Customer Reviews

Summer Moonshine

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4 star:		(1)
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The first thing that has to be mentioned about Summer Moonshine is the hero - Joe Vanringham. I think he is the best hero that Wodehouse ever created - tough; street-smart; not at all the usual 'silly ass' and yet not overly romantic or anything like that. (In fact, if you read Bachelors Anonymous you'll realise that Wodehouse's Joes generally tend to be very good!) The plot is extremely complicated as Wodehousian plots tend to be, but even more so than usual. One finds oneself flipping back to check up on what happened where. And then, on finally figuring it out, laughing like a lunatic. It's a charming book, as economical with space and as funny as one has come to expect Wodehouse to be. Sir Buckstone Abbot is one of the best characters Wodehouse has ever come up with - ditto to Sam Bulpitt, and one wonders why they couldn't become recurring characters. But Joe is the best ever! All hail Joe Vanringham! (Forgive my babbling; this is my favorite book ever, as it's not that difficult to figure out.)

Someday I'd like to read a real biography of Wodehouse (as opposed to the dreadful "fan" bios out there) and find out what was happening to him around 1936 -- when he wrote the scathing, angry "Laughing Gas" and this one. "Summer Moonshine" uses Wodehouse plot A: boy-chases-girl-at-country-house. Yet strange feelings of hopelessness and despair creep into it, and when boy loses girl there's a bitterness like in no other Wodehouse novel. It's not bad, but you definitely get the sense that, as the author himself might put it, something's up.

I first read this book when I was 18, and like the hero, fell in love with a "not too tall girl with an upturned nose". I must have read this book atleast 200 times. You really do wish you were part of the happenings. I wish I could also howl like a wolf in a restaurant. The mysterious American uncle Sam chewing his gum, Tubby going back to his room with a Union Jack for a towel after he finds that his clothes have vanished while swimming, the house of red glazed brick, the Princess.. This is the book which made me fall in love in an Indian Summer.

stretch out with this for a little get away. The setting is a rambling late Victorian monstrosity country house somewhere in the English countryside during the 1930's. The characters include the Lord of the manor, his family and staff and the guests that are paying to stay there. In typical Wodehouse fashion there are several plots that begin separately and then entertwine in a marvolously convoluted manner to produce delightfuly absurd situations.

There are no appearances by Jeeves or Wooster in this one but the results are still delightful.

There are passages in this 1937 classic that make you flip to the cover to make sure it's PG Wodehouse you are reading. A bitter bite occasionally stings you like a famished mosquito attacking from nowhere. Protagonist Joe Vanringham embarks on a 20 page conversation with Jane, the woman he decides to marry seven or eight seconds after their first meeting, and what a witty, hilarious conversation it is. Until, reviewing Joe's biography, Jane asks, "why did you leave home?" When she presses, Joe says, "suppose we talk about something else," and something dark eclipses the dialogue. Wodehouse knows what's going on; he has Jane musing about Joe changing "the game," starting as a "cheerful idiot" (a bitter characterization in itself) and shifting to a cold, "Madam, you strangely forget yourself." Unwodehousian, to be sure. It's only the begining. Joe's lengthy excoriation of his step-mother, Princess Dwornitzchek, whom he blithely accuses of killing his father while "making a fool of herself with boys half her age," is perhaps Woodhouse's most scathing passage in all his fiction.

This intrusion of bitterness and the kind of hatred only family members can work up is in sharp contrast to the antic buffoonery afoot everywhere else in the book. Wodehouse seems determined to stay at the extremes: utter farce sprinkled with seething rage.

The result is Wodehouse in top satirical form, a plot to amaze, characters to remember, with a final resolution a bit too ordinary for the tour de force that went before.

Don't mistake me. The comic elements work beautifully; this is a funny novel. The characters are limned with deftness and just enough subtlety to drive the story and the humor. The best of these is Joe, a flawed hero who somehow maintains his unconquerability in the face of personal rejection, career destruction and financial ruin.

Jane is dynamite; very much up to the job of being a match for Joe, though her devotion to foppish golddigger Adrian Peake is no more comprehensible to us than to Joe.

The supporting cast is surprisingly strong. Sir Buck, the broke baronet trying to unload the ugliest castle in the kingdom so as to regain solvency, is chucklingly imbalanced; his former dancehall girl wife, Lady Abbot, is as sweet, loving, and imperturbable as the vile Princess is mercurial and vicious. Joe's brother Tubby plays Curly to Joe's Moe and does it well.

Miss Whittaker, assistant to Sir Buck, is a terrific player, sharp, temperamental, guileless, and oh, so strong, "quate" the person to stand in the eye of all the storms that swirl about this swirling plot. She steals every scene she graces and gives the evil Princess her ultimate comeuppance.

Of course, there is nemesis turned savior, American plasterer (don't ask), Sam Bullpit. He is a bit too creepy to be hilarious, but he does what he came for. And, if Wodehouse had to strike one truly sour note with a bit of racist mumbling, 'twere best that the words were placed in this man's mouth.

All in all, this is a book that belongs near the top of "The Best of PG etc., etc."

"Summer Moonshine" is one of Wodehouse's stand alone novels i.e. its not tied into other novels like the Blandings novels. Consequently it may not be so well known which is a shame because I rate it as one of Wodehouse's best. Like all Wodehouse novels engagements impersonation and detective work of some sort feature. What attracted me to the book was the premise of a impecunious Baron taking in paying in guests. Anyway the plot is excellent and humour abounds. Let me take this example - "Tubby" is asked by a girl to meet him and she asks him, so she knows he is coming, to make the call of a linnet. Tubby does not think thats a problem until he asks the butler what that might be; he replies: "The roughcall of the linnet is "Tolic-gow-gow, tolic-joey-fair, tolic-hickey-gee, tolic-equay-quake, tuc-tuc-whizzie, tuc-ruc-joey, equay-quake-a-wheet". I have to say I nearly got sick laughing when I read this in the midde of the night.

I would like to say thanks to Fr james Schall for his Wodehouse recommendations because I have to say the books are a tonic for the spirits.

Wodehouse upbeat take on life makes for cheerful reading. His witty wordplay and silly situations make any day sunny!