The Mating Season

P.G. Wodehouse's _The Mating Season_ is very entertaining. Wodehouse's wonderful, comic writing is sure to bring smiles and laughter. _The Mating Season_ is filled with hare-brained schemes plotted by the likes of Bertram Wooster and his chronies, disguises and impostors, and tales of weak-willed men, who quail in the presence of imposing Aunts and fall in love (in swoons) with precisely the wrong young women. And, of course, there is the resolute, unflappable man-servant Jeeves. Jeeves "shimmers" in and out of the book at just the right moments, devising ingenuis solutions to extricate Bertie and his friends from their troubles. As the other reviewers have noted, the story is intricate with four romantic plots and four characters--Berties, Jeeves, Gussie Fink-Nottle, and "Catsmeat" Pirbright--variously impersonating each other at Deverill Hall, an estate dominated by five Aunts. Bertie, the narrator, helps the reader keep track of the story by explaining to characters how things stand as the plot twists and turns. In the final chapter, Bertie gives the reader a final chart, hilariously assembled, of how Jeeves has managed to sort out "the great web." There are many wonderful scenes, including one where Jeeves literally plays the "deus ex machina" with a "blunt instrument knowns as a cosh" and another where Bertie, mistaken as a burglar, is nearly shot. There are hilarious, laugh out loud sentences like this description of Rev. Sidney Pirbright: "A tall, drooping man, looking as if he had been stuffed in a hurry by an incompetent taxidermist." Bertie's way of telling the story, peppered with latin phrases and exclamations of "Right Ho!," is always funny. For readers unfamiliar with Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster characters, I would recommend as a starting point the anthology _The World of Jeeves_, a great collection of Jeeves short stories. These stories introduce all of the major and minor characters, including the unforgetable Aunt Agatha. About ten years ago, my uncle lent me his copy of the _World of Jeeves_ before a long summer trip abroad. Not only did I enjoy the stories immensely, but my friends loved them, too. Living without TV for a few months, these stories became like episodes of _Seinfeld_ to us. I'm still "borrowing" my uncle's book.

Evelyn Waugh, a tight man with a compliment for his fellow authors, referred to P.G. Wodehouse as the Master, and nowhere are the reasons more apparent than in The Mating Season. There is never a dull moment as Bertie Wooster impersonates Gussie Fink-Nottle, Claude Cattermole ("Catsmeat") Pirbright impersonates the non-existent Meadowes, to appear at Deverill Hall as Gussie's personal gentleman (Bertie is impersonating Gussie at the time), Gussie impersonates Bertie, with Jeeves in tow, no fewer than four pairs of sundered hearts are re-united, as Bertie once again escapes the matrimonial trap, and Esmond Haddock, the landed proprietor of Deverill Hall, defies his five aunts to marry Claude's sister, the celebrated Hollywood actress Corky. With all this action and imposture, however, Wodehouse's writing is so skillful that the reader, with no effort, keeps the characters and action straight. There is, of course, time for Wodehouse's unexcelled magic with the English language. To put it more briefly, this novel provides one whale of a good time. Wodehouse wrote dozens of hilarious, wonderfully-written, and intricately-plotted novels. It is high praise indeed to note that The Mating Season would almost certainly rank in the top five in any poll of Wodehouse fans.

In a world sorely in need of a few good innocent laughs if not guffaws, there are always the Jeeves novels of P.G. Wodehouse. For those who spend too much time driving to read actual books, many of them are now on audio tape under the Audio Partners label and the latest of them is "Jeeves and the Mating Season" (61318), complete and unabridged. (Is that last phrase a tautology?) I have reviewed so many of these Jeeves books that I can only say they take place in a mythical time between the world wars when featherbrains like Bertie Wooster cannot survive without clever man servants like his Jeeves. Always intending the best and always creating the worst until Jeeves pulls him out of it, Bertie tries very hard to live up to the Code of the Woosters, a long list of chivalric ideals, one of which is that if a woman is convinced you want to marry her, marry her you must. So to avoid walking down the aisle with the most bubbleheaded female of them all, Bertie must make sure her present affianced does not desert to the camp of a glamorous actress. And so on. To reveal more details can only diminish your enjoyment of this romp, but I can give the basic situation. Gussie Fink Nottle (lover of newts) is engaged to Madeline Bassett but falls into the clutches of Corky Pirbright who is engaged to Esmond Haddock (a man dominated by aunts) and whose dog has bitten Constable Dobbs who is in love with the maid and daughter of Jeeves' Uncle Charley who.... Well, you must by now know the Swiss clockwork plots of Wodehouse. Suffice it to say that Bertie has to pose as Gussie while a chap named Catsmeat poses as.... Again, I leave it to you to sort out.And always remember, it is not only the funny situations in the Jeeves novels but Bertie's (that is Wodehouse's) funny way in which they are told. I got a good loud laugh about once a page as read by the wonderful character actor Jonathan Cecil, the best of the readers in this series. There are six cassettes with a running time of just short of 7 hours. Very funny and highly recommended.

British humorist P. G. Wodehouse's most famous character invention, Jeeves, the quintessential gentleman's gentleman, has become an iconic figure. He has even captured the internet with the popular "Ask Jeeves" site. Jeeves's gentleman, Bertie Wooster, the often wrong but always cheery has almost reached the same exalted state. They are both brought to vibrant, laughable life by the voice of Jonathan Cecil in "Jeeves and the Mating Season." When Gussie Fink-Nottle is temporarily incarcerated, Bertie sees fit to impersonate Gussie at Deverill Hall in order to keep the engagement between Gussie and Madeline on course. No one knows Gussie at Deverill Hall, so this imitation seems possible. No so. Not when a number of really wacky aunts and a capricious dog are involved. Leave it to Bertie to turn what seems like a plausible plot into a madcap mix-up. It's laughter all the way and Jeeves, of course, saves the day. - Gail Cooke

Previous: Joy in the Morning (Jeeves in the Morning)This is the classic volume in which Bertie finds himself at a place called Deverill Hall pretending to be Gussie Fink-Nottle, and Gussie Fink-Nottle shows up pretending to be Bertie. Bertie must do all he can to keep the Fink-Nottle/Bassett romance intact (for we know the fate that awaits Bertram otherwise), and this, complete with two other rocky romances, keeps Bertie on his toes throughout this hilarious book. Jeeves is absent for much of this book, and thus it is short on the interaction between the two that makes the books so charming, but he shows up to save the day when the time is right. Notable in this story is the oppressed Esmond Haddock who cowers under his five aunts, the relationship between Bertie's old chum Catsmeat and a parlormaid named Queenie which nearly ends in very foreseeable disaster, and the presence of Jeeves's Uncle Charlie. I must add that this is the book I read on the plane when I had to fly home for a sudden funeral, and in the midst of the somberness of the occasion, this book was a tangible ray of sunlight. Although I will probably always remember it within that rather unfortunate context, perhaps that is not a bad thing. It worked its magic, and kept me laughing.Next: Bertie Wooser Sees it Through (Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit)