonged to the school of thought that holds that a nice glass of hot milk, while not baffling the death angel altogether, can at least postpone the inevitable." (6.1)
• "He switched on the torch. When he did so, he instantly became the centre of attraction to a rowdy mob of those gnats, moths and beetles which collect in gangs and stay up late in the rural districts." (7.2)
• "A stare that would have aroused the respectful envy of a basilisk." (8.1)

Other P G Wodehouse novels reviewed in this blog may be found here.

August 2022; 249 pages

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