Literary Allusions and Final Thoughts

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Ask your doctor about Tremphia today. Call one eight hundred five two six seven seven three six to learn more. or visit Trempharadio. com Queen Carvania stood haled by the morning sun Army hung on her every word. My champions, I have sold my chariot on Carvana. 'Twas a lovely SUV, an inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it Tonight, we feast An offer you can feast on. seell your car today on Carvana Pick up these mly I was standing there, hoping for the best, when my meditations were broken in upon by an odd, gargling sort of noise, something like static and something like distant thunder. And to cut a long story short, this proved to proceed from the larynx of the dog Bartholomew. He was standing on the bed, stropping his front pas on the covert And so easy was it to read the message in his eyes that we acted like two minds with but a single thought At the exact moment when I sowred like an eagle onto the chest of drawers, Jeeves was skimming like a swallow onto the top of the cupboard Jeeves was the first to break a rather strained silence The book does not appear to be here, sir I've searched the top of the cupboard, sir but I've not found the book It may be that my reply red a trifle on the side of Aerbity My narrow escape from those slavering jaws had left me a bit edgy Blast the book, Jeezves. What about this dog Yes, sir What do you mean? yes, sir? I was endeavouring to convey that I appreciate the point which you have raised, sir The animal's unexpected appearance unquestionably presents a problem While he continues to maintain his existing attitude, it will not be easy for us to prosecute the search for Mr. Finkkotle's notebook Our freedom of action will necessarily be circumscribed. Then what's to be done? It is difficult to say, sir. You have no ideas? No, sir wish, I said that instead of sitting there saying, yes, sir and no, sir, Jeeves, you would do something Can I do, sir? You can get action, Jeeves. That is what is required here. Sharp, decisive action What ho everybody? Welcome to the book Club So that was, of course, PG. Woodhouse's book, The Code of the Worcesters, which was published in nineteen thirty eight It's the third of Woodhouse's eleven full length novels about the adventures and predicaments and trails Bertie Woocester, who is an apparently Dim witted. But very enthusiastic, jolly, well meaning and fun loving Englishmen sometime in the early twentieth century and his inflappable infallible and indeed omniscient Gentleman's gentlemen, his Valt, Jeeves And as you can tell from that reading These books are not just tremendously good fun, they are absolute masterclasses in how to write and how to create a distinctive style of your own. And we'll be talking about the style anded the man in a second, but Tabby You love these books, donon't you? didnn't you grow up reading Juice andbuster? Yeah, I totally did. I adore them. They're those books where because there are so many of them. You can just slip from book to book to book and you remain within this wonderful kind of colourful, hilarious world of cocktails and gentlemen's clubs and country houses. and so you just laugh your head off as you do it. I encurred some very confused looks on the tube when I was reading this to and back from work. And they were a massive hit in my family, partartly because they're so quotable. I'm a huge fan But you are too, aren't you? I am indeed. So I remember Vividly, my friend Luke at school introduced me two them when we were about thirteen or fourteen and him saying, o, if you've never read PG Woodhouse, they're so funny. My grandfather introduced me to PG Woodhouse. I mean, this is the classic way, you know, they're the kind of thing that you hand down through to generations And then I can remember Probably a summer when I was about fourteen just being absolutely addicted, ripping through them, sitting outside in the sun, just laughing and laughing and just thinking like I would never I would never have so much fun reading a book again. I mean, I can remember just crying and crying with laughter When we were discussing this podcast and we were talking about, you know, the bits that we like best, we would endlessly keep kind of interrupting into laughter Exactly. genenius So to give people a sense you haven't read PG Woodhurst of the sort of the vibe of it as it were They are set, aren't they? in this I said the first half the twentieth century because it's sort of vague the setting. It's a kind of Edwardian Never never land, but as well see, the code of the Worstters, which was published in nineteen thirty eight It's also very clearly in a version of nineteen thirties Britain And the reason it's vague is partly because PG Woodheurse himself saw the books as a fantasy He said the principle of his stories was making the thing frankly a fairy story and ignoring real life altogether. There is one way in which the stories are almost kind of historical. I mean, PG Woodhouse said this himself in an interview that I saw where he said that in some ways, I think of them as historical books in that they look back to a time that no longer exist. He said specifically, you know, when I was a young chap Everyone had vallets. But these days, nobody does. But then yes, as you say, It's also a world that never really existed because the nineteen thirties in Britain, this is the inter warar period, massive economic uncertainty, political instability, you have the rise of fascism. There's a building sense of possibly another war on the horizon. It's quite a dark time in many ways, but you get none of this in the world of Bertie Worceser. kind jollity and nightclubs and big country houses and tremendous japes and things like that. Exactly's one element of the nineteen thirties is a very important element that finds its way into to the Code of the Woocess specifically in the character Roder Expode, which we will come to. But just to again, for people who've not read it, I mean what is going on in the book? This is going to be very, very hard to explain. The plot is not the point really Bertie himself describes it as an inmbrolio that would test the Worcester soul as it had seldom been tested before I allude to the sinister affair of Gussy FinNnottle, Madeeline Bassett, oldld Pop Bassett, Stiffy Bing, the Reverend HP Stinker Pinker, the eighteenth century Cow crereamer, and the small brown leather covered notebook. So to give people try to interpret that for people who don't speak PG Woodhouse Bertie And his man servant Jeeves have been sent off to a country house called Totley Towers by his aunt to steal a cow creamer. And a cow cream is basically a jug, this sort of silver jug. When he gets there, he finds that his great mate from school Gussy Finkmotel is there with his fiance, Madeleine Bassett who's a terrible drip, and Bertie tries to avoid her at all costs because he's worried that she will marry him So what can Bassett? who owns the house. He's a magistrate with whom Bertie has a history and Bertie lives in terror Swatkin. So Watkin is there with his great friend Rot Sode who is a would be fascist dictator, alsoso there on the scene another friend of Bertt is called Stephanie oreed, Stiffie Bing And she is engaged to yet another friend of his Harold Pinker, who he calls stinker. Stinker Pinker. He's now rebranded himself as a Church of England. Curates. And basically, All of these characters end up sort of en meshed with each other in this incredibly complicated plot in which Bertie is being D I mean, as we saw him in the opening reading, Hiding on the top of a chest of drawers from a dog while searching for a notebook Bertie's been forced ever greater and more sort of baroque escapades to try to extricate himself from this terrible situation Yeah, really thanks to the machinations of two formidable women in many. That's right, ye, exactly. We'll dig into the story a bit more in due course. But let's get into PG Woodhouse himself because I think that his books are much more famous than Woodhouse himself. So he's born in Guilford in Surrey in eighteen eighty one And his Christian names are Pelem Grenville Unfortunate, I think, but everybody calls him plum His father Ernest was a magistrate in Hong Kong and his mother Eleanor to visit her family when he was born, he was born prematurely. So she took him back to Hong Kong with her as a baby And then when he was two, his parents brought him and his older brothers to England And they basically handed him to a nanny who lived in Bath called Miss Ropper. and he said that she was a stickler for order and cleanliness. but they essentially abandoned him. There's something quite sort of young Churchill about that. theseese parents warning off and doing their thing and basically leaving their children in the care of Quite a few of the great writers of the early twentieth century had a similar story. so Rudard Kipling George Owell So basically Ernest and Allanen went back to Hong Kong and PG Woodhouse, their son, did not see them for another years In fact, in Robert McCrumb's brilliant biography of PG. Woodhouse, he says, in total, Woodhouse saw his parents for barely six months between the ages of three and fifteen which is by any standards a shattering emotional Privation So parents in his books are generally shown as pretty cold and chilly.' not there's not a great deal of Maternal or paternal affection in the books And actually You know, This experience, I think, lies at the heart of PG Woodhouse's fantasy world because basically he's been cut off from his parents. It's the greatest severance that a small child can have. And as a result, he sort of retreats into himself and effectively creates an imaginative fantasy world that he never leaves for the rest of his life. Yeah, he essentially kind of suppresses all represses all serious emotion and takes solace in this fantasy It makes him withdraw into this very detached state of mind where he just wants to talk about things that are nice or that are fun or You know, so for instance, McCrum says, the completeness of his fantasy world reflects the intense and lonely bleakness of the inner world created by his early life. And you can definitely see that in the world of Jeeves and Worcester. He always said that he wanted to be a writer, so he escapes into this. And he is lucky in that he's very sunny, he's very jolly in his temperament, and everybody who knows him comments on his very sweet, kind nature. And when I was looking up some interviews with him on YouTube before doing this, you can totally see that. He's so warm and smiley and chipper And this definitely explains the kind of unique nature of this fantasy world that he constructs It's always summer, notothing bad ever happens. You know, it's always jolly and light As we've said, there are barely any references to the real world, Quite a dark real world in terms of its you know politics and a war on the horizon. And he hardly ever mentions the war, alough it will later on in his own life have quite a sort of sinister impact on him that we'll get on to. So it's an imaginary nineteen twenties that doesn't really exist where everything is also superficial. He has a genuine horror. any kind of profound emotion. He makes light of everything. Everything is a joke, you know, particularly in the dealings with women. There is awareness of women that runs right through the books. I mean, we mentioned that Bertie in the Code of the Worstters, the worst thing that can possibly happen, the kind of existential apocalyptic disaster that he is facing is that he will have to marry Madeeline Bassett. Yeah. And the reason for this is that he has this lovely life of the sort of gentleman of leisure He hangs around in the drones club, throwing bread rolls at other old Atonians and stuff. The Eetternal Bachelor. He is menaced at every turn Aunts by would be suitors by women who write for little magazines They blue stockings of various kinds who are always kind of terribly domineering and bullying and he cannot stand up to them As he says to Jeeves in another book, showhow me a delicately nurured female Jeeves and I will show you a ruthless Napoleon of crime And he basically says, you know, women They're terrible. and Indeed romance although the books are quite romantic, Bertie himself regards romance with a very skeptical eye, doesn't he? Genuinely, I think my favourite passage in the whole book is this book when he's kind of he's talking about Madeeline Bassso. Basically if she doesn't marry, Gussy Fingnotle she believes that Bertie has been pining for her all this time and so she will marry him. and Bertie just can't There is no world in which Bertie can say, no I won't marry you. It's just His fate? Yeah. He says at one point, I once stayed at the residence of a newly married pal of mine, and his bride had carved inlged letters over theark fireplace in a drawing room. The legend, twoo lovers built this nest And I can still recall the look of dumb anguish in the other half of the sketcher's eyes Every time he came in and saw it Whether Madeline Bassett on entering the marital state would go to such an awful extreme, I could not say, but it seemed most probable. So two things. firstirst of all, Tabby is somebody with nuptials of their own fast approaching. Would you be tempted to do this? Would you put this above your fireplace? Absolutely not. Do you know who inspired this? So PG Woods apparently went to visit HD Wells and this was written in HD Wells. This seemed solikely that the guy who wrote the War of the Worlds H this above his fireplace? Well, obviously, it's because of the rejection from his mother. It's not hard to see the psychological roots of this sort of dread of women and of emotion because he's been rejected and he's been damaged. And he was brought up partly by a succession of aunts. So he had eight aunts living in England at the time that he was sent to school and Woodhouse in his Jeves and Worceser stories combines these arts into two absolutely formidable figures One is Aunt Agatha Now Aunt Agatha is just absolutely terrifying. She's not in the code of the Worters, though, she is alluded to at one point Bertie describes her as she es broken buttles and wears barbed wire next to the skin And she's just absolute martinette and a matriarch. And then this aunt Dalia, she is She kindinder and jollier. She's a hunts woman, isn't she? Oh yes, she most definitely is. She has a sort of fogghorn voice And she again, Bertie cannot possibly stand up to her. So when she says at the beginning of the book, I want you to steal an antique cow creamer from a magistrate who already despises you whichich is an insane thing for Bertie to do. He cannot possibly resist her notot least because She has a brilliant cook. French cook called Anatool Yeah exactly. And Bertie doesn't want to be deprived of this bloke's cooking. The stakes are so low and yet they become so high. Well then I was thinking could also argue of the Jewves and Worter books that there is kind of a curiously proto feminist angle in that Bertie is kind of putty in the hands of strong, intelligent women Yeah who are ruthless and much more formidable than he He's just no match for them. Well, no one can say that PG Wood hasouse his women aren't strong characters. They are stronger than lots ofng men who are completely jellies of various kinds. Although I suppose you would say treatment of a character, will get ont to Madeline Bassett who is theort love interest as it were But she is very much a particular kind of man's nightmarish fantasy of what a girlfriend would be like Back to Woodhouse. Woodhurse went to various prep schools, and then he went to Dolwich College The Delich College was also the alma martater, incredible that it produced two such different writers PetG Woodhurston Raymond Chandler. and Woodhur, he didn't know Rayond Chandly was seven years older He absolutely loved his time at school. He's one of those people for whom school is this kind of arcadian fantasy. it's this time and as he says, it was like heaven He loved the camaraderie, he loved the bance with the other boys, he loved the sport. Very like you Thanks, Abby. You loved your school days? I did like my school days and I did like all those things. left. I never left. In my heart, I never left, exactly. I'm sure my wife would be delighted to hear you saying He was a big reader So he read Chaucer and Spencer and Shakespeare because he studied them. You know he devoured Dickens and Kipling and Conan Doyle. He loved the comic wordpl of the Gilbert and Sullivan oeretas and you can see all of that reflected style of Jubes and Worcester I think you can't underestimate what a massive influence that was on Woodhouse and also shouldn't overlook it. I think it is quite overlooked, how well read, how knowledgeable he was. Yes, definitely. Well, actually, we'll come on to all the literary illusions in the book. I mean, there were as many literary illusions in the Code of the Wstters as they probably are in something like the Wasteland by T.S Elliot. I just think PD Woodha sounds like such a great man You know, he doesn't wear his intelligence heavily.. He's fun, he's lighthearted, he's funny. he's amiable, he's nice. Does he remind me of anyone, Tabby? Myself? Oh come on. he had an open goal then you missed it Um So you know, he expected to Oxford, didn't he? his older brother had been to Oxford, but his father basically says no So you're going to have to go and get a job and he goes off to work at HSBC.. And he didn't enjoy it at all, did he? No, I mean, unsurprisingly. So then he starts writing comic pieces in Bys magazines and is first published in nineteen hundred and then also publishes a school story novel in nineteen oh two And then within the next seven years, he's so prolific. Within the next seven years, he's written about another eight novels and co wrritten two more. I mean, he's like trollop or something. He writes at such an incredible speed. He's an absolute machine all through his life And then in the early nineteen hundreds, two other really important influences. One, he visits New York And he absolutely loves New York And he recognizes that the appetite for stories basically, in these sort of little magazines is enormous and greater even than in England, but also crucially because the market is so big the fees are bigger And so he starts writing for American publications And he also starts writing musical comedies for the stage, and he's brilliant at it And so that sort of sets the pattern for the next sixty years of work He will write short stories and novels and musicals, but his eyees very firmly on that American audience. So he is thought of as the most English of writers. Yeah. But that is actually a bit of a contrivance because as we'll see, what he's doing in the books is he's creating a kind of Anglo American fantasy of England with a lot of Hollywood slang and a lot of kind of the slang that he's picked up in nineteen twenties kind of roaring twenties, jazz age, New York and whatnot. And he's combining that, as we'll see with his public school background create this unique style that is all his own. That's actually such a brilliant point I' never considered that this is very much The world as Americans hope period of England might be, it's kind of downtown Abbey on steroids. Yeah. It's the visional Americans would have of the English upper classes, particularly during this period. But he doesn't fight in World War onene his eyesight is too poor and it makes him ineligible. So he spends the war in New York writing for the Theatre. And then in nineteen fourteen, he marries a widow called Ethel and theirs is a very happy marriage, which is a nice thought considering You know, he had quite a lonely upbringing. She takes very good care of him and she has a daughter called Leonora who he adopts. And then there's a Ky Ye, which is nineteen fifteen, and this is when he writes his first Bandingss novel. So this is kind of his other great, most famous series, similar Ua to Jubes and Worcester He writes his first Bannings novel, which is called Something Fresh and then a short story, Extricating Young Gussy, which introduces two characters called Bertie Worcester and Jeeeves. Yeah, so now we come to our protagonist. So Bertie So Bertie, he took several goes to get to Bertie, didn't he? Because he'd been playing with characters a little bit like Bertie. Yeah. well this is Something of an archetype at this time anyway in the nineteen hundreds, the kind of er class Englishman stereotype. So Mcrumb says, the The dim Whitted Upper class stereotype have been a popular English figure of fun since early Victorian times. For instance, it's a stock figure in musical comedies. And Woodhouse himself said in something that I found that he thought of Bertie a bit like this chat called Lord Nitty Mild May. The steeple chaser. He's an aristocratic man. He's slope shouldered, he's gaunt and he's a great sportsman which Bertie is not. But then in nineteen twelve, Wood House invents a character for Strand magazine called Reggie Pepper And Reggie narrates his own adventures like Bertie does and describes himself as a chap who's supposed to be one of the biggest chumps in London. And Reggie, like Bertie is also always getting engaged in appropriate girls. But then again, he's rougher and he's more selfish than Bertie is. He's not as good humores, nor is he as reflective as Bertie is And he doesn't have that very particular narrative voice and crucially there is no jeeves in these stories So the narrative voice is really important because people often forget that and people think of Bertie as an idiot. The person who tells these stories cannot be an idiot. He's so well read and he's got such a mastery of the English language. I mean, this is the funny thing about Bertie, the ambiguity of him There are some we'll talk about them in the Code of the Worters a little bit more later. I there are characteristics of the comments to all the stories Bertty is rich, obviously there's no question of him ever having a job or ever working The Worcester Millions. The Worter Millions, he says, but he says that sort of sl Slightly self deprecatingly I think, doesn't he? Yeah. He spends his time at the drrones club with the boys throwing stuff around, drinking So sort of his school days discontinuing endlessly into the distance. He has the dread of women, he has this dread of getting married and he's constantly sort of battling with Jeeves because he will be Bertie will return unexpectedly from holiday with an ill advised jacket or an outlandish pair of shoes, which Jeeves will want to destroy. Or Jeeves will have some scheme of his own, as in the Code of the Worcess. Jeeves wants to go on around the world cruise. We'll come back to this because I love this passage. And Bertie doesn't want to go on the cruise and Jeves is determined to force him to do it. Which brings us to Jeeves So Pete Woodhouse himself said of Jeeves, who is in many ways, his great creation. I mean, he's entered culture. everyveryone knows of Jeeves. They think of butlers and they think of Jeeves. M more so than Bertie. Be he's not actually a butler. He's a valet. He's a man serven, he's a gentleman's gentleman. But we no longer have that concept. so it's easier to think of him as a butler, yeah. Woodhouse said he invented Jeeves as a plot He needed to get Bertie out of situations, out of messes, but Bertie because he was meant to be a dimwit, couldn't get out of them himself So he thought, you know it would be out of character for Bertie to think of the solution. He said, Well who will think of it? For a long time I was baffled. Then I suddenly thought, why not make Jeeves a man of brains and ingenuity and have him do it And after that it was all very simple So He gets his name from a cricketer who played for Warwickshire, a bowler called Percy Jeeves, who was actually killed on the song in july nineteen sixteen. so it was a well known figure. Jeeves is a very backward looking figure. You can't really imagine him on the kind of western front or something, like Percy Jeeves There have been servants in PG Wood House before. so thiss characters called Jevinans, who is a butler in a short story in the Strand magazine in nineteen fourteen, But Jeeves is obviously much more than just a man servant, isn't he? is a He's like a deity to Bertie. Yeah. he himself is a gentleman, that's one thing. He's a friend, he's a companion, he's a confidant. But he's also Bertie's guardian angel and often in cases, he's Bertie's friend's guardian angel as well. He's omniscient, he's totally reliable. He's utterly infallible He's a genius. It's almost like, as you say, he has supernatural powers, you know, this massive brain of his And he has a mastery of all literature and history, which is extraordinary. And I love the way that he's described as kind of shimmering into a room or gliding into it or oozing out of it. Jeees never walks anywhere, does he really? No, never. That's too human, you know. As soon as he said it in his biography, I thought, Yes.. Wh didn't I see this before? We've mentioned a few times the Strand magazine. Strand Magazine published the Sherlock Holmes stories And actually In creating Jeves and Worceser, PG Woodhouse is emulating another double act that we've done on this show, which is, of course Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. You're so right about that actually. You, you can imagine the same audience reads both sets of stories because they're published in the same places for one thing. So the story is being told by the dimmer person, so Dr. Wilson or Bertie. They get into a terrible mess. they can't see a way out. Their friend has vanished often in the middle of the story And then the final third, the friend, that Sherlock Holmes or Jeeves, returns and uses their unbelievable almost as you say, supernatural brain power Yeah to solve the case and save the day You know peopleeople often talk about the relationship, the camaraderie actually between officers and men in the First World War and how much that appealed to people. And there is an element of that, I think, about Bertie and Jeeves. Yeah, but also that thing of a servant and a master being used in comedy. I mean goes right right back to cllassical times, Robert McCromb makes that point. The other thing I was thinking, slightly less sophisticated point is u It's exactly the dynamic. Have you seen Black Addder III? The Prince Regent and Black Ader? Yes. And obviously that Hugh Lorie plays Bertie Woocester in the Jeves and Wistter adaptation. So Definitely true on that, I would have thought. Oh yeah, completely. You can definitely see how Huler was, I mean But also the people who wrote Backd would undoubtedly be very aware you would hurse thoughts that but you're dead right, totally. It's similar So anyway, Bertie and Jeves, they appear in a series of short stories in the late nineteen t s and early nineteen twenties, which end up being collected as the first Jves and Borceser books. But meanwhile, Woodhouse is dividing his time between Britain and America. He's now a very, very successful Broadway lyricist And he tells his school friend that writing musical comedy has taught me a lot. I think you can see that in his prose actually. But he's also producing an endless stream of short stories and novels. So in the nineteen twenties MacCrum says a decade of nonstop work in which Woodhouse would compose the lyrics for some twelve musicals, write or adapt four plays, and publish twenty books in London and New York. I think it myself as quite stickoved. You write very quickly. I'm not remotely in that league. That's absolutely extraordinary You do write like a million word books whereas Soty Woodhouse's books are quite short. Yeah, but also his I mean, I'll say this and I'm not ashamed to say it, his are much better But It's interesting, why do you think these books strike such an enormous chord in the nineteen twenties Well, I think it's actually the timing is really important. I think We've mentioned a few times the First World War. The world has descended into such horror and so many of the old certainanies have crumbled And actually we talked about this when we did our episode about Virginia Wol Sport Mrs. Dalloway, which an attempt to reckon with the trauma of the war. What PG Woodhouse is doing and it' sort of it seems weird, doesn't it to think that, you know you could be reading One week, Mrs Dalloway and the next week, PG Woodhouse, and they're just been published and they're both reflecting the times But what P. Woodhouse is doing is he's offering you escapism. He's deliberately ignoring The horrors of the time. looking back to a kind of carefree confidence and certainty that has been lost. I think his books would have appealed overwhelmingly to middle class readers. If you're a middle class reader who is alarmed about the war, you you know you've lost friends or something, you're worried about the Russian revolution and the rise of Bolshevism and all of these kinds of things Reading PGy Woodhouse this warm, comforting bath, nothing has changed since nineteen hundred in this world The anxieties of modernity have not kind of penetrated And that's why I think, you know, PetG Wood has really hits his stride. And he becomes, I mean, it's a household name by this point He goes off to Hollywood at the end of the twenties, he gets to deal with MGM I mean, he goes to Hollywood, you know every few years, never really works out. And he always sort of comes back after a year and says, I don't know why they bothother paying me all that money because I didn't really to do anything. Yeah, I think he needs to be busy. He's an industrious man, I suppose. Yeah, he's industrious. He's ambitious. He likes America and he likes going out there And then he comes back. The nineteen thirties are a more uncomfortable decade for him By this point, the writers that he' grown up with that he loved as a boy like Conan Doyle and Rudgard Kipling They're all dead or they're dying off He had enjoyed, I think, the spirit of the sort of jazz age side of things in the twenties, especially when he went to New York You can see that in Jeveses and Worterotia. Oh you can completely. And there are stories, there are short stories, for example, where Bertie goes off to New York and has adventures there and you can there's a sort of There's a real sense of fun. that Woodhouse is somebody who likes America. He's amused by it. He likes its confidence and its breeziness and You know, there the sort of American millionaires chomping cigars in his books and things and it's He finds all that really infectious, I think. But then in the thirties When you mentioned the economic issues of the day, it's the deeppression There is Stalin and his terror in the Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War, Obviously the rise of Nazism Woodhouse is not a I mean he's a small C conservative writer, obviously and small conservative kind of person, but he's not especially political. So you might think that he would be an odd fit with that the sort of temper of the times But This is the point at which he writes probably his most beloved books. So the first full length Jewves and Worcester novels Thank you, Jeves and righto, Jeves. They're both published in nineteen thirty four A couple of years later, he's offered another gig in Hollywood, MGM again. He goes out there for a year. againgain, it doesn't work out He comes back to England And when he comes back to England from California, he has the idea for a third book and this is today's book, The Code of the Worstters. Yeah. And he was originally going to call it the silver cow And he said to one of his friends, I think it's going to be one of my best He wrote it over Christmas and kind of New Year, nineteen thirty, seven, thirty eight. His wife said he rewrote it so many times that she thought it would never be finished But he did finish it. Yeah. And we'll plunge into the code of the Woocesters and how it works after the break. Yeah. So just before we do get into that hilarious story. Let's just quickly get to the break by talking about quite a famous but quite a sort of odd and sad episode in Woodhouse's life. So these are the famous broadcasts. So he's living in a house in France after the Nazis invade in nineteen forty. He tries to get out, but he's too late. He's captured by the Germans and he's interned as a civilian prisoner And I think, you know, undoubtedly, he suffered some pretty difficult times during that period And then a year later, thanks to pressure from the Americans He and because of his age, he's fifty nine at this point. He's released and taken to Berlin. And there he agreed to record a series of what were definitely lighthearted radio broadcasts that were to be broadcast mainly to the U.S And remember what we said about Woodhouse's jollatity and his kind of escapism and his unwillingness to kind of face up to sad things These broadcasts were intended to be funny and light hearted reflections on his time being interned. He was never going to say it was traumatic and it was hard. They weren't to be taken seriously And they kind of have the same humorous tone and flippancy of Jeeves and Worcester. They're not at all political, they're certainly not pro Nazi. And you they even make fun of the Germans It's very badly received in Britain Partly because it's disastrous. I mean, it's disastrou, It's partly because it's been broadcast. from German radio He's thought to be kind of collaborating, unintentionally maybe, but collaborating nevertheless, is the flippancy of them, which I think I understand in fairness When Britain is seemingly at this point losing the war ay it's a period of incredible national suffering It's thought to be too provoking you know, too flippant And he gets widespread criticism. So for instance, A. A. Miln, the writer of Winnie the Poo, he comes out and publicly lambassasts him. The BBC broadcast, one of the most opinionated things they've ever done on the radio, was a massively controversial thing within the BBC attack by a colonist, I think for the Daily Mirror, basasically saying, this blow, PG Woodhouse, his ms laugh all his ears, whatever, whatever He's a traitor You know, he at a time when our cities are being bombed when you know, thousands upon thousands of British men and women have been killed He is making going to Berlin and they put him up in a hotel and he's making jokes broadcast on German radio with the enemy. by the enemy. Yeah, what a monstrous thing to do. And Wood has his friends send him messages. to try to stop him, but it was too late he'd recorded them all and they kept going out on American radio. And it was absolutely catastrophic for his reputation in Britain. I mean The way you've presented it, Taby makes it very obvious your own sympathies. I think it was foolish. I think it was incredibly foolish and it was and it was thoughtless. I don't think he was traitorous, I don't think he was a Nazi. Of course not. The flippancy that had served him so well and had brought him so much success and had inspired so much affection from so many readers was totally ill suited the moment. In fact, I'm just going to have to say it to Abby, it was a bit inappropriate. And for that reason, public opinion turns against him in Britain And it takes a long time for it to shift actually, the taint of that. MI five later investigated it and they concluded that he definitely wasn't treacherous, but he was politically naive and it was poor judgment becausecause of all the negativity and his unpopularity in Britain, he moves to the US and he stays there permanently And he himself admitted that it was a very foolish thing to do. He called himself a loon for doing it. He is eventually forgiven. And at the end of his life, he's knighted. but he basically carries the stain of this, certainly in Britain for the rest of his life. For the rest of his life, although not, I think, subsequently, I think by the time that he died, which is nineteen seventy or so People recognized that they'd been too harsh on him Yeah. I mean, it's not exactly forgotten because it's something that people bring up as we have. But that's because it's an unexpected story. You would never expect a story like that from the man that wrote Jeves and Worer. I think that's why people remember it. So all right, we need to talk about the code of the Worcesters. We'll find out after the break Hey parents How do you make smarter choices for your kids college today That's where Sally can help. 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It's the number one OBGYN recommended brand of emergency contraception, and it won't impact your future fertility. That's Freedom to Be. Use as directed Welcome back to the Book Club everybody. So now we're going to get straight into the code of the Whisters. Do you Dominic want to explain what is an insanely complicated story Okay, so we'll start right to the beginning. Yeah. Bertie wakes up and he's got a colossal hangover Yeah and Juves comes in and Juves has this sort of she called it eight usees a tissue restorer. It cures everything. Exactly What do you think it's in it? I've always wondered. I think you can find a recipe for it online actually. Really I think Berte describes it at one point. It's like it's derived from quite a popular hangover cure the sort of nineteen th or something. So I think it's kind of, you know, raw egg Wster sauce, all those kinds of things. Yeah o. I've lost my interest. Anyway, continue. So anyway, now there's a big issue for Bertie and Jeeves because they're having a disagreement about this round the world cruise. as Bertie puts it When two men of iron will live in close association with one another, there are bound to be occasional clashes. Yeah. And then we get to what is undoubtedly one of the great passages in all twentieth century fiction. And I think to reenact this doment, we should take on our roles from the opening reading. Go for it.. I'm Jves Travel is highly educational, sir. I can't do with any moreore education. I was full up years ago No, Jeeves, I know what's the matter with you. That old Viking strain of yours has come out again You yearn for the tangue of the salt breezes. You see yourself walking the deck in a yachting c. Possibly, someone has been telling you about the dancing girls of Bali. I understand and I sympathize. but not for me. I refuse to be decanted into any blitution going liner and logged off around the world Very good, sir He spoke with a certain What is it in his voice? And I could see that if not actually disgruntled, he was very far from beinggruntled Yeah that's the that's the genius of Woodhouse. the very far from being drrntled th. The word play. Anyway, Tabby, you can take up the more complicated part of the plot. Okay, so after this, Bertie goes to lunch with the nice aunt Aunt Delia And she demands that he go to a shop and sneer at an antique cow creamer in order to bring down the price for Bertie's uncle Tom, who collects silver becausecause otherwise he's disbarred from her dinner table and the brilliance of Anatool Well there he runs into a Swatkin Basset and his friend Spode. So Watkin who he has been find five pounds fi for nicking a policeman's helmet, G Panta So then Bertie receives a note from his friend, Gussie Fick Nootle saying, Oh, it's all off with Madeeline. you must come quickly and fix it. It's in Bertie's interest to fix their engagement because otherwise he has to marry Madeeline. So off he goes to Totley Towers, also on the urging of his aunt Dahlia because she says you need to steal the cow creamer from Sir Watkin bought it. Yes, exactly. So there's two things combined the cow creream and the Madeline Bassadague. And then Once there, he discovers that in order to mend Madadeelleine and Gussie's fences, he must steal back a notebook in which, in order to steal his nerves for his groom speech at his forthcoming wedding, of which he's absolutely terrified, Gussy has been writing down all the terrible things that he can think of about his father in law to be and the terrifying spode. But now he's lost possession of the notebook and it's fallen into the hands of the marvellous stiffy Bing. She's Madeleine's cousin, Sheissa Watkins niece and she is holding it as a bribe. She also wants Berseie to steal the cow creamer because then she wants her fiance, Harold Stinker Pinker to come in and save the day by returning The cow creamer to to Walkin. She wants her fiancee to punch Bertie as a marauder, a marauding thief to punch him and then he'll look good and therefore her uncle will let her marry a stinker Never marry a man called Stinker. Anyway so Madeline then breaks off the engagement with Gussy again, Spode makes some threats Bertie is terrified once more that he will have to marry Madeeline However Jes then discovers a secret about Spode and says to Berta, you must say the word you Le and Sode will be putsty in your hands. But he does this and it proves very effective. There are all sorts of entanglements and dramas and adventures compomlications ensue. Yeah, manan eating dogs policeman's helmets, you name it. We mentioned the Sherlock Holmes comparison earlier on and actually Robert Mcron in his biography compares this to a Sherlock Holmes story in terms of the complexity and says you know, PG Woodhouse loved Conan Doyle and this is the one story that sort of rivals the intricate machinations of the most Convoluted Sherlock Homer' adventure. Bertie describes it as a case, doesn't he? Yeah. He says at one point to Jeeves, Man and boy, Jeeves, I've been in some tough spots in my time, but this one wins the mottled oyster I love that expression. The wins the mtle the wasist, I don't even really know what that means. But at one point he explicitly mentions Sherlock Holes, isn't he? Yeah, he does. He actually does, which is kind of remarkable. He says, I mean, imagine how some unfortunate master criminal would feel upon coming down to do a murder at the Old Grange if he found not only Sherlock Holmes was putting in the weekend there, but Hurcule Poiro as well There's a satisfaction in the way that the Jeeves and Worcester books are kind of tied up, their plots are constructed rememinds me of the same kind of satisfaction of reading a Sherlock Holmes book. A detective story, yeah. Yeah, how everything neatly kind of clicks together. Yes, exactly. although you read it and you marvel at the complexity of the plots and the way totally But the truth of it is that the plots are slightly irrelevant. In Alfred Hitchcock's films, he used to call the McGuffin, which is basically The thing that the characters are searching for or something But you don't really care what that is because the pleasure of it is just in the experience. And this is true of Cod of the Wooters. The the joy of it is in the characters and particular in the way that Bertie describes them So if we kick off with Aunt Dahlia, she is the nicer of the two aunts, isn't she? She's the nicer of the two aunts, but she's still, I mean, formidable. So she's such a particular type of upper class Englishwoman. So for instance, Bertie says of her, She greeted me with one of those cheery view Hellos which when she went in for hunting used to make her so noticeable a figure with organisations for doing the British fox a bit of no good And he always has funny ways of describing her to her face. so he'll say, oh, aged relative or my fluttering old aspen or decrepit ancestor, or things like that. She laughs very loud. So for instance, he says she laughed a bit louder than I could have wished in my frail state of health. But then she is always a woman who tends to bring plaster falling from the ceiling when amused. because Auelia that's kind of forcing him into all these terrible binds He says at the end that she's just as bad as his other aunt, All aunts are bad. Yes. sooner or later out pops the cloven hoof, as he says. Exactly. So the house that he goes to Totley Towers is the house of Swat in Bassett Cbassad is this magistrate He's a sort of pillar of the establishment. He is disturbingly short which I think Bertie finds unsettling They have this history That so what can as you said, find him five pounds forestinia policeman's helmet on boat race night I mean, this bit makes me laugh so much when Bertie's described. So what kind appears he's dressed in a very loud twezed suit. And Bertie says, It is of course an axiom, as I've heard Jeeves call it, that the smaller the man, the louder the Czech suit. and old Basset's apparel is in keeping with his lack of inches Prismatic is the only word for those frightful tweeds. and oddly enough, the spectacle of them had the effect of steadying my nerves. They gave me the feeling that nothing mtered. Then there's Madeleine Bassett's Swatkins daughter. We've already alluded to her kind of romantic nature. She's sopy, droopy and a bit of a drip. She's kind of sickeningly romantic. and as I said, she can't even conceive a world in which Berie isn't piling for her from afar. And let's remember that You know, one of the great tensions in this book is Bertie's desperate efforts to go to any length to avoid having to marry her. And yet the minute that she sees him at Totley Towers, she says Oh, why did you come Oh I know what you're going to say. You felt that cost what it might, you had to see me again just once. You had to take away with you one last memory, to which Verie replies. Terrific, I said. feeling I had to say something She cs herself as a romantic heroine and then he says of her to his aunt, I call her a ghasty girl because she was a ghasty girl. And then there is this one thing that he says about her which somehow is so pertinent to life. I kind of know exactly what he means I promise I've never done this myself. I promise You definitely have. He says She was definitely the sort of girl who puts her hands over her husband's eyes and says, Guess who She definitely does. And she is well matched with his mate Gussy Fininknottle. Hberie says, a fish faced pal of mine who on reaching Man's estate had buried himself in the country and devoted himself entirely to the study of newts. They call him a newt fancier, yeah. This is literally what he is. But he adores Madeleine, doesn't he? He absolutely worships Madleine She's very attractive and she's very feminine, I suppose. There is another girl on hand So this is her cousin. Stiffy Bing. Now stiffy is She's jolly, she's a laugh. Yeah. but she is also pretty intimidating. So she is blackmailing Bertthie into stealing the cow crereamer and getting himself punched. Yeah, she's very robust. She always gets what she wants and she's always unruffled and unphazed. And I like the way that she speaks because I think She's actually one of the only characters that matches Bertie's kind of clever contortions of speech and language, her abbreviations, the colloquialisms, the slang. and it makes her very flippant, which I find so entertaining. There's something in the way that she speaks that is very kind of the bright young things of this time. So a lot of the characters in Nancy Mittford's funnier books speak very like this, for instance There's nothing sooppy about her at all. She has a compelling stare. She's indomitable but feminine. I'm just gonna say it, the comparisons with self are uncarly. becausecause also the other thing is apart from all those wonderful characteristics that we share, she also fervently jumps to the defense of indefensible pets and I do the same. I did that for my cat cats, but you've got reallyready no room. Cat's gone. Yeah. Yeah knows my brother. Yeah, there was definitely a point by the way, when you were talking about Stiffy being there, where it was pretty clear that you've forgotten all about the book and were just praising yourself. Yeah, I know that was an ode temoir And then one of the great characters, I think one of my favorite characters in all modern English twentiet century this fict And this is Roderick Spode. In Spode, we have the one moment when the nineteen thirties intrudes on Woodhouse's fantasy because he is very clearly modeled on Sir Oswald Moseley. Yeah, the British Union of Fascists In Spode's case, he leads an organization called not the Black Shirts, but the Black Shorts The reason being that they ran out of shirts and they had to buy what Bertie calls footer bags as a mark of their paramilitary status And then B he says, By the way, when you say shorts, you mean shirts of course. This is talking about the black shorts. No, by the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left He and his adheres wear black shorts. Foter bags, you mean? Yes. How perfectly foul? Yes Bennies, Bennies Goy He has a tremendous line when he first seeased boe because of a breathtaking coVve aboutbout seven feet in height and swathed in a plaid ulster that made him look about aboutb six feet across. He caught the eiron and arrested it. It was as if nature had intended to make a gorilla and had changed its mind at the last moment So anyway, Spode is the leader of the Savors of Britain, the Black shorts is our vion. is to make himself a dictator. And Bertie, when he discovers this because he's met Spode earlier didn't know who he was and now finds out. And Bertie, rather like you, congratulates himself a great length on his perspicacity He says, Wellell I'm blowed. I was astounded at my keenness of perception. The moment I had set eyes on Spode, if you remember, I had said to myself, What ho? a dictator. And a dictator he had proved to be. I couldn't have made a better shot if I hadd been one of those detectives who see a chap walking along the street. deduced that he's a retired manufacturer of popppet valves named Robinson withith rheumatism in one arm living in Clapham So again the Charlock Holmes erence Jeeves discovers though as I said, this secret about Spode that kind of halts him in his tracks when he's about to attack Bertie. And he learns this from his own, you know man servants cllub, which is called the Junior Ganymede And the secret is that spowed secretly Dlights in designing and making ladies' underwear. You can't be a successful dictator and design women's underclothing. No, sir. One or the other, not both. Precisely, sir. Bertie is equipped with this knowledge. Fe up front boutique called Uilly Ss where he designs women's undergarments. And he decides to confront Spode with this, doesn't he? And he unleashes on Spoode, this tremendous passage. You hear people shouting, Hile Spode. you think It's the voice of the people. This is where you make your bloomer. What the voice of the people is saying is, look at that frightful ass spodge swanking about in footer bags to do every your puffs see such a perfect perishher. You can see there though. and Woodhouse's style has kind of been seen ever since and you can see why as a brilliant way Punctksering pretensions of fascism. He just mocks it, he ridicules it Yes, completely. Spode is all about violence and posturing and showing off. I mean, Spode is a comic figure rather than a terrifying one, although Bertie does find him terrifying But he is Unfriendly, unsympathetic, kind of glowering with rage all the time Bertie is the embodiment of decency and tolerance and goodness and actually the code of the Worcesards, which gives the book its title The code of the Worcesters is never let a pal down And there's something I think quite touchingly innocent And simple about this. Yeah. It's the sort of understated spirit of British propaganda in the early years of the Second World War. Our simple virtues will win out over the maniacal posturing of the dictators. You know, that sort of spirit We've made this comparison so many times, but there is something very talolkien about that. Well, our mind's work in similar ways, Tubby, because I thought exactly this is like the hobbits defeating Mordor kind of thing. that is I think in both cases actually It's an idealized British self image in the age of totalitarianism. Yeah. you know, we will overcome this evil by the virtues of friendship and simpathy. Deency, tolerance. yeah. So But there we have very I mean, as you said, so unusually for these books, the real world is entering the story. But in a way in which it's cartoonized really. The threat of fascism is tamed in the book and made ridiculous And it makes it easy to deal with it. That spode is basically undone. Yeah Bertie, confronting him with the fact that he designs women's underwear Yeah. I mean, if only with that's simple, of course. mean it's one of the things that people love about the book actually is the contrast between Bertie and Jeeves on the one hand. and spowed Usually the books they have villains. But then the appeal of these books, it's not actually just the plot or the characters, marvelllous th so they are It's the style And I think his is surely one of the most recognizable and effective styles in all modern English literature Woodhouse's language just totally steals the show. He can backflip and some assault his language in such a way that it gives such a strong impression of comedy, but also the character's actions. You always know exactly what he means, even though everything is contorted and flipped around, there's such precision It's like a dance. And so And Be of that, it's worth just stressing the brilliance of Woodhouse as just a pure writer of English. Forget the story, forget the characters. He's one of the great stylists. L there's something worth quoting in every paragraph. and like my copy is proof of that. Every second page is dogged. Evelyn War, who is considered far more hard hitting. called him the master of their profession. I mean, high praise indeed, because I think Evelyn Wall's writing is some of the greatest But PG Woodhouse is just a genius. Well, lots of writers, lots of critics have said It's this use of language. It's the unexpected image. it is the surprising wordplay, it's the sort of inversion, it's the incongruity. It's the way in which Woodhouse's style on a sentence by sentence level combines Soort of high art and mass culture. So that sort of the literary illusions and then the slang. And if you kind of go through it, I mean, we don't often do this on this show, but I think PG Bodz absolutely deserves it If you look at the ingredients of any given paragraph or sentence public school slang from his Dullich days, you have the sort of sporting banter You have The slang from you know the speake easasies of New York in the nineteen twenties. You have abbreviations, all kinds of informality, you have literary references you have I mean the slang is a huge, huge element of this. He loves making up words and playing with words. He loves language itself. I think there are some writers that you can just tell that they're obsessed with language above anything. Yeah, the musicality of it. you mentioned the point about musical comedy. the sound of it actually and So there's a really good example on the very first page. So it's the bit when Bertie awakes from his hangover And actually, if you just think about how this works, he says Just before Jeeves came in, I'd been dreaming that some bounder was driving spikes through my head, not just ordinary spikes as used by Jail, the wife of Heiba, but red hot ones He returned with the tissue restorer. I loosed it down the hatch and after undergoing the passing discomfort, unavoidable when you drink Jeeves's patent morning revivvers, of having the top of the skull fly up to the ceiling and the eyes shoot out of their sockets and rebound from the opposite wall like racquet balls, I felt better It would have been overstating it to say that even now Bertram was back in mid season form, but they had at least slid into the convalescent class and was equal to a spot of conversation Ha, I said, retrieving the eyeballs and replacing them in position. Well, Jeeves, what goes on in the great world? And actually if you go through that and you look at all the different ingredients, Slang he talks about some bounder. Dving spikes through my head has not used spikes as used by Jail the Wife of Heber. So Jail the Wife of Heibber is an Old Testament reference. Jeees has drink the tissue restorer, he looses it down the hatch There's the stuff with his eyes popping out like rackquet balls Then there's the sporting stuff of like Bertram in midseason form. A spot of conversation, we're back to the kind of upper class slang. He says he talks about retrieving the eyeballs and that's a very, very common PG Wood has thing. he'll say I raised the arm. Or self. you'll say, the self rejoiced. Yeah or something like that. Exactly Yeah exactly. He never says things directly. He always finds a more interesting way to climb around the direct statement, but get its meaning across. And then again, you know the sort of his questions to Jeez. Well, Jeez, what goes on in the greatreat world? The joviality and the flippancy of it But almost every ingredient of that paragraph, there is something going on with every little idiom with every phrase. know It'd so easy to write that in a much more mundane and banal way and to derive less pleasure from every ingredient And yet he wrote so fast, performing acrobatics with every line But the other overlooked thing as well, I think about the writing is Bertie is a narrator. He's a very self conscious narrator, for instance. So he'll often speak directly to the reader throughout As if he's kind of looking to entertain or keep his audience with him. But also, so for instance, in the early pages of the book, his first mention of Gussy Finnotle, he says, a thing I never know when I'm starting out to tell a story about a chap I've told a story about before is how much explanation to bun in at the outset. It's a problem you've got to look at from every angle and so on and so on and so on. and he goes on. and it's this really, really big chunk explanation so long and it's so waffly. It takes him longer than if he just explained it. Who B Gus he was? I love that. Yeah. When he says, you know, sorry, I know we're just genererating into reading lots of bits out. It says if I take for granted that my public know all about Gussy Ficknotl and just breeze ahead, those publicans who weren't hanging on my lips the first time are apt to be foged But if he s he then says, But if I give you eight volumes of the man's life and history, other bimbos who wor so hanging will stifle yawns and mutter, old stuff get on with it. Yeah. So that's sort of again, yeah, you're right. He's a self conscious narrator. and actually this takes us to such an important point about Bird as a narrator Bertie is such a literary narrator. So I read an article by Charles Moore in the Spectator, Charles Morere the bographer of Margaret Thatcher He. went through the codes of the Woostters and he made a list of all the cultural illusions And he basically found eighty five of them in total. So one of them we've already mentioned the very first page, Jail the wife of Heba. She kills a bloke in the book of Judges in the Old Testament earlier on the first page, so literally just a paragraph or so into the book, when Jeeves comes in and wakes Bertie up, Steve says to Bertie, There is a fog, sir, if you'll rellect, we are now in autumn Season of Mists and mellow frruitfulness. Season of what? Mists are a mellow fruitfulness. And this is a reference to Keats. and it goes on and on and on. like so many references every page or so Fifteen from the King James Bible, fourteen from Shakespeare, three from Keats, three from Dickens and so on and so forth and It is a range of references that Charles Moore said that A Py Woodhouse's readers People who had been to the kind of schools that he had been to. would have had these references drummed into them And they would, like Bertie vaguely recall them, not perhaps exactly know where they're from. And sometimes Bertie takes it for granted that you will recognize the more famous ones. So he says of your great favourite, Stiffy Bing Kipling was right, D and the M. E the M is deadlier than the male, the female of the species is deadlier than the male. Which is a big assumption that people will get that. Yeah, but I guess woodhouse thinks his readers will get it. And yes a lot of readers would have I mean, Kipling was such a huge favorite in the beginning the twentieth century But the great thing is that Bertie, he sort of knows all this, but he doesn't know that he knows it. He doesn't know quite why he knows. He would sort of say, Jeeves once said to me, I can't exactly remember what it is, but something from wasas it Shakespeare or was it Keat's Jeeves? And Jeeves would say, Turnerson, sir Because Jeeves always knows he's a walking dictionary of quotes and knowledge. So for instance, when Jeeves asks Bertie if he plans to obey Aunt Dahelia and stal the Crowd crereamer, Bertie answers That is the problem which is torturing me, Jeeves. I can't make up my mind. You remember that fellow you've mentioned to me once or twice who let something wait on something? You know who I mean, The cat chap And then Jve says, Macbeth sir, a character in a play of that name by the late William Shakespeare. He was described as saying I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat in the Adage. So that's a reference to the scene in which Lady Macbeth is mocking Macbeth by describing him as the proverbial cat who wants to eat the fish but is afraid to get hisish feet wet, so Bertie is mis remembering that entirely And then later on The image recurs because he later plucks up his courage to enter the drawing room where the silver cow creamer is kept. and he says, My frame of mind was more or less that of a cat in an adage. So again, he's totally misremembering it Exactly. And that's the point of it. Yeah. Macbeth comes in the very last lines of the book, which I think are some of the great last lines ever written Bertie, the case is solved as it were and Bertie is going to sleep And Bertie says Presently, the eyes closed, the muscles relaxed, the breathing became soft and regular sleep which does something which has slipped my mind, to the something sleeve of care poured over in a healing wave. As you can tell, we're big PJ Woodhouse fans I think people have written obviously much about the human condition. They've written books that are maybe more emotionally moving books that had more to say as it were. But I don't believe there's any writer in English, with the possible exception of Shakespeare, who've produced works that word for word, line for line are better, more ingeniously, more cleverly and more satisfyingly written. And I think the other thing is that you're a huge fan of fantasy Woodhouse is never thought of as a fantasy writer. You know, he didn't create creatures and worlds, but What he has done is he's created an alternative universe speaks to an enduring yearning, I think for lost innocence. for escapism and nostalgia, for kind of lightness. I mean what underlies all his plots is people are seeking love. The stories are always the stories of young love one way or another. and there's a sort of there is this, I mean, it's such a terrible cliche. everyveryone says it to PG Woodhouse. But there is this Extraordinary sunniness to them that makes them, I think, utterly irresistible Yeah And also, I mean they b pleasure to so many people. I think that matters. We've always said on this show that It's about, you know, enjoying books And I think you can enjoy these books more than almost any in the world That lightness, I think, is important. If part of the pleasure of reading is it allows you to escape to bright sunny climes, well then I mean Woodhouse is the master isn't he? Although we've quoted loods. I mean, we've basically just quoted our ways through thisad read out the book So now should we give it marks out of ten? So what's our rating system today We have so many options. You can choose Teby. So we're going to rate it out of unexpected intimate apparel designers.. O we're going to rate it out of incriminating notebooks. What are you racing it out of ten? I think this is one of the great novels. It gives me so much pleasure. I'm going to give it eleven out of ten because I think it's brilliant I don't want to say anything beat it except posibly the la Fair enough. Yeah. I'm going to give it not as high but still very respectful. I'm going to give it ten out of ten It's just pure joy. It's the perfect comic novel, but it's also unrivaled in like the perfection and genius of its language. And I've always turned back to these books for comfort And they never fail me. So ye, yeah,ice Wonderful. Will it ever be beaten? surely not? Well, maybe when we finally do Ironborne, the next romantasy big hitter on our radar. Oh, come on, surely we've had enough romantasy for a while