The PG Wodehouse Collection by PG Wodehouse

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook collection of short stories and a novel. I'd already heard the novel, Right Ho, Jeeves, in a separate audiobook and liked it, so while I resented having to buy it again as a part of this collection (come on Chirp, think about what you're doing!), I was interested in the short stories. I now wish I had not been tempted because this was an unpleasant mess. The weird thing is that if I'd bought this first, I might never have made it to the novel because I was so put off by the stories preceding it.

Originally, I had listened to the novel with mixed feelings because on the one hand it featured the most appalling snobbery and privilege, but this was offset on the other by the absurdity and humor which softened those harsh edges. In this collection, there was no absurdity and little humor, so all that was left were the distasteful parts, and that didn't sit well with me.

Neither did it help that while Simon Jones, who read the novel I originally had heard, did a great job, BJ Harrison, who reads this collection, is nowhere near as good. Consequently, I was neither amused nor entertained. The stories included are as follows:

• Leave It To Jeeves (1916)
• Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest (1919)
• The Aunt and the Sluggard (1919)
• Death at the Excelsior (1976)
• Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg (1919)
• Jeeves in the Springtime (1923)
• The Man Upstairs (1914)
• Jeeves and the Chump Cyril (1923)
• Jeeves Takes Charge (1925)
• Deep Waters (1914)
• The Man Who Disliked Cats (1914)
• Extricating Young Gussie (1917)
• Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

Why they're in that particular order, I do not know. Clearly it's not chronological. The stories seem to have been randomly tossed in there, so there's no flow of anything. Several were not about Jeeves or Wooster. These included Death at the Excelsior which was a boring detective story, The Man Upstairs another boring story about a man and a woman living in apartments one above the other, Deep Waters about a man who fakes being unable to swim to make time with an attractive woman he sees swimming, and The Man Who Disliked Cats about some dude who seeks to have his girlfriend's cat kill her parrot so she'll get rid of the cat, which he dislikes. Those latter two had the potential to be truly funny, but they were not, neither of them.

I was seriosuly disappointed in this collection and do not commend it at all, unless you're getting it solely for the novel at the end, but I can't speak for that having not listened to it in this version.

Right Ho, Jeeves! By PG Wodehouse

Rating: WORTHY!

This novel, first published in 1934, is the second full-length book from Wodehouse about Jeeves and Bertie Wooster. I'd been sort of idly interested in reading a Jeeves story for a while, but I never got around to it, so when this came up as a discounted audiobook on Chirp, I snatched it up. I didn't regret it. It was highly amusing to me and quite entertaining, although there were some bits where it dragged, and it's hardly politically correct, given its antiquity.

Note that there is one use of the 'n' word (although not in this historical context intended in an abusive way, merely descriptive, it's still, through our modern eyes, abusive enough) and there's the usual sexism for a book of this vintage.

On top of all of that one might justifiably take exception as well, to the idea of the idle rich having so much and so little of use to do with it, when so very many have so very little and are in urgent need of more. Those things aside, I enjoyed most of the book.

The story is of Bertram Wooster who, fresh back from Cannes, is looking for yet more idle pastimes to waste his life on. He discovers that his old school chum, Gussie Fink-Nottle, needs help. The book is replete with oddball names, my favorite being Pongo, which is not a dog but another of Bertie's male friends.

Anyway, Gussie is pining for a woman named Madeline Bassett. Bertie refers to her as 'the Bassett' and I must have missed something (I listen to this while driving, which always takes precedence in any conflict of attention, of course), because when he started talking about the Bassett, I was convinced for a while that it was a dog he was walking. It took me a little time to make the right connection which in itself was another source of amusement.

Bertie is rather peeved that Gussie is resorting to taking advice from Jeeves, and this is a theme that runs through this book - Bertie's jealousy of Jeeves's respected standing and his accomplishments in terms of winning people's favor for seeking advice. Naturally Bertie tries to take over all of these situations, convinced he'll do a much better job, and inevitably ends up screwing things up. Thus he takes on yet another love affair, that between another friend of his, Tuppie, and his betrothed, Angela, and messes that up as well.

Some of the most entertaining parts of the book are those which feature Bertie's interactions with his feisty Aunt Dahlia. I was laughing out loud at several of those. She is such a force of nature and is so disrespectful and dismissive of Bertie, and utterly intolerant of idiocy, a quality with which he seems over-abundantly endowed.

When his aunt tries to tap him for the prize-giving at the local grammar school where she lives, Bertie is aghast and ends up managing to offload the talk and prize delivery onto Gussie, who shows up drink and is quite amusing. The whole event is reminiscent of a similar occasion in David Nobbs's The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin wherein Reggie delivers an equally irreverent and drunk speech at an event before faking his own disappearance. I wonder if Nobbs might have cribbed his scene from Wodehouse's original example.

All ends well, of course, so overall I really enjoyed this book and in particular the spot-on reading of it by Jonathan Cecil. It's possible to get this book for free from Project Gutenberg since it's now out of copyright in the USA, but then I would have listened to it via my robot reader and amusing as that can be, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as entertaining as Cecil's version! I commend this as a worthy listen.