The Clicking of Cuthbert

I recently listened to this book on audio and found it extremely humourous! There are multiple short stories, all surrounding golf with love and the advancement of life. References to play and equipment are very old, referring to niblicks and mashies rather than current club names. This is a great read for anyone who loves golf, humor, and a touch of the original game.

I am not a golfer. The appeal of hitting a little white ball with a bent stick and then chasing after it eludes me. So why would I read a collection of golfing tales? The answer can be summed up in one word: Wodehouse. P.G. Wodehouse is, hands down, the funniest author I have ever read. This book contains ten golf-related short stories featuring a typical assortment of Wodehouse-style characters: likable, good-hearted, but often clueless and bumbling. As usual, love (or the hope of love) is the impetus of the plots and many misunderstandings and hilarious high jinks quickly ensue. Oh, if only real-life romance were this much fun! If you are a fan of screwball comedy or classic Brit-coms, you'll probably enjoy this book--even if you don't enjoy golf.

Can anyone find new sources of humor in golf? Certainly, it takes a great humorist to do so. P.G. Wodehouse pulled off this feat by combining an obvious love for the game with sense of irony about the humiliations that golfers experience for their sport, a subtle mix of love and how golf can complicate that emotion, and a hilariously overbearing narrator who is obviously the biggest windbag in the golf club. Be sure to read the book's foreword in which P.G. Wodehouse describes how he was taken by golf. As the Clicking of Cuthbert opens, a young man is about to give away his clubs and quit golf. The Oldest Member relates to the young man The Clicking of Cuthbert in which an earnest young golfer in love finds the way to his beloved's heart through a most circuitous detour through the drawing room to discuss literature. A Woman Is Only a Woman explores how falling for the wrong woman (one who doesn't care for golf) can blight life and friendship. A Mixed Threesome shows how the judicious man is careful to whom he introduces his fiancée . . . while looking at the pleasures of golf compared to the pleasures of marriage. It's very funny. In Sundered Hearts, a misunderstanding about golf leads to a marriage and a marital mishap. In The Salvation of George Mackintosh, Wodehouse looks at the awful pest . . . the non-stop-talking golfer. In Ordeal by Golf, that old tradition of doing business on the course takes a predictable turn as two men fight it out for advancement by playing with the boss. The Long Hole looks at both the potential for cross-country golf to be an adventure and the trickiness of the rules. The Heel of Achilles looks at the role of confidence in building up the golfer. The Rough Stuff returns to an old theme of Wodehouse's, the need to let your emotions go to make contact with the heart of the one you love. The Coming of Gowf is a writer's fantasy about creating a fanciful golf story. Anyone who has ever struggled with an editor will be laughing for days. Fore!!

Many of these golf stories are not above average Wodehouse humor--but that's funny enough! The title story alone is worth the price; it's very clever, very funny, and one of his best little gems. Cuthbert is having trouble competing with a local literary light for the attention of a fair maid, until a bigger foreign literary light comes to put the local novelist in the shade. Vladimir Brusiloff's character is a marvelous caricature of the deep, dark, dismal Russian novelist; his systematic self-promotion by tearing down the reputations of other literary lights with lightning-bolt rapier thrusts (which at the same time humiliate Cuthbert's local rival) is ingeniously funny. In the end, an unexpected enthusiam proclaimed pontifically by the visiting literary lion enables Cuthbert's prowess in the great game of golf to trump the literary pretensions of his local rival in the great game of love. The elegant, inexpensive Overlook Press hardback edition is a "best buy."

Probably most famous for his Jeeves and Wooster books, P.G. Wodehouse was an avid golfer. 'The Clicking of Cuthbert' was the first of two books Wodehouse wrote about golf (the other being 'The Heart of a Goof'). It was originally published in the US as "Golf Without Tears" in 1924 - 2 years after the first UK publishing. It's also one of the first books by Wodehouse that I read, back in the days when I did play the game myself. However while I have, just like the Oldest Member, long since retired it's still a book I can pick up and enjoy. Rather than a straightforward novel, the book is a collection of ten short stories. With the exception of the tenth, each story is 'told' by the club's Oldest Member. There is a common theme throughout the stories the Oldest Member tells - how golf is vital to success in every aspect of life. The last story, however, is my favourite one in the book. It's a historical tale, telling of the coming of a strange new religion called Gowf to the country of Oom.I think that this book would appeal more to the golfing community than to the uninitiated. There are certain terms and phrases specific to the game, which mightn't make much sense to a non-golfer and could possibly break the flow of the story a little. Furthermore, some of the terminology associated with the game has changed since the book was written. Clubs are referred to in the book as baffies, niblicks and mashies while, at the time Wodehouse wrote the book, the word bogey meant par. On the other hand, it's still a book written by P.G. Wodehouse - he does have a very distinctive style of writing and certainly appears to have a hugely loyal fanbase. If you've read other books by him and enjoyed them, odds are you'll enjoy this - regardless of your expertise on the golf course. If you haven't read any Wodehouse before, I'd probably suggest starting with a Blandings or a Jeeves novel.