The Mating Season.

I’d rank P.G. Wodehouse’s The Mating Season as perhaps my favorite Jeeves/Wooster novel for its extraordinarily high degree of silliness and slightly more convoluted plot (although Wodehouse’s plots, at least the Jeeves/Wooster ones, are nearly all alike), but above all because Bertie Wooster has a little more character than normal in this novel, as opposed to the many books and stories where he’s a highly amusing fathead.

The story involves, as usual, couples whose intended marriages are either forbidden by forbidding relatives or split up by squabbles, four such couples in this case, including Wodehouse regulars Augustus “Gussie” Fink-Nottle and his aristocrat flower-child fiancée, Madelyn Bassett, who believes the stars are God’s daisy-chain … and that Bertie is hopelessly in love with her, which makes him her backup plan should Gussie fail to deliver the goods. Of course, Gussie does fail to d. the g., while a brother-sister tandem finds their hoped-for nuptuals on hold due to the presence of five forbidding aunts at Deverill Hall, where Bertie arrives pretending to be Gussie, only to have Gussie later arrive pretending to be Bertie, which means that Gussie (as Bertie) gets the use of Jeeves. There’s also an angry dog, a village talent show, some dancing on chairs, and a very inappropriate dinner-table joke.

The plot does bring some narrative greed – you know everything’s going to work out fine, but seeing how Wodehouse (through Jeeves) works his way out of the mess he created for his characters is always a pleasure, and Season doesn’t disappoint. But what draws me back to Wodehouse is his dry wit, which infuses prose and dialogue alike and leaves him without peer among comic novelists. I won’t spoil the dinner-table joke, but I also enjoyed his droll description of a dog chasing a cat while he’s chased by his pudgy female owner:

It was the cat who eased a tense situation. Possibly because it had not yet breakfasted and wished to do so, or it may be because the charm of Bertram Wooster’s society had at last begun to pall, it selected this moment to leave me. It turned on its heel and emerged from the bush with its tail in the air, and the white, woolly dog, sighting it, broke into a canine version of Aunt Charlotte’s A-hunting-we-will-go song and with a brief ‘Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo’ went a-hunting. The pursuit rolled away over brake and over thorn, with Madeline Bassett’s school friend bringing up the rear.

Position at the turn:

1. Cat
2. Dog
3. Madeline Bassett’s school friend

The leaders were well up in a bunch. Several lengths separated 2 and 3.

Interesting to no one but me: Apparently I’ve read The Mating Season before, but I didn’t recall it at all, which means I probably read it in 2001 or 2002 when I first discovered Wodehouse and read many of his Jeeves books in a short period of time. Also, this marked my 86th book read in 2009, a new personal best for a single calendar year (although I suppose you might argue that I’m playing the Arbitrary Endpoints Game with myself). I may be obsessive, but I’m diligent about it.

A few of you have asked me where to start with Wodehouse. The book that got me started is now out of print, but you can still buy it through amazon under its UK title, The World of Jeeves: A Jeeves and Wooster Omnibus. It contains two collections of short stories plus one Jeeves novel.

Next up: Pedro Páramo, a surrealist novel by Juan Rulfo, spurred by a question from reader Kirby in April of 2008.