This is a very amusing and readable piece of Wodehouse nonsense, but it’s perhaps not The Master at the absolute peak of his form. First published in 1910, this outing for Psmith is quite an early Wodehouse, with the languid, lucid and engaging Psmith with his friend Mike Jackson both sent to work in a City bank.
There are some typical Wodehousian scrapes (although no romantic entanglements) and, naturally, some wonderfully witty writing; his use of language is already exceptional, but he hasn’t yet reached the heights of genius which led Hilaire Belloc to describe him as “the greatest living writer of English” It’s readable and has a good number of smiles in it, but it didn’t make me laugh out loud the way that some later Blandings or Jeeves and Wooster books do.
These caveats aside, you can’t go wrong with Wodehouse and this is a charming, amusing period piece which I can recommend to anyone.
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