Sunset at Blandings
The Wodehouse collection comes to an end with a sparkling classic from the master of hijinks and social comedy. This is Wodehouse's last, unfinished chronicle of Blandings and includes a treasure trove of detailed notes on the final stages of the plot, enabling us to watch over his shoulder to observe the master at work. The revels at Blandings Castle are now ended but, as Richard Usborne confirms delightedly, its cloud-capped towers shall not dissolve. Although written when Wodehouse was ninety-three, the pages of "Sunset At Blandings" remain 'funny, fresh, young in heart and full of hammocks, sunshine and four pairs of lovers headed for altars.
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What Hacker News says
- > Not sure he would have wished its publication.
The first half of the book is collected published works of his (columns, articles, etc.) including an introduction to P.G. Wodehouse's posthumously published and unfinished Sunset at Blandings. In that introduction he makes it clear how fascinating he thinks it is to see a master at work. I think, based on that, he wouldn't be too upset to see that he got the same treatment.
That said, The Salmon of Doubt is very much unfinished and for me isn't the best part of the collection by far. Still worth a try, even if you just don't read that last section.
- Douglas Adams on Wodehouse
""" Who are your favorite authors? Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Kurt Vonnegut, P. G. Wodehouse, Ruth Rendell.
...
Master? Great genius? Oh yes. One of the most blissful joys of the English language is the fact that one of its greatest practitioners ever, one of the guys on the very top table of all, was a jokesmith. Though maybe it shouldn’t be that big a surprise. Who else would be up there? Austen, of course, Dickens and Chaucer. The only one who couldn’t make a joke to save his life would be Shakespeare. ...
We Wodehouse fans are very fond of phoning each other up with new discoveries. But we may do the great man a disservice when we pull out our favourite quotes in public, like “Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes,” or “. . . like so many substantial Americans, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag” or (here I go again) my current favourite, “He spun round with a sort of guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat’s milk” because, irreducibly wonderful though they are, by themselves they are a little like stuffed fish on a mantelpiece. You need to see them in action to get the full effect. There is not much in Freddie Threepwood’s isolated line “I have here in this sack a few simple rats” to tell you that when you read it in context you are at the pinnacle of one of the most sublime moments in all English literature.
Shakespeare? Milton? Keats? How can I possibly mention the author of Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin and Pigs Have Wings in the same breath as these men? He’s just not serious! He doesn’t need to be serious. He’s better than that. He’s up in the stratosphere of what the human mind can do, above tragedy and strenuous thought, where you will find Bach, Mozart, Einstein, Feynman, and Louis Armstrong, in the realms of pure, creative playfulness. From the Introduction to Sunset at Blandings (Penguin Books)
"""
