Galahad at Blandings - P.G. Wodehouse

I had heard so much about Galahad Threepwood and Lord Emsworth! Finally I got around to reading about their exploits at the famed Blandings Castle.

Blandings somehow reminded me of the Udaipur palace, except that Udaipur palace is actually only a tourist spot. Blandings is a castle-cum-home to the wealthy royalty who don’t really work for a living. Anyways, I digress. Galahad and Lord Emsworth are quite the brother-in-arms, the smarter one looking out for the loonier one. And at the scenic, apparently blissful locale of the Blandings a scheme is on the way to rob Lord Emsworth of his happiness. And between the baleful sister and the successful execution of her fiendish plans lies the gallant Galhad; the protector of hapless brothers!

Ofcourse the plot is not as simple as that. To start with, there is the wealthy American Tipton Plimsoll who wants to marry Galahad’s niece, the naïve (read dumb) but good looking girl of yore who is easily molded the way her mother wants. And that can have scary implications when the mother happens to be Hermione, the vilest of Galahad’s and Lord Emsworth’s sisters. The sister, while being fickle like a confused rabbit about the worthiness of young Tipton, goes about meddling in Lord Emsworth’s life. What with hiring him a nagging secretary, she plans to get her brother married off to some other equally atrocious woman. And the secretary, Sandy, once in budding love with Sam Bagshott who turned out to the son of an old friend of Gally in this small world was hardly in the pink of the spirit since her break up with Sam. Oh, and I totally forgot about Willfred Allsop, nephew of Aunt Hermione, is in love with the caretaker of the award winning pig at the Blandings Castle (I didn’t know pigs could win awards for fatness. Wodehouse even manages to teach culture through his books!) And there are as many misunderstandings as there are love stories. And Galahad, as he comes to the aid of his brother in need is also a soul who can not stand a heart pained by the loss of its love. So he makes a personal agenda of seeing through all the couples to their happy endings. Cupid personified for you!

The character of Lord Emsworth and the villainy of his sister provide a very good platform for a lot of chuckles. The story begins at a drunken revelry in America and ends in Blandings Castle just outside of London. Totally disassociated things like romantic tangles, the hand of the law and the obese pig all come together in this delightfully funny novel in which a multi-layered plot eventually unravels to the happy ending.