Something Fresh – BooksPlease

I wrote about my first reactions to Something Fresh by P G Wodehouse in a Sunday Salon post – click here. I finished it a week or so ago (I borrowed it from the library) and it’s made me want to read more of Wodehouse’s books. It’s very entertaining and amusing, indeed farcical at the end.

I did find it mildly confusing when I read that Ashe Marson, the young English writer looking for ‘something fresh’ to get him out of the rut he was in, was renting a flat off Leicester Square in London for five dollars a week and there was a later reference to the cost of something (I forget what) in dollars. Wodehouse to me was a British writer and wrote very British books and this book was published in the UK. So I had to look it up. Ah – Something Fresh was first published in serial form in the Saturday Evening Post between June and August 1915, (American), then in the USA in book form as Something New on September 3 1915 and nearly two weeks later in the UK. So some Americanisms appear to have survived.

Once I got over this little stumbling block I read the book without any interruptions. As I wrote in my earlier post Ashe and Joan Valentine are both employed to retrieve the scarab that Lord Emsworth absent-mindedly pocketed when visiting Mr Peters his son’s future father-in-law. Lord Emsworth under the impression that Mr Peters has given him the scarab has exhibited it in the museum at his family home Blandings Castle.

Alerted to the plans to steal back the scarab, Baxter – the Efficient Baxter – Lord Emsworth’s secretary, sits on guard all night to foil the thief. The result is pure farce, with fights in the dark, mistaken identites, crashing furniture and valuable china smashed – most enjoyable mayhem. I much prefer farce on the page than on stage!

I loved the language -just one example picked at random:

The Efficient Baxter was coming down the broad staircase. A general suspicion of mankind and a definite and particular suspicion of one individual make a bad opiate. For over an hour sleep had avoided the Efficient Baxter with an unconquerable coyness. He had tried all the known ways of wooing slumber, but they had failed him, from the counting of sheep downwards. The events of the night had whipped his mind to a restless activity. Try as he might to lose consciousness, the recollection of the plot he had discovered surged up and kept him wakeful. It is the penalty of the suspicious type of mind that it suffers from its own activity. (Page 160)

Today’s reading is a mixture of murder and farce.

Farce in the form of Something Fresh by P G Wodehouse which is brightening up this cold and frosty Sunday. I hesitate to write about it because the quote from Stephen Fry on the back cover tells me:

You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour.

But I will anyway. The aimable and definitely doddery Lord Emsworth absent-mindedly pockets first a fork at his Club luncheon and then a valuable scarab belonging to Mr Peters, the American millionaire and father of Aline engaged to be married to Freddie, Lord Emsworth’s feckless son.

Mr Peters is the opposite of Lord Emsworth, driven by his devotion to collecting scarabs, which he pusues with the same concentrated and furious energy that had helped him to amass his millions and chronic dyspesia. Lord Emsworth on the other hand is mild and placid, happy to bask in the park and gardens of Blandings Castle.

I can see it’s going to get nicely complicated as Freddie, Aline, and their parents, George Emerson who insists he is going to marry Aline, Ashe Marson and Joan Valentine (both employed to retrieve the scarab) all go down to Blandings. Freddie meanwhile is scared he’ll be sued for breach of promise by Joan.

Then murder from Susan Hill’s The Vows of Silence, the fourth book in her Simon Serrailler crime novels.

So far this is a gloomy book not just because of the murders but also because of the unhappy state of Simon and his family. His brother-in-law is diagnosed with a brain tumour, his father has started a new relationship with Judith a year after his wife’s death much to Simon’s distress, and adding to his sister Cat’s problems Karin, one of her patients is suffering from aggressive and terminal breast cancer. Simon, himself is unhappy, missing his mother, unable to understand his father, and quarreling with his sister. Add to all this a gunman apparently shooting young women without any motive, an uneasy, middle-aged couple starting a relationship through an online dating agency with their own individual family problems and it’s doom and gloom all the way.

The murderer is introduced in the first chapter, as “he” and switching rapidly between all the different characters (there are lots of them) and sub-plots intervening chapters reveal his state of mind. I don’t think it’s going to take me much longer to finish the book as it’s easy reading apart from the subject matter.