Wodehouse: A Pelican at Blandings

A Pelican at Blandings
P.G. Wodehouse
(Overlook, 2010) [1969]
240 p.

Wodehouse’s novels are by reputation frothy larks, so readers can be forgiven for being caught off guard when, early in A Pelican at Blandings, something happens that strikes cold dread in the heart: Lord Emsworth’s prize pig, the Empress of Blandings, refuses to eat a potato.

When, in a subsequent scene, a large painting of a female nude is installed at Blandings Castle, I began to feel my palms sweating, and when, in a still more subsequent scene, not just one but two coteries of thieves plot to steal the painting, I was confirmed in my judgment that this is an uncharacteristically disturbing and unwholesome entry in Wodehouse’s canon, and by a significant margin.

To be sure, some of the elements that are familiar from earlier Blandings novels recur here, but typically with some shocking twist. A young woman wants to marry against her family’s wishes, but she wants to marry a man pretending to be a looney doctor’s junior assistant. A rich woman arrives as a guest under false pretences, but Wodehouse, in a move that must have imperiled cross-Atlantic diplomatic relations at the time, chooses to make her an American. Even more outrageous calumnies occur, or are suggested, but for propriety’s sake I won’t mention them here.

Obviously, and notwithstanding the admitted truth that the writing in A Pelican at Blandings is a dream, I cannot recommend the book unreservedly. Mature readers might enjoy aspects of it — rather, I suspect, as some people apparently enjoy those Saw movies — but I would advise, in that case, that it may be best to keep near at hand a cold compress and a hot toddy — and perhaps a potato.