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Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (always known as 'Plum') wrote about seventy novels and some three hundred short stories over seventy-three years. He is widely recognised as the greatest 20th-century writer of humour in the English language. Perhaps best known for the escapades of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, Wodehouse also created the world of Blandings Castle, home to Lord Emsworth and his cherished pig, the Empress of Blandings. His stories include gems concerning the irrepressible and disreputable Ukridge; Psmith, the elegant socialist; the ever-so-slightly-unscrupulous Fifth Earl of Ickenham, better known as Uncle Fred; and those related by Mr Mulliner, the charming raconteur of The Angler's Rest, and the Oldest Member at the Golf Club. In 1936 he was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for 'having made an outstanding and lasting contribution to the happiness of the world'. He was made a Doctor of Letters by Oxford University in 1939 and in 1975, aged ninety-three, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He died shortly afterwards, on St Valentine's Day.
P G Wodehouse is in a class, and a world, of his own. How have his books survived? Farces about chinless aristocratic young men with not a brain in their heads, no inclination to work, and a facility only for getting into the most elaborate scrapes don't seem like lasting works. But at Wodehouse's death in 1975 at the age of 94 his books were still selling, and they remain so popular that Everyman have with great foresight decided to issue all of them, in a splendid uniform edition - and here are four, two early, two late, and nothing to chose between them for sheer delight. His is gorgeous comedy, as unique as it is delightful. Wodehouse himself once described his novels as 'sort of musical comedy without music, ignoring real life altogether', and to describe his plots is not actually to say much about the books. For the record, in Laughing Gas a Hollywood child star and an English aristocrat exchange souls (Vice Versa again, but many times more funny) while in Heavy Weather the imperishable Empress of Blandings (a pig, if you ask) takes the central role, together with two prime examples of Wodehouse's classic battle-aunts. The Mating Season, one of his best, tells how Bertie Wooster pretends to be Gussie Fink-Nottle and gets entangled in the amorous affairs of Esmond Haddock and 'Corky' Pirbright, Gussie later turning up pretending to be Bertie. It takes the immortal butler Jeeves (who in Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit refuses to help Bertie because he disapproves of his moustache) to save the situation. But none of this is important: what matters is that there is nothing Wodehouse can't do with the English language, and not a line he can write which doesn't reduce one to helpless laughter. Long may his books flourish. (Kirkus UK)
