Alternative Realities ~or~ Uneasy Money*

Since taking a chronological approach to the remaining titles in my Wodehouse challenge, I’ve had a sense of foreboding hanging over me for the past few months.  While I was reading The Luck Stone there was a claxon blaring away in my head, because it was difficult not to remember that, for all of their derring-do, the valiant schoolboys I was reading about would most likely be WWI cannon fodder.  That is, of course, if they were real human beings.

The odd thing is that, aside from a nod to Prohibition and the Depression, the real world seems not to have intruded much into Wodehouse’s novels.  This did not stop Plum from mocking the current political situation.  Earlier books have shown him to have a deeply satirical side, and the character of Spode in the Jeeves and Wooster novels shows that he did have a sharp political awareness.  It seems that our author only judiciously applied real world evets as he deemed necessary.  Take, for instance, the many trips over the Atlantic during the action of Uneasy Money.  This book came out in 1916, at the height of WWI, and yet there is no mention that it was a slightly dangerous thing to do. 

Maybe it was a method of coping with the situation.  If my memory serves me, Wodehouse was not resident in the UK during the war because he was busy with musical comedies on Broadway.  Perhaps the war’s horrors would not have been immediately felt at such a remove, told only through the newspaper and letters.**  A novel which overlooked the international situation might have well suited an isolationist US at the time.  Given that Wodehouse experimented with a few genres, I always wonder why he did not continue down some routes.  Maybe it was as simple as money, or what amused him.  Honestly, I could speculate endlessly about his motivations, but the simple fact of the matter was that while the war raged on, Wodehouse gave his readers a delightful bucolic romp to sink into, much like an ostrich burying its head in sand.

*Read April 2016

**I was living abroad when some fairly horrible things happened in the US, not the least of which was 9/11.  It is very strange to be so far away when such things happen in your native land, or at least I thought so.  I felt as though I ought to be doing something, although exactly what that was did not make itself immediately apparent.  Of course, I had access to things like television and the internet and could following developments as they happened.  I cannot even begin to imagine how receiving news at a slower pace would have felt.