The Stiff (but delicious) Upper Lip . Review on Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit - P.G. Wodehouse

Stiff Upper Lips need not always have a singular tone! This was my first read from the P.G.Wodehouse stable and I didn’t regret it. The subtle notes of humor in contemporary British English are impactful and cocky. One needs to let this way of narration grow over him/her to appreciate its elegance and class. Jeeves, it appears has been deeply researched in other works of P.G.Wodehouse and has thus been presented as a ready-made character in this volume. His sense of timing and a knack for complex problem solving comes most handy to the unfortunate Bertram Wooster who frequently falls prey to a jealous friend, an out of sorts aunt and the fickle intellectual fiancé of the jealous friend with a pumpkin head. The plot is intricately woven with weird instances of torrid troubles which befall Wooster in a summer he had otherwise planned to pass in his bathtub reading a much lowly considered form of literature called ,’The mystery of the Pink Crayfish’, which it turns out later has been written by a fellow he happens to know in a not-so-comfortable situation. The interesting part of the plot is that the nuances of all characters are somehow related to each other and any experience with one character has a domino effect on most others thus solving some problems by default and creating few new others by a stroke of plain bad luck. The language is quite prude and aristocratic stemming from an era of early 1900s Great Britain lending a rich suave flavor to the temperament of the characters. There is something refreshing about British English, which in a way seems to me quite a notch superior to American English, what with the clarity of thought conveyed in well constructed sentences and the avoidance of needless use of slangs. I’d suggest anyone to use this as a bedtime read, it’s nice to go to sleep with a smile on your face. :)