Book Review: A Man of Means
Posted on | August 17, 2010 | No Comments
A Man of Means
P.G. Wodehouse & C.H. Bovill
P.G. Wodehouse Society
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Perhaps it’s a mistake to even attempt to review a P.G. Wodehouse novel. If you’ve read one, you have a pretty good idea of what they’re all like, and you’ve probably already decided whether or not you like them. I happen to like them.
In case you’re one of the people who haven’t read one, they are light comedies with plenty of mix-ups and broken engagements, clever language and inanely blathering young gentlemen. Pip-pip, what ho, stiff upper lip and so forth. Eminently charming – somehow only made more attractive via the passage of time, though this may only be true to people used to overlooking early 19th century race and gender fail and the occasional touch of classism. As much is inevitable.
A Man of Means consists of a series of six short stories that originally appeared in The Strand in 1914, a chronological and a consistent whole that – perhaps due to the co-writer C. H. Bovill – read as particularly snappy and satirical for Pelham Grenville W. The theme might have been the corruptive power of sudden wealth, but turned in the end into a light farce on greed, in which a simple and innocent young man, Roland Bleke, learns to avoid traps laid by mercenary characters after his prize winnings. The most biting of these depictions is the unscrupulous stock broker whose operation eerily resembled that which led us to the global financial crisis almost a 100 years later. He ends up losing while Roland gains via the vagaries of the stock, and Roland never even realizes that he was being used. The most oppressive and dare we say sexually charged of the stories is an affair where Roland finds himself engaged to a beautiful dancer from a fictional South American state, who turns out not only to be after his money to finance her country’s royalist revolution, but also married.
The stories read easily and segue into each other seamlessly. For a fan of P.G.’s, this makes pleasant light reading. I’m almost ashamed to say how little I was bothered by the exoticism and classism, when there was so much simple and clever delight to go with it. At the same time, I do not whole-heartedly recommend this to anybody who happens to come from a South American country, or any nation torn with internal conflict.
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