Summer Moonshine - P G Wodehouse

After reading 'The Adventures of Sally' I really wanted to get better acquainted with Wodehouse again so was very pleased to find a pile of seemingly unread books in a charity shop - I bought 3, including 'Summer Moonshine', and leaving a few behind for somebody else to discover.

It's hard to find much to say about 'Summer Moonshine' specifically, in the nicest possible way Wodehouse isn't about plot as such, or characterisation - he has a set of stock characters - the vague parent, determined and pretty young women, formidable aunts, dithering young men, a cad, and a hero who may dither a bit, or may be the square jawed determined type - and then there will be romance and misunderstanding until everything ends up happily ever after. It's a time honoured formula and none the worse for that, the joy of his books is in the way he weaves words together; everything is a lovely joke - complicated, labyrinthine jokes spun out of seemingly nothing.

I first found Wodehouse when I was in my teens which with hindsight feels appropriate. So many of the characters are young and intent on enjoying it, problems are of the sort that will obviously be easily sorted - and never needed to be complicated in the first place - and everything will end happily which when I wasn't complaining about how unfair things were was pretty much how I saw life when I was rather younger. One thing I clearly remember about being 17 was the assumption that I could probably work out just about anything and that everything would naturally fall into place. Some of that confidence has ebbed away over the years - when I was twenty I had yet to be confronted with a leaking washing machine, or a leaking boiler, or a leaking water pipe (there's a theme emerging here, nature did not mean me for a plumber). 

Reading Wodehouse again now is comforting - there may well be an element of nostalgia in there for me, but his humour more than stands up to my slightly more sophisticated reading habits and expectations. If anything a better appreciation of how things are put together makes me respect Wodehouse more; he makes it all look so effortless when it clearly isn't - something that becomes very clear when I look for a quote to illustrate just why I find him so funny. The quotes get longer and longer in an effort to pin down the charm until eventually I gave it up as a bad job - all I can say is pick up a book and see for yourself, there are plenty of cheap second hand copies around and a few on project Gutenberg so there's no excuse not to.