Basil Seal, familiar to readers of Black Mischief (1932) as the man hired to become the ruler of an African nation and to modernize it, has returned to England, his ludicrous efforts at modernization for naught. It is the autumn of 1939 (in this 1942 novel), just as war is breaking out, and Basil, one of the “bright, young things” on whom Waugh casts his satiric eye and biting wit, is bored. Penniless, he accepts his sister Barbara’s suggestion to help her to place urban children with rural families to protect them from the incipient bombings. Soon he has turned this in to a profitable business–country house residents are more than willing to pay Basil NOT to bring three especially monstrous children, to live with them. Strong on character, grim humor, and satire, and short on overall plot, Waugh has created in this novel characters who represent the worst of upperclass young people–their shallow interests, indifferent education, frivolous behavior, lack of long-term goals, and seeming absence of any values except pleasure. (To see the full review, click on the title of this excerpt.)
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Focused on the “bright, young things” whose frantic pursuits of pleasure led to constant and ever more frivolous parties in the years leading up to World War II, Vile Bodies offers a satiric look at every aspect of upper class British society. From the hilarious opening chapter, in which an assortment of British travelers is crossing the Channel from France during especially rough weather, through innumerable parties, dances, weekend visits to country houses, automobile races, airplane trips, a movie set, and ultimately, “the biggest battlefield in the history of the world,” Waugh skewers his characters and their values (or lack of values) and, in the process casts a jaundiced eye on society as a whole. Though the characters are superficial and their behavior even more so, as one would expect in a satire, Waugh manages to keep the reader’s interest high through his rapid changes of focus and scene and his keen observations of society in the years just prior to the war. (To read the entire review, click on the title.)
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With delightful, tongue-in-cheek humor, P. G. Wodehouse continues the adventures of Bertie Wooster, an often silly member of the upper class who depends on his much more sensible “gentleman’s gentleman,” Jeeves, to keep his life from falling apart. In this novel, Wooster has been growing a mustache for the two weeks that Jeeves has been on a shrimping holiday, and he fears that Jeeves will not like it. Sure, enough Jeeves does not, and neither do any of his other friends–except for Lady Florence Craye, his former fiancée, now engaged (to Bertie’s great relief) to Stilton Cheesewright. The fate of the mustache is only the starting point for Wodehouse’s comedy of errors, however, as Bertie goes from London to his Aunt Dahlia’s country home, where Lady Florence, Stilton Cheesewright, and Percy Gorringe, a young man who wants to produce a play based on Lady Florence’s book, are also in attendance. (Just click on the title to see full review.)
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In this ninth of his eleven Blandings Castle farces, P. G. Wodehouse brings a large cast of mostly repeating characters to Blandings Castle in Shropshire, where their adolescent behavior, their misplaced values, and their obliviousness to real issues in a real world, allow Wodehouse to create gentle but pointed satire of the British upperclass, of which he himself was also a member. Written in 1965, but set in 1929, this novel, like all Wodehouse writing, is timeless in its ability to capture the silly, the petty, and the laughable in complex and hilarious plots in which numerous misunderstandings occur because characters refuse to be honest with themselves and with each other. Wodehouse selects perfect, absurd details to describe these characters as they engage in perfectly outrageous actions, as he coaxes readers of all walks of life to laugh with those whom “society” considers to be “upper” class. (Just click on the title to see full review.)
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“I don’t know if you know the meaning of the word ‘agley,’ but that is the way things have ganged.” With this play on lines from Robert Burns, Bertie Wooster, the aristocratic and dithery protagonist of P. G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves” novels, expresses his dismay at the way matters of love and quiet country life have “ganged” since his arrival at his aunt Dahlia’s country estate. Shortly after his arrival, he is surprised to read in the newspaper that Roberta “Bobby” Wickham is engaged to marry him. Bobby, upon her arrival, quickly sets him straight–she is in love with his best friend Reginald “Kipper” Herring, and because she knows her parents find Herring unsuitable, has made them believe she will marry Bertie, whom they dislike even more. She believes that their discovery of the truth will be a relief. (Just click on the title to see full review.)
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