Cat’s Cradle
by Kurt Vonnegut (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963); audiobook read by Tony Roberts (HarperAudio, 2007)
To appreciate Vonnegut, one must concede to him the heightened facetiousness of Wodehouse within a satire less halcyon. Cat’s Cradle riffs on the everyday world turned sordidly askew, its protagonist forever teetering – either the only keeper or only inmate of the asylum.
Money for Nothing
by P G Wodehouse (Herbert Jenkins, 1928); audiobook read by Jonathan Cecil (BBC, 2009)
More or less the quintessential Wodehouse novel, with a country manor, a romance frustrated by misunderstanding, comings, goings, comedy mishaps, and several greedy protagonists locked in a tangle of one-upmanship, all exquisitely facetious in the telling, the prose gilded in its loquacity.
Mulliner Nights
by P. G. Wodehouse (Herbert Jenkins, 1933); audiobook read by Jonathan Cecil (Chivers, 2011)
The stories in this collection read somewhat like unused subplots from Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle and Jeeves & Wooster novels, but in their upgraded state fairly dazzle with insouciance. Wodehouse riffs masterfully on his favourite topic (thwarted engagements), his prose wild and expressive.
Clouds of Witness
by Dorothy L. Sayers (T. Fisher Unwin, 1926); audiobook read by Ian Carmichael (BBC, 1992/2009)
An unhurried mystery from which the protagonist seems oddly removed. Lord Peter Wimsey is a character cut from the Wodehouse mould, yet the writing—despite its occasionally witty turn of phrase—leaves him untethered, a whimsy (as it were) without true purpose.
Jeeves in the Offing
by P. G. Wodehouse (Herbert Jenkins, 1960); audiobook read by Ian Carmichael (Chivers, 1990)
‘In the Offing’ is an apt title, for the valet Jeeves remains all but absent from this novel, leaving Bertie Wooster to thrive on his own initiative and witterings, thwarted less by inherent haplessness than by the tangled Gordian knot of circumstance.
Blandings, Series 1
adapted by Guy Andrews (BBC, 2013)
Series One of Blandings, although adapted rather loosely from the P. G. Wodehouse books (and lacking their most memorable character, Gally Threepwood), nevertheless manages to conjure up a merriment not out of keeping with its source material. Well cast, fast-moving and frivolous.
The Small Bachelor
by P. G. Wodehouse (Methuen, 1927); audiobook read by Jonathan Cecil (Chivers, 2009)
Immersed in New York culture yet without a character to provide an outsider’s perspective, Wodehouse’s usual wit and comedy of circumstance dips towards the more edgy, less comfortable humour of, say, Fawlty Towers, its intertwining of lives and problems more sequentially resolved.
Blott on the Landscape
by Tom Sharpe (Secker & Warburg, 1975); audiobook read by David Suchet (AudioGO, 2011)
Sharpe weaves plot strands like Wodehouse and is similarly dexterous in his use of prose. He is coarse, though, and often vulgar, his characters toilet plungered en masse from the unseemly depths of human nature. Nonetheless, ‘Blott’ executes a dizzying comedic spiral.
Galahad at Blandings
by P. G. Wodehouse (Simon & Schuster, 1964); audiobook read by Jeremy Sinden (Chivers, 1993; 2011)
In Galahad Threepwood surely we have the nascent (if more genteel) template for Dirk Gently, and in the comings and goings at Blandings Castle that of Douglas Adams’ much-vaunted fundamental interconnectedness of everything. This is Wodehouse at his fabulous, gab-gifted, exquisite best.
The Inimitable Jeeves
by P. G. Wodehouse (Herbert Jenkins, 1923); audiobook read by Jonathan Cecil (BBC, 1990/2009)
This fix-up novel brings together eleven Jeeves & Wooster short stories, the linking thread of which is Bertie’s friend Bingo Little, whose compulsive falling in love brings endless trouble to his old school chum. Jonathan Cecil’s reading lends zest to the mishaps.