Sitting in the Airport. . . .

[deliasherman]

Watching all the planes go by. But not ours. Ours is (I hope) winging its way towards Cleveland from Dallas, so it can discharge its passengers and turn around and take us to Dallas/Ft.Worth, where the airline assures us there will be a connection (eventually) to San Antonio. At moment of writing, the plane is 3 hours late

Comments

[kijjohnson]

Having subjected Wodehouse's completed oeuvre (even the lesser works) to careful and repeated examination, I concur. (Oh god, now I'm starting.) He was still a brilliant, rigorous stylist and plotter, the best of both that I have ever read; but I feel you're right, that his Breguet clockwork storytelling didn't move gracefully past the Thirties.

Terry Pratchett, absolutely. I have always wanted to write a Wodehouse pastiche, but thus far I have only gotten as far up the stylists' foodchain as Laurence Sterne (whom Wodehouse must have adored).

There's a Wodehouse/Lovecraft mashup novel, called Scream for Jeeves. Just saying.

[deliasherman]

Oh. My. God. I can't imagine. On further reflection, I think I can, and I want to read it. Any good? Let me rephrase that--is it as screamingly awful as I suspect?

[kijjohnson]

I don't have the book in hand (it's at my parents' house in Wisconsin), but I remember it as highly amusing.

At Amazon.

[movingfinger]

Older plane terminals: fiberglass scoop chairs, usually orange. Eames design, I think.

Wodehouse: No, the later stuff falls off sharply. (It just can't get any better than Augustus Fink-Nottle, newt fancier.) The later works on all Wodehouse arcs are too formulaic; it's not they're overworked, it's that he can't seem to spark them to life. Bertie's personality attenuates.

I have a Penguin, Life with Jeeves, which says it contains Right Ho, Jeeves, The Inimitable Jeeves, and Very Good, Jeeves. It's not clear to me whether this is Compleat---the habit of reissuing stories in differently-titled volumes has me bibliographically flummoxed. But it does have lots of Bingo Little.

Wodehouse was a genius with place names. "Woollam Chersey" indeed.

bookmama29's kid was recently reading Wodehouse and asked me how old Bertie is supposed to be. We figured

[deliasherman]

I'm terrible with titles, but I do think there are more than 4 Jeeves/Bertie novels--Bertie Sees It Through being one of them.

Your triangulation of Bertie's age is impressive. The Titanic is as good a guess as any as to the cause of his orphaned state. Or maybe they emigrated to Australia for any one of a number of reasons.

[movingfinger]

The Wodehouse titles (especially on these Wooster-Jeeves stories) are less than secondary, very poor aides-memoires.

But I'm sure there isn't a pig bit in the volume I have. There is a pig (mask) bit in the musical By Jeeves, substituting for the false fire alarm during which Bertie is sent off on a bicycle in the middle of the night on a fool's errand to get a spare housekey (everyone being locked out of the house).

[sartorias]

I find Wodehouse falls off after about 1945. I stopped collecting later ones, and just reread the early ones.

[deliasherman]

Which I shall do, too. What's the one with the pig in it? I want to re-read that one, as soon as I get home, with access to a library.

[sartorias]

Those are the Blandings ones.

[kijjohnson]

The Empress shows up in a lot of places.

[desperance]

By my count there are eleven novels in the Jeeves canon, and half a dozen books of short stories. (I do not claim my count to be comprehensive.)

"Bertie Sees It Through" - I suspect this to be a US retitle of "Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit", which is indeed a classic. I'm assuming "The Return of Jeeves", from what you say, to be the one where Jeeves is borrowed by somebody else? Hrrmph.

Later Wodehouse, yes, lacks the generative fire. He didn't change - at all! - but trying to be an Edwardian in an Elizabethan age put too much strain on what was always a fragile confection.

Later Pratchett, on the other hand, just gets better and better. And yes, I am damn sure he's intimately familiar with Wodehouse. The English comic tradition demands it, and Terry knows just exactly where he is and what he's doing.