I read Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit and Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves quite quickly, but was forced by fate to take a long time with this one -- which is too bad. It's the best of the three by some measures (colder, I think, less affectionate, and deadlier), but one of its great strengths is the sheer breeziness of the prose, which wants to be taken in great gulps.
I've never read such perfect comedy as the Jeeves stories, excepting arguably Wilde's Earnest (ur-Wodehouse?), which is written with a more audible snarl and is therefore presumably 'greater' but, for me at least, less purely pleasurable. (There's no one in Earnest I actually like, not even a bit; whereas I love Bertie and Jeeves, and Aunt Dahlia, and Gussie and Stiffy and Stinker and Madeline and even Sir Watkyn Bassett the deplorable ex-magistrate.) My previous gold standard for written comedy was Douglas Adams, but the extraordinary lightness of Wodehouse's writing has helped me put a name to the weird tension within Adams's writing, which seemed to come from the encroachment of his Very Serious Ideas onto his fictional worlds. (Hence the surprising seriousness and even leadenness of the Dirk Gently books, compared to the Guide.)
I admire Wodehouse's commitment to the integrity of his fictional world, and his embrace of Bertie Wooster himself -- I don't think Bertie is ever ironized in the text (beyond the worldwide ironies which cast, say, Anatole's meals as more significant than a month in jail), and Wodehouse is careful not to rob Bertie of his sympathetic humanity for a laugh. It's generous, humane work.
I'm in awe of him.
Next stop, inshallah: Aegypt. For realsies this time.
