I thought it was time for another Wodehouse book… Have I mentioned how much I like the Everyman edition series? The format, the typography, the paper, the binding — everything is perfect. Except the artwork on the dust covers. It’s all by somebody called Andrzej Klimowski, and they’re all naff. They mostly look pretty slapdash (even if the colours are often pretty attractive), and this one even has a pretty unfortunate subject matter. And it’s not even depicting a major scene in the novel.
The novel, though, is very funny. It takes an unusual amount of time for Wodehouse to get his ducks in a row — over a hundred pages — but when he finally gets everybody installed at the country estate, we get some of the most insane scenes Wodehouse has ever written. So many characters, and so many twists, and so much funny repartee. I LOL-ed out loud several times.
There’s also rare meta moments, like when Lady Constance starts pondering why their estate always seems to be beset by impostors, or when the narrator talks about coincidences…
I wonder whether this was ever adapted for the screen? They’d have to cut down the number of characters to about a third, I think, for it to work, but there’s so many funny scenes.
Nope, just a radio adaptation and:
Scenes from the novel were adapted in the first episode of the second series of the Blandings television series, “Throwing Eggs”, which first aired on 16 February 2014.
Uncle Fred in the Springtime (1939) by P. G. Wodehouse (buy used, 4.21 on Goodreads)