Wodehouse: A Life [Paperback]

It's a diligent and comprehensive but rather dull dissertation, rattling off facts in an efficient chronology, but lacking in passion, or even original insights about its subject. When McCrum does dare to venture an opinion he tends to contradict himself a few pages later (e.g. giving conflicting summaries of PGW's academic success, and emphasising that he was a loner but then describing another situation as satisfying his need for companionship).

There are voluminous notes, but there is no superscript marker when reading the chapters, so you don't know when there is additional information, which is intensely irritating and makes the notes somewhat pointless.

For a far more enjoyable and informative read, see Barry Phelps' P G Wodehouse Man and Myth (out of print, but surely available from Amazon Marketplace and abebooks etc).

In addition, I knew that P.G. Wodehouse was very prolific, but I never quite understood how he did it. I was fascinated to see how disciplined he was to keep doing his daily quota of words. As someone who likes to write as well, this was a positive inspiration to keep to that discipline myself. I was also pleased to find out more about how he developed his plots and characters and did his rewriting. If you combine this book with Sunset at Blandings, you can get a quite helpful perspective on the details of his craft.

Next, I am always running into veiled and ambiguous references to P.G. Wodehouse having done some broadcasts for German radio during World War II while living in Germany. It was never clear to me what that was all about. Now, this book gives me enough information to have views on the subject. I hadn't realized that Wodehouse had been interned by German forces in prison environments for over a year before the broadcasts. In addition, he was released from internment before agreeing to do the broadcasts which turn out to have been very ill-considered but not a clear-cut case of selling out to the enemy.

Naturally, the ultimate question is also about how interesting Wodehouse must have been in person. That's a disappointment. He was a real bore in public who preferred solitude. On the other hand, I was fascinated to see how much of his personality can be found in the various characters in the stories.

I was aware of his famous quote about writing about life as though it is musical comedy, but I didn't realize that he actually helped write lyrics for musical comedies among his many successes.

Finally, there's a marvelous question of what-might-have-been. Wodehouse was about to go to university with bright prospects when he family pulled the financial plug to favor his older brother. P.G. spent two years working in a bank while writing furiously at every spare moment to establish himself in England, rather than being sent abroad as another bank trainee. You'll find yourself cheering for him!

Mr. Wodehouse lived so long that there's also the fascinating part of the tale about how his writing went from being cutting edge comedy to being historical fiction about the Edwardian era.

The less you have read of Mr. Wodehouse's work, the more you will probably enjoy this volume.

I found that the book's main weakness was that it gave me a great many more details about his personal life than I really wanted to know (such as all of his dogs and his relationships with them) and a little less on his writing than I would have liked to know.

But it's a solid effort, nevertheless, and one that will provide much pleasure to Wodehouse fans.