This book was written a year before the great man died. It
is the last of the wonderful Bertie and Wooster novels and for me it is up
there with the Inimitable Jeeves as the best of Wodehouse.
Bertie discovers some spots on his chest and goes to the
doctor. He is instructed to go live in the village and lay off the metropolitan
life for a while.
En route to the
doctor, he encounters a girl Vanessa Cook leading a march against the
capitalists along with her love, the easily excitable and very strong Orlo
Porter. Cook once rejected Bertie. She is a firebrand and Bertie is now glad
that his advances were spurned.
Bertie calls his aunt Dahlia and she asks him to come up to
a village which incidentally is the home to Jeeves’ aunt too. He meets Porter
and Cook also at the village.
Bertie is given the task of stealing a cat so as to help his aunt win a horse racing bet and this leads to
many moments of laugh out loud, riotous moments.
Wodehouse is an author for whom no praise is high enough. I
become ashamed at my vocabulary or the lack of it when I have to describe him.
To write he is funny is to say the Sun is hot. His command over English is
amazing and the way he uses it is amusing and side splitting.
This is one of
his best books and there can be no higher praise than that.
Very highly recommended.
He should be credited with putting aunts in the league of the dreaded species, like mothers-in-law, or worse..
ReplyDeleteAstute observation sir.
ReplyDeleteThe crazy aunt has become an endangered species since His demise.