The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

P.G. Wodehouse has been on my list for years. I've always enjoyed my run-ins with British humor, and Wodehouse's most well-known creations, Jeeves and Wooster, have the advantage of existing both on paper and on screen. I've also had several friends over the years speak highly of both the written and television versions of the duo. My bout of Anglophilia earlier this year, prior to my UK trip, convinced me that it was finally time to join in the fun.

Except I didn't get around to it until my flight home for Christmas about eight months later. But get around to it I did, and I didn't regret it. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Wodehouse's characters, Bertie Wooster is a young English gentleman, and Jeeves is his personal valet and right-hand man. Code of the Woosters is only one of many stories and books that Wodehouse wrote featuring the two, and it isn't the first, but I had no trouble getting into the swing of the story or picking up on the background.

I laughed the whole way through. The ridiculousness of the situation in which Wooster finds himself is made all the funnier by the earnestness with which he explains it to the reader. In this case, it involves a marriage (not Wooster's) and an aunt and a nabbed policeman's helmet and a cow-creamer, and that's about all you need to know. And Jeeves calmly and quietly helps Wooster extricate himself from that situation with an equally-matched seriousness...and an amused smile that is never once written directly into the text, but shines through the subtext at intervals. That hidden smile brilliantly complements that earnestness with which Wooster is weaving his tale, and I think this is what I loved most about the book. Wooster is the narrator, and Jeeves is the interested onlooker, and as readers we can legitimately step into and relate to either role. Combined with Wodehouse's wit and clever writing, it makes what is really a slapstick comedy at heart into something much funnier than the already funny surface story.

I'll probably pick up another book at some point in the not-to-distant future, and I already put a hold on a couple DVDs at the local library. I'm looking forward to more.