Arunoday - The Rising Sun: Ring for Jeeves @ P.G. Wodehouse

Shashi Tharoor's favourite author is what I call him. Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born in 1881 in Guildford, the son of a civil servant and educated at Dulwich college. He married in 1914 and took American citizenship in 1955. He was created a knight of the British Empire in the 1975 New Years Honours List. He died on St. Valentine's day, 1975 at the age of ninety-three.

He published around 100 books. He created two of the best known and best loved characters in twentieth centuries literature in Jeeves, the ever resourceful 'gentleman's personal gentleman', and the good hearted young blundered Bertie Wooster. Their exploit first collected in carry on, Jeeves, were chronicled in fourteen books and have been repeatedly adapted for television, video and stage. He also created Lord Emsworth, the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, Psmith and the numerous members of the Drones Club.

P.G. Wodehouse said, 'I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether, the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn'.

Ring for Jeeves was 44th of 2020.

Only Jeeves novel in which his employer, Bertie Wooster, does not appear (though he is mentioned), and the only Jeeves story narrated in the third person.Set in the early 1950s, the story concerns Bill Belfry, Lord Rowcester, an English aristocrat who is in financial trouble. His future relies on the problem-solving abilities of Jeeves, who is temporarily serving as Bill's butler. Jeeves has been loaned to the former Bill Belfry, now styled the 9th Earl of Rowcester (pronounced just like “Roaster”).

And so we find young Lord Rowcester living in a decaying pile of medieval stone, desperate for a source of funds to plug the holes in the roof and to provide for his bride-to-be, a veterinary surgeon named Jill Wyvern. It’s all very well for his brother-in-law, Sir Roderick Carmoyle (Rory to his friends), to work at Harrige’s department store. Even Bertie Wooster has fallen in the world, to the extent that he must go to school to learn how to darn his own sox. But Bill wants ready money and fast. While Jill, Rory, and Bill’s sister Monica (a.k.a. “Moke”) think His Lordship is doing something for the Agricultural Board, in fact he has taken Jeeves’ advice and set up shop as a bookie, disguised under a false mustache, an eyepatch, a loud suit and tie, and the name of Honest Patch Perkins.

Things start to heat up when a beefy, red-faced, Anglo-Malay hunter named Captain Biggar wins a double at the horse races and his bookie—our own Honest Patch—finds himself £3,000 short of being able to pay. Bill and Jeeves flee, Biggar pursuing them nearly as far as Rowcester Abbey, where they doff their disguises and brace themselves for what comes next. What comes next is a farce involving a rich, house-hunting American widow with a taste for ghosts; a diamond pendant with a loose clasp; an old white hunter whose noodle has been so cooked by the tropical sun that he has but a light grasp of reality, though he never quite loses touch with the gentlemen’s code; an embarrassing relative who can be relied on to say the wrong thing at the wrong time; a horse race in which so much depends on an unfavored horse closing in from behind; a household staff full of pimply teenagers; and a tough old magistrate who makes up his mind to ask a neighbor for the loan of a horsewhip, only to use it on him.

Besides this, it is a romantic comedy with two couples whose happiness is endangered by the silly goings-on. It a crime story in which the culprit is more worried about making amends for his crime than facing the music. It is an adventure that gives full scope to the ingenuity of Jeeves, who not only knows what horse to bet on, but who can usually come up with a fiendishly clever scheme for dealing with sticky situations. Even when most strongly moved, Jeeves registers emotion by no more than a faint twitch of the eyebrow. Yet, somehow, there is a marvelous eloquence in his utterances such as, “Yes, my lord,” and, “Indeed, my lord,” and, “Most disturbing, my Lord.”

The dialogue sparkles. The protagonist’s nervousness gives spice to the high-spirited high-jinks. And if the narration seems to lack some of the unflagging zest of a first-person Bertie Wooster yarn, it compensates by making one think that the whole business would go off like a bang on the stage. This is well, since Wodehouse adapted this book from his own play Come On, Jeeves, co-authored by Guy Bolton. While it doesn’t have all of the magic we have come to expect from Jeeves-and-Wooster stories, it is filled with a perhaps more grown-up hilarity, based on more grown-up times, and speaking to a more grown-up audience.