It’s a romantic farce that holds together not only by its skillfully constructed plot, but also by its author’s unerring genius for drawing forth character details, and by his evident delight in the nuances of the English language. According to myself, who enjoyed that very passage with my own ears, the whole book is a treasure. Harry Potter audio-book reader Stephen Fry, who played Jeeves on British TV, recommends one scene in this book as “the single funniest piece of sustained writing in the language,” according to Wiki. But in fact it comes right to life with humor that still draws chuckles, snorts, and belly-laughs galore. By all rights, it out to be as tediously, or even perhaps offensively, outdated as the desiccated corpse of an 80-year-old mayfly. In its style of narration, it partakes of the stylish slang of a British upper-class dandy riding the crest of fashion à la 1934. In its dimensions, it appears to be a trifling piece of entertainment. Its plot, similar to many other adventures of Bertie and his man Jeeves, has to do with mending two broken betrothals, saving an endangered marriage, distributing prizes at a boys’ school, and staving off the resignation of a supremely gifted French chef, all upon a summer holiday in the Worcestershire countryside. While some of the Jeeves books are collections of short stories, this one is a solid (though not very long) novel.
The actor gave just the right vocal touch to dimwitted playboy narrator Bertie Wooster, his brilliant but tight-lipped servant Jeeves, his pushy Aunt Dahlia, his thick-necked (not to say thick-headed) clubmate Tuppy Glossop, his weedy old school chum Gussie Fink-Nottle, and many other daffy characters. The latter gave voice to the characters in this book during a long, tedious road trip this week. Nothing brightens my outlook on the world after a nutritious diet of serious books on CD quite like listening to an audiobook of a Jeeves novel read by the likes of Jonathan Cecil or David Ian Davies. I’m interested but only so far as making sure that I don’t miss any of them.
Wikipedia has a nice list of the books it comprises, if you’re interested. The Jeeves novels are one of the few series of books I have chosen to enjoy without any regard to canon order or the order of publication.
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