Carry On Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

You know you’re living your best life when you step up to the bookshelf to try and pick a new book and find yourself asking ‘Elmore Leonard or P.G. Wodehouse?’. Well, maybe not your best life. But it’s a very good one. Honest. The reading is certainly good.

   I started my P.G. journey with Jeeves and Wooster, thanks to the collections released by Hutchinson back in the late 90s. I picked the first couple with a rabid desire to devour them all, only I hit a tiny, tiny snag. Just a minor one, really. And it’s a snag that I guess no self-respecting reader should ever admit to anyone. So, here goes…the TV show was too good. Yup, you heard me. Welcome to the first world problems of a forty something, white, straight, English man. Do I read my next Elmore Leonard or my next P.G. Wodehouse book? Do I keep reading a book when the TV show with Fry and Laurie in has burned itself permanently onto my brain? I know, I know. Things are tough all over, right?

   I grew up watching those Fry and Laurie Jeeves and Wooster shows. I adored them. There wasn’t much else like them in my life. For a long time, that’s how I knew Fry and Laurie. Before Blackadder. Before their own sketch show. Before House and the inescapable avalanche that was Stephen Fry a few years back when he was EVERYWHERE. They were Bertie and his butler to me. I loved the pace of the stories. I loved the minor calamities they faced, week after week, with no major sense of jeopardy. I loved the way that show could send up fascists and rich people and cliché love stories with sometimes only a raised eyebrow or a mention of a certain lady’s clothing shop. It also gave me a minor fear of aunts for a while, but I learnt to live with it over time.

That fabulous show was the reason I started buying the Hutchinson omnibuses, only every page I read clashed with the TV series I kept in my heart. I knew the stories better than I realised. Which I meant I knew every twist, every kid pushed into a lake, every punchline and narrow escape. It also took me a bit of time to adjust to the rhythm of having Bertie narrating. That’s probably why I’ve found it far easier to take trips to Blandings, where Wodehouse sits at the keys and makes me smile page after page as he tells me of their latest problems. Which, I’m being honest, aren’t a million miles away from the sort of problems Mr Wooster might face.

   So, I hear you ask, what made me pick up the second omnibus and dive into Carry On, Jeeves? Well, somebody asked me. The answer is pretty simple. Sometimes, when your TBR pile is getting out of hand, it’s the unexpected books that catch your eye. I was looking for something completely different. Maybe non-fiction. Maybe darker. Maybe something with a ring of the abstract and uneasy about it. Only, there amongst the pile, was that bright pink cover. I’d been loving the Blandings books I’ve read recently so much that something made me think ‘ah, why not?’.

   I apologised very politely to Mr Leonard, promised to pick up Maximum Bob soon, and opened the first page of Carry On Jeeves. I found, to my surprise, that the book was actually a collection of short stories. I’ll read one, I told myself. Test the water. Only the first one flew by and left me grinning,

Fine. One more then.

I turned the page and, a few hours later, I’d polished off the whole thing. It turns out the short story format suits these characters far better than I realised. Once I spotted a storyline I recognised, I could appreciate how well the TV show had woven it into an hour of entertainment with another story or two. And when I came across a couple I didn’t recognise, I read a little quicker, my fingers gripping the pages a little tighter. Glee gleaming in my eyes.

   The shorter format means you can watch Wodehouse’s mind at full flow. You get to meet more of his cast of characters, as they appear in various stages of panic or begging for a favour. You also, more importantly, get to witness how Wodehouse can take a very set formula and begin to experiment, finding whole new ways to torture his narrator until a certain butler comes calmly, almost serenely to the rescue.

From a few simple starting points, normally involving an aunt and a situation you know Bertie is going to fall headlong into, you watch P.G. start to work his magic. His humour reads like music. Wooster’s narration is jaunty, friendly. It carries you into whichever house or dinner party he’s ended up stranded at, desperately trying to avoid either marriage or the police or being forced out of his own home to keep a friend safe from their own aunt.

   For the first time in a long time, the Jeeves and Wooster stories really swept me up and it was a delightful ride with a little present waiting at the end for me. The final story, Bertie Changes his Mind, is narrated by Jeeves. The story is absolutely brilliant. You get to see the relationship from the other side.

Jeeves can always be read as manipulating Bertie, from one problem to another, helping him but making sure he fits with the butler’s own superior standards. Here, though, we get to watch Jeeves tackle the problem that his employer has started to think about having children. A problem he faces carefully and, most importantly, kindly. He finds a way to show Bertie Wooster that maybe he wouldn’t like to be a father after all. It’s done with such affection that you don’t doubt the kinship between these two within the mind of their creator, and Wodehouse gets the tone of Jeeves one hundred percent perfect (as you’d expect). It’s not snooty or smug. Instead, Jeeves talks to us with the same level of thoughtful, incisive genius that you’ve witnessed him demonstrate so many times from Bertie’s point of view. Also, it has to be said, his plan for helping his employer reconsider his feelings on children is absolutely sublime (again, as you’d exactly expect).

   Now, I know I’ve said this before with Wodehouse, but obviously these books are never going to inspire revolution, apologise for troubling history or reflect a lot of society. They also don’t really have a lot of depth when it comes to the female end of the cast. They can certainly feel quite alien when you compare them to where and how we’re all living now. But, for all of that, there is real joy to be found in these pages if you can forgive it for a few social moments of short-sightedness. I’ve definitely found out that I personally prefer reading these shorter stories to the Jeeves and Wooster novels. So, if you’re looking for a way to try them, then this is a good place to get your grounding. Just, you know, don’t expect the sort of dark, brooding introspection that some books will offer you. Bertie Wooster probably wouldn’t ever read a book like that so I suppose it makes sense that he wouldn’t want to appear in one either.