September’s Wodehouse selection was The Golden Bat, which is set in an English private school. First published in 1904, it is one of Wodehouse’s earlier novels. To be honest, I was a little apprehensive about reading this one. A few months earlier, I had read The Pothunters, another private school tale (it is about a missing athletic trophy, not illicit substances. Wodehouse is nearly free of any references to illegal behavior, the main exception being violation of prohibition. From what I know about that era, it sounds as though everyone except the most virtuous violated that one.). The problem with The Pothunters is that pages and pages of short, snappy dialogue go by, and one generally does not have a clue about who is speaking. The vast swathes of rapid-fire speech zip by, and by the end, even though I knew there was an entire troupe of young men amongst the ranks, it could just as easily have been one boy having an extended monologue.
I chose The Golden Bat for September because I had indulged myself by reading Very Good Jeeves in August. The latter is a collection of some of the best Jeeves and Wooster stories, and, since August is my birthday month, I decided to treat myself. Being the good New Englander that I am, I had to make up for the pleasure by taking on a book that was not leaping of the shelf at me. Indeed, The Golden Bat had been sitting there ever since my experience with the pothunters, taunting me, as if it knew that I might be disappointed or annoyed by it, and still it did not mind, because it knew that, in order to achieve my goal, I had to read it.
I should not have been so concerned, as I enjoyed The Golden Bat more than I thought I would. It is still an early novel, with perhaps one more description of rugby matches than was absolutely necessary, but the characters of the school boys are distinguishable from one another. Wodehouse seems to have some obsession with the prevailing early 20th century stereotype that the Irish were all mischievous trouble-makers, which later calmed down in later works into continuous references to Pat and Mike jokes. That being said, at least these high-spirited lads were also smart and very kind-hearted. What I liked most about the story was that the boys all had the earnestness of teen-aged boys, as though every last thing is vitally important and that the choice of deciding who was going to represent the school at a rugby match against their dreaded rival was going to change the course of their lives. It made me laugh and then made me feel very old as I remember feeling the same way a couple of decades ago. What chilled me even more was remembering that, since the book was written in 1904, World War I was looming in the near-distance, and it was likely that most of the characters would have fought and a good number killed. Then I needed to remind myself that these were characters in a book, not real people, but I took my motherly concern as a sign that Pelham had done a good job making me care about them.
