The Girl on the Boat by P.G. Wodehouse

I'm still reading Wodehouse books I've never read before - he wrote around a hundred, mostly novels and story collections, so I have probably a couple of dozen to go - which means I'm getting into things that are called "minor" or "obscure" or other critical terms that mean "you might want to read this if you really like this guy, but be warned."

But Wodehouse was a popular, humorous novelist to begin with. His failure modes are nothing like those of more literary novelists, where "minor" tends to mean a book is half-baked, confusing, or just wrong-headed. "Minor" in the humorous novel implies things like "not in a major series" or "didn't make a splash when it was originally published" or just "about as good as a dozen other books by the same guy, with nothing really particular to make it stand out." Or, as is the case here, "is Of Its Time in ways that look quaint several generations later."

The Girl on the Boat is a hundred-year-old short, funny novel by a writer who was already a master of his craft by this point: it was published in 1922, when Wodehouse was about forty and had been making a living at writing for half his life. The problem, for some readers, will be that it's set in a world that no longer exists. Astute readers will realize the title implies that: no one meets on an ocean liner anymore, though that, and the inevitable shipboard romance, was a cliché of the time. I tend to think that's a minor problem with humor in general, and usually entirely beside the point with Wodehouse: nearly all of his book were at least somewhat anachronistic when he wrote them, on purpose. As long as we can understand how this world works, it can still be funny: we don't need to live in that world ourselves, or, frankly, for that world to have ever existed.

The plot of On the Boat wanders a bit, starting in New York with a British Theosophist writer, Mrs. Hignett, arriving for a lecture tour but immediately abandoning her to focus on her nephew Sam Marlowe, who will be our romantic hero. Sam ends up on the boat of the title, rooming with his cousin Eustace (son of the domineering Theosophist) and falling in love with Wilhelmina "Billie" Bennet, who...

Wait, this is Wodehouse, so it gets complicated quickly.

Billie has been urged since practically birth to marry Bream Mortimer, a young man with a face like a parrot, because their respective fathers (rich American businessmen) are good friends. Bream and Billie and their respective fathers are on the transatlantic boat to spend the summer in England, where they hope to rent Windles, the Hignett ancestral manse.

Billie has been engaged to Bream, but not terribly seriously, and is not currently. She does not love him, doesn't consider him up to her Tennyson-inspired standards of dashing, daring knightly manhood, and won't marry him. She was also briefly engaged to Eustace in New York over the previous weeks, even though he is a weak neurasthenic type who is even further away from her ideal.

Anyway, Sam makes a big impression on Billie by making what she thinks is a grand romantic gesture towards her, but was actually more of a standard Wodehouse misunderstanding, as the ship pushes off from the docks in New York. They spend much of the journey together, canoodling as much as anyone canoodles in a Wodehouse novel, and are briefly engaged, though Billie breaks it off at the end of the voyage for her usual you're-not-Sir-Galahad reasons related to a very Wodehousian amateur-theatrical event Sam comes off very badly at.

Meanwhile, Billie's best friend, the big-game hunter Jane Hubbard, has also been looking for love. She's the kind of strong domineering woman who will grow into a formidable Aunt in Wodehouse, so she's looking for a fairly weak man she can take care of - and so she falls hard for Eustace, and he for her. Because of that, Eustace agrees to rent Windles to the Mortimer/Bennet party, but only if he can stay there as well to be close to Jane.

Does Sam find a way to get down to Windles himself and press his suit with Billie? Of course he does. Are there confusions and misunderstandings along the way? Yes, indeed. Are there impostors galore infesting Windles?

Actually, no. I regret to inform any reader hoping for impostors that all of the main characters already know each other well, so such subterfuges would not be possible. But Sam does hide in a suit of armor during a late-night search of the stately home, a scene that also includes Jane running around shooting at things with her elephant gun, if that helps soften the blow.

And, yes, of course the book ends with Sam and Billie motoring away to get married, as it must. Getting there is the fun: this is prime-period Wodehouse, with a lot of fun turns of phrase and some of his more amusing hey-I'm-writing-a-story-here sidebar commentary.

Even if you're a Wodehouse fan, you probably haven't heard of this novel. It's not famous, not in any of his major series. But it's a wonderful book from his interwar peak, with only minor flaws and not too much reliance on his standard material. (e.g.: the lack of impostors)