I must admit that my 20 Books of Summer list has turned out to be something of a work of fiction. Jeeves  Joy in the Morning certainly didn’t appear on it, but I thought it might distract me from all of the rain we’ve been having in this so called summer. It sort of did.

The setting is Steeple Bumpleigh where Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Agatha lives with her second husband Lord Worplesdon and his daughter Florence and schoolboy son Edwin who is described as a pestilential stripling and a Boy Scout.  It’s really Florence that worries Bertie most though as he had been engaged to her previously and he doesn’t want her to think he’s interested in her again. She is in fact now engaged to ‘Stilton’ Cheesewright and he’s sure that Bertie is after her again.

It’s another romance which is in trouble though. Bertie’s friend Zenobia (Nobby) is engaged to another of his friends Boko, an aspiring artist. Boko is about to go to Hollywood where a glittering career seems likely, but Nobby’s guardian is Lord Worplesdon and he’s refusing to give her permission to marry Boko. Of course Jeeves sorts everything out. This book is seen as one of his best but for me it didn’t quite hit the spot, I suspect that had more to do with my mood at the time of reading it than anything else.

This is the book that Wodehouse was working on when the Germans walked across his lawn in the south of France where he had refused to leave for the safety of England, he believed that the Germans wouldn’t invade France it seems! It ended up with him being interned and his reputation in tatters as he was seen to have been working for the Germans via radio programmes. I think he was sort of conned into doing it, but you can imagine that he was probably terrified so would have agreed to anything.

If you’re interested in Wodehouse you should try to see Wodehouse in Exile. I enjoyed it anyway.