Well, I had a feeling that I wanted to read something a bit more light and fun this week, so I decided to take a look at My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. I've covered Right Ho, Jeeves in the past after I bought a giant Wodehouse collection, and I was surprised to discover that Right Ho is actually the sixth book in the series!
My Man Jeeves is the first book, published in 1919, and collecting stories published from 1911 through 1917, and that's the source of a big surprise, at least for me!
Because the 1911-1913 stories actually star a Bertie Wooster-lookalike named Reggie Pepper, and there's no Jeeves to be found! The book isn't even published in order of publication, giving me three solid Jeeves stories and then, without warning, throwing four Reggie Pepper stories at me before finishing with one last Jeeves and Wooster.
Fortunately, Reggie has much of the same charm and delightful conversational style of Bertie, though without the emergency brake that is Jeeves, and his stories are quite good, too.
They're fun and light and quite funny, taking good chunks of dry and silly British humor and adding a pinch of the absurd and a few healthy pokes at the posh.
If you've ever seen the TV show (and if you like British humor, you should!), you can almost hear both of them in Hugh Laurie's voice.
My two favorite stories were "Leave It to Jeeves," for the spectacular way in which Jeeves's first plan backfires (it's really something to see), and "Absent Treatment" for the comic farcical detective story that Wodehouse tucked into it. "Rallying Around Old George" gets an honorable mention for how Wodehouse develops a situation of pure chaos and handles it deftly.
My two least favorites were "Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest" for having a very flimsy conclusion, and "Helping Freddie" for much the same reason.
All in all, it was a very good read and highly recommended for fans of Jeeves and Wooster or British humor in general. I loved seeing how things started out before Wodehouse had really fleshed out the characters.
For more details on the individual stories, see the appropriate chapters in the embedded video.
Since My Man Jeeves was published in 1919, it's free to read now! You can grab a copy here.
No comments:
Post a Comment