‘Lord Emsworth And The Girlfriend’ by P.G. Wodehouse

Lord Emsworth And The Girlfriend by P.G. Wodehouse, 1928

The magic trick:

An odd couple

It’s my birthday again, and the annual SSMT tradition is a Blandings Castle story to celebrate.

After “Lord Emsworth And The Girlfriend,” though, I might need a new tradition.

It’s just not a very good story; tedious and overly mean-spirited.

Always prolific, Wodehouse feels like he was mailing this one in to meet a deadline – or to get a paycheck.

The plot prepares a typically raucous Wodehouse setpiece – here, it’s the August school fest on the Blandings grounds, requiring Emworth to wear a top hat and make a speech. But it’s as if P.G. himself is so bored by the resulting scene that he bails on it before it really gets started and pivots the plot down a tangent instead.

The main development on which the story’s humor hangs is the pairing of Clarence – the old, conservative, sheepish earl – with a rough-and-tumble 12-year-old girl from London. I didn’t find the idea amusing, and the ensuing scenes of them together didn’t make me laugh either.

That being said – and for the purposes of our SSMT entry – it is a setup worth noting; putting two seemingly opposite character types together into a narrative and watching what happens when they’re forced to work together.

And that’s quite a trick on Wodehouse’s part.

The selection:

The day was so warm, so fair, so magically a thing of sunshine and blue skies and bird-song that anyone acquainted with Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, and aware of his liking for fine weather, would have pictured him going about the place on this summer morning with a beaming smile and an uplifted heart. Instead of which, humped over the breakfast-table, he was directing at a blameless kippered herring a look of such intense bitterness that the fish seemed to sizzle beneath it. For it was August Bank Holiday, and Blandings Castle on August Bank Holiday became, in his lordship’s opinion, a miniature Inferno.

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