1929 comedy. All the couples are at odds, but more importantly, the
Empress of Blandings is missing. US vt Fish Preferred.
I think this book suffers, when read in isolation, from its deep
roots in the Wodehouseverse: Percy Pilbeam the annoying enquiry agent
comes back from Bill the Conqueror, and Hugo Carmody and Ronnie Fish
were both in Money for Nothing. One picks up who they are quickly
enough, of course, because nobody here is a terribly deep or complex
character, but I did find them more than usually idiotic even by the
standards of Wodehouse's stock roles, and perhaps a recent
recollection of their backgrounds might have helped get me in sympathy
with them.
What's more of a problem, though, is that Wodehouse has doubled up on
characters. Pilbeam is all very well, but The Efficient Baxter is also
here, and their jobs in the narrative (to interfere, to do things that
seem reasonable, and to be caught out and look stupid) are basically
the same. Perhaps Ronnie Fish and Sue Brown are meant to be the
Benedick and Beatrice to Hugo Carmody and Millicent Threepwood's
Claudio and Hero, and Sue shows a bit more gumption than Millicent
while Ronnie is prone to moodiness and pointless fits of jealousy; but
to me at least they tend all to blur into each other, with enough
material split between them for about one and a half Wodehouse
standard farces.
Apart from that, down at the individual scene level, it works very
well, with idiocy stacked on coincidence on idiocy until it takes
Galahad Threepwood (working on his surely scandalous memoir) to sort
everything out.