There is a tense, sparse quality to Wodehouse’s early work that almost reminds me of Hemingway. I have noted before that the earlier works tend to have pages and pages of dialogue with maybe one of two speech markers. The result is that the reader (or at least, this particular one) looses track of whom is talking. When I am floundering in such a morass, sometimes counting backwards from the last speech marker, I wonder if it makes a difference to know which character is talking. Perhaps Wodehouse meant only to have a run of dialogue, demonstrating how overly worked up about everything his teenagers are, knowing full well that almost everything they are concerned about comes to nothing.
This is perhaps a bit too existential a reading of Wodehouse. I am not very familiar with the school yarn genre of the early twentieth century; it could be that they were all written in a similar fashion Certainly, in his later works, the author diverges from his earlier style. Children are for the most part only sideline players, sometimes the instigators of plot, but never, from what I can tell, the narrator or hero. Then again, Wodehouse wrote his teenagers almost as if they were adults (and, some can argue that Bertie Wooster is merely an adolescent in a man’s body). Another style development is that Woodhouse’s descriptions became more developed and lush. He took great enjoyment in similes, and could run a mile with a metaphor. One of the nice things about reading the works of an author who published over such a long period of time is becoming familiar with these changes.
There are two other, unrelated, comments that I had which are connected to this book. The first was that, towards the end, one of the prefects calls a group of students to task for bullying. Having been peripherally involved with the development of an anti-bullying policy for a local school last year, I almost dropped the book to hear about what we think of as a modern problem. From what I can tell, we all knew that bullying has been going on since time immemorial, but that somehow it has become more intense in our modern age. It is nice to know that there is nothing new under the sun, although still a little unsettling to think that intense bullying has always been a concern.
The second was a delightful encounter I had while reading this book. You never know who you are going to meet on the commuter rail. I have run into old classmates, teachers, long-lost friends and yoga buddies, to name a few. The most notable encounter happened one evening when I plopped myself down on a two-seater, next to a man who was reading a Jeffrey Archer thriller. That was notable enough, as not many people read Archer. He was more surprised when he saw that I was reading a P.G. Wodehouse novel. It turns out that my seat companion was the president of the Toronto Wodehouse association, and we had a wonderful ride talking about the master . It also turns out that he works with the company that will be re-developing the old coal plant site in Salem, a project that is near and dear to my heart, as I always approve of any project that will improve my native city. We also had a few other bizarre similarities, one of which being that his wife and I are alumnae of the same alma mater. It turns out that the world of Wodehouse holds many surprises and delights, and not all of them are limited to the text between the covers.
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