P G Wodehouse. The World of Jeeves (1931; repr. 1988)

     P G Wodehouse. The World of Jeeves (1931; repr. 1988) Thirty-four stories of the inimitable Jeeves and his efforts to get Bertie Wooster out of the scrapes his gormlessness constantly land him in. The narrator in all but one is of course Bertie himself, and he is not nearly as much of chump as he appears to be. True, he doesn’t foresee the consequences of his schemes, or confuses wishful thinking with planning, and Jeeves has to intervene to ensure the happy e., as Bertie would say. But Bertie’s narrative style, his skill at presenting the plot points in just the right order so that we see what will happen, his comments on life and its vicissitudes, all these bespeak a much more lively, if misdirected, intelligence than Aunts Agatha and Dahlia give him credit for. As Jeeves comments in the story he tells, Mr Wooster is unable to deal with the Unusual Situation; it paralyses him; it turns him into a goggle eyed rabbit.
     The lightness of touch misleads in another direction, I think. Many people believe that farce is not a serious form of literature, and by serious they mean one given to proffering great insights and moral guidance. I disagree. Farce depends for its effects on a well-defined moral world view. Without such a world view, the farcical elements would be merely puzzling, or even silly; consider the datedness of the sex farces of the 40s and 50s, for example. We laugh because the characters in farce violate the morality and etiquette of their time. Thus farce is an infallible guide to the expectations of the society in which it is set and for which it written. It provides us with a critique of both manners and morals.
     The world of Wooster did not exist in real life; it is abstracted and simplified in much the same way as the Art Deco posters of the time abstracted and simplified the visual world. But like those posters, it shows us an ideal existence that is worth striving for. Bertie, with all his faults, stands for decency, good manners, kindness, loyalty, modesty, humour, and the innocent pleasures of food, drink, and sports. Not a bad ideal, in my opinion. Besides, the stories are great fun. *** (2003)