Leave it to PSmith - P.G. Wodehouse

PSmith is at it again. As usual he is doing his good deeds for his friends, searching for adventure, and taking a slight deviation from the normal scheme of things, is falling in love.

And pursuing all these things, he finds himself in the idyllic locale of Blandings Castle. So you also have the delightful Lord Emsworth in the plot. Though the screen presence, or should I say, page presence, of Lord Emsworth is fairly constrained, he doesn’t fail to put a smile onto your visage.

Leave it to PSmith is an extremely entangled plot with past friends, burglars, imposters, secretaries, hen-pecked husbands, poets, and what not thrown in. There is no way I can get into that in much detail. It should suffice to say at this point that PSmith ends up in Blandings with the task of stealing Lady Constanance’s twenty thousand pound necklace. Before you start doubting his noble intentions and pass a judgement on his flawless character let me bring upon you the fact the benefactor of this little scheme would be his childhood friend Mike Jackson and his wife, and the wife’s genial step-father and Lady Constanance’s husband and the bumbling Freddie Threepwood. And if your righteous side still denounces the act of crime, I will let it be known that the original perpetrator of the idea was the victim’s husband who is kept on a tight financial leash by his wife. Now, if you ever did, I hope you do not sympathise with Lady Constanance. And it is a cause of great convenience and joy for PSmith that his heart keeper, his love of life, Eve Halliday should be camping at Blandings in the same period. Of course this is just the beginning. The plot gets infinitely complicated after that. The only thing that I can assure you off is that all of the threads are very satisfactorily tied together. The story is as gripping and hilarious as a Wodehouse novel can be.

A prominent change in the novel is PSmith’s name… which changes from Rupert to Ronald Eustace! I have no clue why that happened. I tried googling it with no satisfactory result. Well, as Shakespeare said, a PSmith with any other first name is just as engaging.

PSmith, Journalist - P.G. Wodehouse

The adventures of the very loquacious PSmith continue in his American jaunt which lands him in an unlikely profession of journalism, a whim exercised solely to keep himself busy while his childhood friend Mike played cricket across the American lands. Now you wouldn’t imagine Wodehouse to get himself messed up with Godfather-ish stories of the underworld, talk about the workings of the mafia and much less so, let his hero wander in the dirty lanes of crime. But that’s exactly what happens in this story.

Of course, the goons are not nearly as adept at disposing their victims as they would be in a, say, a Ludlum book. And neither are they equipped with weapons of mass destruction of any kinds. So the skirmishes of PSmith with them retain the characteristic Wodehouse humour. Whew! What a relief for the Wodehouse reader!

The plot is actually quite a few layers thick with several characters flitting in and out. And all this balanced quite finely in the storyline, which is in fact ridiculous to the point of being funny, but not so far as to be slapstick; a skill, honed and mastered by Wodehouse.

PSmith, ends up being the sub-editor of Cosy Moments when he accompanies his friend Mike, who is visiting US of A to play cricket. And while Cosy Moments of inherent nature was, as the name suggested, cosy, PSmith wanted to make it a smoldering cauldron of gory realities that surround us in the cruel world. So much to the agony of the staff of Cosy Moments, and to the reader base’s plight, Cosy Moments, among other things, started prodding in the sneaky happenings of a tenement scam. As it turned out the stakes were far to high, and PSmith discovered that he was risking his limbs, bones and hats in the quest for journalistic superiority. It would actually be quite a fast paced crime or a thriller novel if it were not written by Wodehouse. But hey, if you wanted funny, be glad it was written by him.

The book is quite a delightful package of narration, dialogue and characterization. This was the first book I have read where the Wodehouse’s sarcastically funny tone bites the American society. And if you can’t digest the easiness exhibited in the book to overthrow a power-soaked Don, you can just laugh it off. It’s a great book. Read it.