Hot Water / P.G. Wodehouse

Hot Water
by P.G. Wodehouse

humour
copyright 1932
read in March 2013

rated 7 out of 10: well worth reading

Is this the American Wodehouse? Sure, it's set in France. There are a couple of English characters, some French... and mostly American. And the Americans are more than just the extremes of hero and villain...

Yet Hot Water is typically Wodehouse.

There is, for example, Mr Soup Slattery, safe-cracker. Reduced, by unfortunate circumstances, to stick-ups. Lots of muscle, very little brain. Yet when push comes to shove -- I like him :-)

In a Wodehouse book, nearly all of the characters are likeable. They may have their minor peccadilloes -- such as a tendency to live on other people's money -- but they are likeable. That is one of the great pleasures of reading Wodehouse!

There is also the clever use of words and the regular use of unreferenced quotes...

The lark is on the wing and the snail is crawling slowly across the thorn... I know I could place that... if only I knew my English poetry! I need to Google...

This book, I did read with the internet close by... So I learnt about Xenophon and his ten thousand. Bloomsbury authors. Macedoine. The Volstead Act. It's surprising how much of our language has fallen into disuse in just... eighty... years.

Hot Water can be read and enjoyed for its humour, it's characters, plot twists and overall sense of fun. It brings alive a -- possibly exaggerated -- sense of the Wodehouse world of the 1930s.

And underneath, is a depth of words, of life, of history. A whole host of common assumptions to add to our enjoyment of the book. Assumptions which have largely been lost, over the last eighty years.

Read, enjoy and -- if you want to -- discover the meaning of all the "current" references which are scattered throughout the book.

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