The Girl on the Boat*

It did not hit me until I had to remember the title of this book that there is one thing that I have not (and probably never will) experience that most of Wodehouse’s earlier characters have.  Namely this: I have never sailed across the Atlantic.  I’ve only crossed that ocean on a plane.  A good deal of action in the pre-1960’s novels involves sailing.  It has been used as a catalyst, throwing two people together, it has been used as a setting for the action and, in at least one instance, it has been a means of escape. 

While a flight across the ocean can feel as though it is taking forever, they rarely last more than eight hours.  During the portion of my life when I made the trip regularly, and wrestled with horrible jet lag, I envied those who were allowed to reset their internal clocks along a more civilized timeframe.  What I would have given to have arrived at port adjusted and in a good mood, instead of fuzzy and vaguely desperate.  It might have made my choice encounters with customs officials more bearable.  There is also the matter of one‘s fellow travelers.  I often begin my flights by looking around at my seat companions and resigning myself to being sneezed upon, or squished, or being talked at, or annoyed by screaming children, or some nightmarish combination, for the duration.  The feeling that I get from Wodehouse’s description of ocean liner travel is different.  There are many more people among whom one can circulate, although there are class divisions, so one does not have the free run of the vessel.  One also has the ability to hole up in one’s cabin on a boat, whereas on a plane you are all pressed together, sometimes more intimately than you would otherwise wish.

Then there are the diversions, the promenades, the dinners, the games, the sitting comfortably on board deck chairs.  On today’s planes, you’re lucky if you get a bag of pretzels hurled at you by a harassed flight attendant and for headphones that actually transmit the sound of the in-flight entertainment.  To be fair, I would probably be driven a little mad by the necessity to change clothes on a revolving basis.  That being said, my impression is that there were a lot more possibilities for plot developments on a boat, and Plum made use of them.  Although I have seen references to female characters being stewardesses in the later novels, I have not yet encountered action set on a plane itself.  Perhaps I shall make an interesting discovery later on, but it seems to me that there is not much scope for drama on a plane in the Wodehouse universe.  Maybe he did not like planes.  I can certainly say that today’s travel conditions have not made me a fan of them either.

*Read April 2015.  I’m slowly catching up.

The Problem with the Coming of Bill*

It finally happened; I’ve read a Wodehouse book that I really did not care for.  There were a couple of things that attributed to this.  The first that I encountered was the Domineering Aunt’s** taste for eugenics.  To me, it bought up uncomfortable images of the Final Solution and various experiments that were carried out by Hitler’s gang.  In Wodehouse’s defense, the book was written on 1919, when eugenics was a fad and possibly no one had any idea where it might lead.  Still, it was unsettling to see said Domineering Aunt refer to people as good breeding stock and consider that, once a couple had procreated, the male was surplus to requirements.

The other, larger problem was that I did not really like any of the characters until at least halfway through.  Basically the plot revolves around a young woman who drifts in the high society echelons of the world meeting and marrying a artist, or at least a young man with pretensions to being an artist.  The aunt approves of the match because she is beautiful and he is built along the strapping lines.  The young woman’s family does not approve and she is cut off.  They have a child, whereupon the man burns through his money trying to keep up with his wife’s lifestyle.  This burned me, mostly because I hate it when people live outside of their means.  The young woman comes across as dim and vain, which is guaranteed to earn my ire if it is not in a humorous vein a la Madeline Basset, Gussie Finknottle’s erstwhile love. 

There is only one person who comes through in the end, and that is the ex-boxer best friend of our leading man.  He is presented as perhaps not the sharpest of knives, but comes out with the most astute observations of the silly behavior that everyone indulges in.  Really, I could go on here, but it’s a waste of everyone’s time to review the plot.  While I realize that it is not the prime intention of literature to make you like the characters, they did not keep me riveted the way some anti-heroes can. 

The dust jacket warned me that this was Plum’s closest attempt at a serious novel.  I should have listened.  Perhaps he was too influenced by morality tales, or was trying out a gloomier post-WWI style so as to meld with the Lost Generation.  Whatever the reason, this will not go down in my annals as a Must Read. 

*Read March 2015.  Yes, I read two that month because I had to play catch-up from the previous autumn.

*She had a name.  I simply cannot be bothered to look it up because it means having to look at the book again.