Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre

Christopher Brookmyre was the Next Big Thing in thrillers for a while during my career in publishing, so I kept seeing his books, thinking they looked like fun, and having to go back to reading things for my program instead. I think, over the last few decades, he became just a standard Big Thing in much of the English-speaking world, though sadly not a Thing at all in the USA.

Looking him up now, I'm seeing his major series - which started with this book, his first novel - with radically different cover treatments on current editions, and many of them showing up for sale in their UK editions here. That's a sign the US market has not been kind to Brookmyre, for whatever reasons.

And that's disappointing, because on the evidence of Quite Ugly One Morning, his 1996 debut, Brookmyre is something like a Scottish version of Carl Hiaasen, with funny, fast-plotted thriller novels with a political undertone, smart-ass characters who get themselves into more trouble than they expect, and amusingly baroque levels of violence.

It might be the "Scottish" bit that caused the trouble - parts of Quite Ugly get into nearly Trainspotting-levels of Scots dialect and spelling. I found nearly everything clear from context, but a few random words were puzzlers - and there's a Black LA police detective, in one flashback scene, who does not talk like an American at all. It's the kind of thing that can bounce American readers out of a book, I suppose.

The series hero here is Jack Parlabane, an investigative journalist with a talent for getting himself into trouble, not least because he's good at burglary, which we are told he only uses (these days) in the line of duty. He got into hot water in London for exposing the wrong people and fled to LA, where the same things happened - and more seriously, since the wrong people in LA hire killers, and one tried to murder Parlabane.

So now he's newly in Edinburgh, having just landed a day or two before and about to look for newspaper work there. (This is 1996; newspapers were still booming.) But there was a horrific murder in the flat one floor below his last night, which he did not hear because of the usual all-too-Scottish over-indulgence in alcohol. So he wanders into the crime scene, in his underwear, hungover but endlessly inquisitive.

He's briefly a suspect, but, more importantly, it triggers Parlabane's need to get to the bottom of things. So he starts investigating on his own.

At the same time - this is a thriller, not a mystery - we get scenes from the POV of both the murderer (mostly a Standard Thriller Thug with Scottish Characteristics) and his boss, a deeply Tory and horribly self-satisfied wanker who is head of a NHS Trust and looking to use that to personally enrich himself. There is, of course, a nasty scheme behind the murder of Dr. Jeremy Ponsonby, and Parlabane connects with Ponsonby's ex-wife, the anesthetist Dr. Sarah Slaughter, as they both have separate clues that can join up to help solve the crime.

Among other major characters, there's a few cops, including a youngish lesbian woman who is willing to listen to Parlabane's theories and is not immediately dismissive of them. And this is a short novel, so it rattles very quickly through a lot of scenes - often very colorful, in language or violence or setting or all three - on the way to a big ending with Slaughter, Parlabane, the murderer, and the wanker.

It is a fun romp, the more so if you are inclined to align with Brookmyre's regular, quite pointed, but often sidebar attacks on Toryism - our villain is very much like the guy in this meme:

I'm going to be looking for more Brookmyre books myself - I've got thirty years to catch up on - so take that as a recommendation if you like.

Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse

I don't like to make sweeping statements about writers with around a hundred published books, since there's likely to be some oddball piece I've forgotten. But I'm pretty sure that Laughing Gas is P.G. Wodehouse's only fantasy novel. (The Swoop!, which I haven't read, is arguably science fiction, but that's different, he said as a former editor who specialized in that difference.)

It's from 1936, which I (and most others) consider Wodehouse's high period - it came in the middle of Heavy Weather, Thank You, Jeeves, Right Ho, Jeeves, The Luck of the Bodkins, Summer Moonshine, The Code of the Woosters, and Uncle Fred in the Springtime - a murderer's row of humor if ever I saw one. Not all of those books are his absolute tip-top - Summer Moonshine is a minor book; you might be thinking of the Blandings book Summer Lightning; I was - but it's a pretty impressive run for six years ('33-'39).

Laughing Gas is also arguably minor: it's not part of any of Wodehouse's series, the fantasy element is a bit odd and doesn't entirely emphasize his strengths, and it has one of Wodehouse's intellectually duller protagonists without a Jeeves figure to relieve him. On the positive side, there's lots of great Hollywood material, including a wonderfully beastly child star - Wodehouse didn't have major child characters in his work very often, but they tended to be great when he did.

That slightly dim hero is Reggie Havershot, third Earl of that name, the usual late-twenties rich and unencumbered Wooster-esque figure. He's in Hollywood because "the family" (the usual Formidable Aunt) wants him to stop a cousin, "Eggy" Egremont, from marrying an unsuitable American woman.

That woman is Ann Bannister, a former reporter who was briefly engaged to Reggie two years before (of course). She's now minder to the child star Joey Cooley, though she's maneuvering to become the new personal publicist for big star April June.

Reggie met April on the train to Hollywood, and she got her hooks into him then. Since he is dim, he thinks she's wonderful and they have the love that is true. Everyone else thinks she's leading him on for the title, and that she's mean and self-obsessed, but Reggie, like a good Wodehouse hero, will not have the name of the woman he loves bandied about.

But then Reggie goes into a dental surgery at the same time as that child star, Joey Cooley, and the two of them swap bodies "in a sort of fourth dimension." Reggie wakes up as Joey, though he has some trouble remembering that consistently - he thinks of himself as his former, large, strapping self, so the fact that he is now a weedy pre-teen with golden locks is a continual surprise to him.

Meanwhile, Joey is having a grand time in Reggie's body - he'd been keeping a list of people he wants to "pop in the snoot," from directors to scenario writers to April, and now that he is large and beefy, he's going to take full advantage of all the snoot-popping he can do.

Over the course of about two days, in which Reggie-in-Joey's body is stuck with the schedule of a child star living in the home of the head of his studio and under the baleful eye of that studio head's nasty sister, Reggie keeps trying to continue his old life - did I mention he's a bit dim? he's the kind of person who is no good at adjusting his plans to current circumstances - and is moping over what he assumes is the loss of April forever.

It turns out Joey was an absolute terror, and a lot of the things the kid did pre-swap come back to bedevil Reggie over the course of those days. Also, he's thrown together with Ann quite a bit, and comes to curse ever having let her go, particularly when he finally sees what a nasty person April is.

There are complications and chases and various other colorful characters along the way, and, of course, Reggie and Joey do end up colliding in the fourth dimension once again, so they can return to their respective correct bodies and their appropriate happy endings. They each somewhat ruin the life of the other, but in ways that they're both happy with, in the end.

Again, I think this is a bit on the minor side - the fantasy mechanism is fun, but Reggie is a bit too dim to take best advantage of it, and we don't see April being as horrible as we're told she is. But it is a fun Wodehouse book from his best period, with a lot of amusing material.

The Holy Places & A Tourist in Africa by Evelyn Waugh

I'm pretty sure the point of the Waugh Abroad omnibus, assembled and introduced by Nicholas Shakespeare in 2003, was to gather Evelyn Waugh's pre-War travel books into a single volume, rescuing them from the mostly-obscurity they'd fallen into. Waugh had suppressed them, more or less, for the last decade or so of his life, issuing instead a "good parts" collection of the less-politically-tendentious bits under the title When the Going Was Good.

Those books were Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, Waugh in Abyssinia and - in a different tone and style and not really a travel book in the same sense - Robbery Under Law. I got the Waugh Abroad omnibus soon after it was published, read Labels in 2006, and then finally got back to the rest of those books starting last year.

But that was not the end of the omnibus.

Waugh had two other short books, which came out after WW II, which were suitable for inclusion in a book called Waugh Abroad. And so they were. And now I've read them, too.

The TL;DR is that Waugh got stuffier and grumpier and stodgier and more boring as he got older, and he was not unstuffy and grumpy and stodgy to begin with. His fiction has a lot to recommend it, even towards the end of his life, but his late nonfiction is really for scholars and massive fans and exceptionally right-wing Anglo-Catholics at this point.

With that said, the last two books in that omnibus are The Holy Places and A Tourist in Africa.

The Holy Places is barely a book at all; it comprises one very short introduction and two magazine pieces. I know the bookbinders can do magnificent things, but this is barely twenty-five pages in the omnibus, so I wonder how this appeared on its own in the world.

One essay is about Saint Helena, who was the wife of one Roman Emperor and mother of another in the 4th century. More important to Waugh - so important that he barely mentions it - is that she's credited with discovering the True Cross. Waugh is a true believer, so the fact that it's pretty clear that the jumble of wood she was lumbered with is no such thing - assuming that there was originally a thing that it could be, and I might not even go that far myself - cannot impinge on his thinking. Since she is a saint, she must be a wonderful perfect person, and that's basically what his essay says. It is nice that he had such a durable religico-philosophical underpinning to his thinking, Andy said brightly, searching for something positive to end with.

The other essay is about a trip to Jerusalem in 1952. It is also suffused with the piety of a convert, and some circumlocutiously-worded stuff that I think is grumping about the existence of Israel, because clearly only Christians should be in charge of that land and the world in general. (Preferably Catholics, of course, but Anglicans are mostly all right and those Orthodox chappies have much to recommend them. Waugh is less fond of more radical Protestants.) Muslims are mostly treated as good enough fellows, for lesser races - I suppose because this was before most of the major wars and oil shocks, so they had no power. The essay is decent on architecture and some aspects of history, and it's nice that Waugh had such a resolute faith, I suppose. He's not actively dismissive of Judaism and Islam, I'll add, in an attempt to be somewhat positive.

A Tourist in Africa is somewhat longer - actual book-length, though not a long one - but sketchier and smaller and less well-formed than his pre-war travel books. He admits he hates being in England in the cold weather - and almost admits to hating being with his family at Christmas - and so fled in the winter of 1958-9 for a trip down the East coast of Africa, somewhat visiting places he'd been before the war and at intervals since.

The book is based on a diary he kept at the time, and still maintains a diary format. I suspect that, instead of turning diary notes into a fuller narration and spending some serious time thinking through what he wanted to say, this time Waugh just expanded his notes in situ, threw in some of his usual hobbyhorses, and called it a day. I don't want to say a book about traveling several thousand miles over the course of two months is lazy, but there are definitely aspects of it that show an impulse to take the easiest path.

It is substantially less interesting and detailed than his pre-war travel books. It's still Waugh prose, so there are good lines and specific thoughts throughout - the reader may not agree with those thoughts, and I expect most won't, but they're worth engaging with in one's own head to be clear on why they're wrong.

In that typical old-boy-network way, Waugh avoids giving names to most of the people he meets - it's the commissioner or agent of this particular town, or "R" - though they mostly seem to have been friendly and solicitous and happy to give this visiting dignitary dinners and house-room and the use of their cars and drivers to roam about and see the sights. And, as usual, it will be the rare modern human being who can agree with any of Waugh's political ideas - I'd be very suspicious of anyone in 2026 who could, actually.

I do recommend the Waugh Abroad omnibus - or, at least, the first four books collected in it, which are actually about travel and see Waugh giving insights about places and people he met that are long-gone now. The later bits of that omnibus, though, are for a much more select and massively smaller audience.

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)

Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

The fifth Jackson Brodie novel, Big Sky, came out in 2019, after a nearly decade-long gap since the previous book, Started Early, Took My Dog. It's structurally like the previous books: Brodie is an important viewpoint, but only one of several, and the story circles around both a group of characters, many of whose thoughts we see, and some unpleasant and illegal activity both in the present day and the past, which all comes out in the end. They're all crime novels, but I still don't think they're really mysteries - there are police, detecting things, and sometimes Brodie doing detection as well, but the detection is not the focus and the feel is much more like a literary novel.

Well, Kate Atkinson did begin as a literary novelist, winning the Whitbread for her first book Behind the Scenes at the Museum, so that's not surprising.

This time, we're on the east coast, back in Yorkshire, in a cluster of towns and hamlets and villages of which the one familiar to me is Whitby - from Dracula. Brodie is living in a rented house nearby, doing minor private-detective work, mostly watching or entrapping unfaithful husbands, and trading custody of his teenage son Nathan with his former partner, Julia, who is working as an actress on the Collier TV show nearby. 

One of the other viewpoint characters returns from a previous book - Reggie Chase, a teenager in When Will There Be Good News?, is now a Detective Constable working on a cold case this time. (There's always the underlying question in a series of how swiftly time passes - I think, for the Brodie books, it passes normally, and everyone gets as many years older as the calendar indicates.)

The crime this time is sex trafficking, which causes some tonal shifts in Big Sky, and also means Atkinson is more reticent about showing the bad things underlying the plot than previously - not always to the book's benefit. We do see a few of the women trafficked, but none of them from inside their own heads, and Atkinson's politeness in skipping over all of the actual criminal activity means they stay ciphers, or plot tokens. This is clearly a post-Jimmy Savile novel; there's a (fictional) trafficking ring that was discovered and shut down a decade or two previously. The two heads of the ring were caught: one suicided and the other is now dying in prison. But there were rumors of a "third man," who was never identified - Reggie and her partner are running down leads related to that now, after a victim from those days gave a new interview and named some new names.

The other viewpoint characters are are peripherally related to the ring that is still running - the second wife of one figure, her teenage stepson, a local businessman who might be brought into the scheme by the current three conspirators, and some secondary characters.

I find that the Brodie novels, and maybe Atkinson in general, are a bit of a hill to climb starting out - Atkinson has to run through her large, disparate cast, to identify everyone, place them in the world, and explain their backstories and how they're related to each other. That takes the first fifty or seventy pages of the book: it's all compelling writing, but it can feel a bit like homework. Once the narrative gets past that point, though, her strengths shine out more clearly, as she can make connections and cut back-and-forth between strands and (several times this book) carefully give the reader the impression something particular (and generally shocking) has happened, while leaving herself room to show that impression was mistaken.

Big Sky is a bit messier, and I think not quite as successful, as the previous books: Atkinson can't show us sex trafficking the way she could murder and abduction, so it's all abstracted and on the level of tut-tutting rather than visceral. But the characters are sharply drawn, their thoughts full of insights and pointed moments, and the writing is as supple and engaging as ever. Not quite as good as the previous books is still very good.

Was That Normal? by Alex Potts

Philip is about forty. He has one of those jobs you can do from anywhere, on a laptop, so he does it from his apartment, alone. He lives in a British city, probably mid-sized - not very specific, not very special. His apartment is garden-level, which means he looks out his window, while typing on that laptop, below the street. He doesn't have any long-term friends, or any connections with colleagues that we see - the closest person in his life is his landlady/roommate, an older woman who intermittently tries to engage Philip and be friendly with him.

Philip isn't all that good at being engaged and friendly. He's wrapped up too much in his own head, the kind of person who obsessively thinks about what's he's doing, what he should be doing, and if there's anything that he wants to be doing. (There usually isn't..) He goes out to the pub now and then, because he thinks he should or because he thinks he'll have a good time this time, but he inevitably ends up drinking too much to be social and pays for it later.

Was That Normal? is a graphic novel, by British creator Alex Potts. It covers a few months in Philip's life - how he starts from that point of being stuck, how he's searching for connection, what happens to him, and where he ends up. There are no major epiphanies, no huge revelations, no amazing transformations - like all of us, Philip is deeply embedded in his own life, and all changes will be gradual and incremental.

But he does want more, want something different. He does try, in his fumbling, uneasy way, to open up to experience, to look for things that would make his life brighter. He gets dragged out to a concert, and is struck by the singer, Gina. He sees her around town, and strikes up a friendship.

He obviously wants more, but things are messy - Gina has a volatile not-quite-ex and doesn't seem terribly interested in anything more serious than friendship with Alex. But she is friendly, and it looks like it's been a long time since Philip had a friend.

He's uncomfortable with a lot of the day-to-day of life, the kind of person who over-thinks everything and then has trouble just doing even the little bits of social interaction that more thoughtless people never waste a moment on. That might not change - or not entirely. He's going to stay Philip. But he might be able to be a Philip a little more comfortable in his own skin, a Philip who tries more things, a Philip who spends more time with people and gets better at it. I do say "might" - Potts, again, is not going for epiphanies or transformations here; this is a realistic, grounded story about a real person in a real world, and nothing is guaranteed. 

Potts draws Was That Normal? with a slightly rumpled, indy-esque line - immediate and grounded, with his people not quite as pretty as a reader might expect. His panel borders are hand-drawn, just a bit uneven. The colors feel just a tone or two off from purely realistic - slightly more of a picture than the thing itself, usually in earthy tones, with lots of yellows/tans, browns and dull reds for backgrounds.

Was That Normal? could be a little hard to take, particularly for readers with a lot of Philip in their own makeup - but it's well-observed and thoughtfully true, and does provide some hope for this Philip...and, by extension, for all of the rest of us.

Pigs Have Wings by P.G. Wodehouse

As the back-cover copy leads off by sublimely noting, it is pig-stealing time in Shropshire.

This is not the longest or the most complex of P.G. Wodehouse's novels set in and around Blandings Castle, and there's only one impostor, who is revealed fairly quickly. But it is the Blandings novel that sees two massive pigs stolen by the major competitors of that Fat Pigs competition at the Shropshire Agricultural Show, in either 1952 (the year the book was published) or the eternal, unspecified, Wodehouse year, where it is one part 1890s, one part 1920s, one minor part the decade it was written, and about five parts pure whimsy and invention.

Pigs Have Wings has some of Wodehouse's most inventive, fun writing - he several times pauses to talk about the details of writing the book, apologizing for not mentioning a particular character for a long time and noting at one point:

Stress was laid earlier in this narrative on the fact that the conscientious historian, when recording any given series of events, is not at liberty to wander off down byways, however attractive, but is compelled to keep plodding steadily along the dusty high road of his story, and this must now be emphasized again to explain why the chronicler does not at this point diverge from his tale to give a word for word transcript of Lord Emsworth's speech.

Every mature Wodehouse book is frivolous; the best of them turn that frivolousness into something  magnificent. This is one of those - it's also the book that features the line about the "unmistakable sound of a butler falling off a bicycle." [1] The plot is fun, but the language is even better.

You see, the Empress of Blandings has won that Fat Pig contest two years running. Lord Emsworth's great rival, Sir Gregory Parsloe, has imported a possibly even-fatter pig - in a shocking breach of ancient custom, though not actually against the rules - from Kent and named it the Queen of Matchingham. The contest is coming up swiftly, and the two pigs, each in her sty at the two stately houses a few miles apart, are snuffling up their recommended fifty-seven thousand and eight hundred calories a day, in a race to see who can get the fattest.

But everyone assumes Parsloe will cheat. And the current keeper of the Empress, a slightly wobbly pig-girl named Monica Simmons, is his niece, installed by the domineering Lady Constance, Lord Emsworth's sister, who is more interested in keeping good relations with the neighbors than with winning Fat Pig contests.

Of course, there's also a few young-love plots - as well as a not-quite-so-young-anymore love plot - to complicate things. And one impostor, in the person of one of those not-quite-so-young love interests, a former barmaid and current owner of a detective agency, hired to keep her presumably-beady eye on the Empress.

Eventually, both the Empress and the Queen are stolen, by forces from the other camp. And a pig is hidden in the kitchen of a villa, where a keen-eared pig-keeper - and a slightly less keen-eared local policeman - may hear its distinctive grunting.

This is a good first Wodehouse novel - it shows what he does well, isn't too long or too convoluted, and the series element is minor. (There's a fat pig, a dithering lord, and a couple of other bits of standard business - that's it.) The fact that it's a glittering, lovely delight makes it only that much better.

[1] As opposed to the unmistakable sound of a barmaid falling down stairs, which is from the Drones story "Tried in the Furnace."

Robbery Under Law by Evelyn Waugh

I've been reading a bunch of Evelyn Waugh's travel books over about the past year, in a big omnibus called Waugh Abroad. I've generally enjoyed them: Waugh was a right-wing nutbar, just this side of fascist and absolutely loony in the ways only an upper-class Englishman converted to Catholicism in adult life could be, but he was also a fine writer with a great eye and a world-class grump. So seeing him go to various Third World - I think the term didn't exist yet, but that's what it was - hells in the '30s and complain about them is a lot of fun.

The next book collected in Waugh Abroad was Robbery Under Law, subtitled "The Mexican Object-Lesson." Waugh did travel to Mexico for a few months in 1938 and wrote this book immediately thereafter, it is true. But this, sadly, is not a travel book. It's a tedious, tendentious screed that is probably only of interest as an example of what the kind of right-wing people who thought fascists were really good at building roads and keeping the lesser races down but still were going too far in the whole government-controlling-the-economy-thing considered important in 1938.

Mexico, at the time, had been through a century or more of turmoil since independence, and had had a sequence of corrupt and/or incompetent leaders, who each in turn stole what they could and either fled or the country, or, more often, were murdered by their successors. In 1938, they were officially Marxist and had suppressed the Catholic Church, two aspects of their society that Waugh, of course, hated with every fiber of his being. So, being a professional writer, he therefore spent over two hundred tightly-set pages writing against those things at great and deeply boring length. Let me be clear: it seems like Mexico was a horrible place, run by thieves and charlatans for their own benefit, and had been (with slightly different fools and charlatans, each in their turn) for decades at that point. But the things Waugh was most annoyed about are the nationalization of the oil business and the breaking up of the large estates of the rural aristocracy. And one is hard-pressed, a hundred years later, to care about either of those things if one has anything like a modern political sensibility - even a very right-wing modern political sensibility.

I was hoping for stories of Waugh traveling through another corrupt, odd country and telling the reader about it. There is a quick list of sketched moments in one chapter here: all of the rest is argumentation. And, again, unless you're the kind of interwar Anglo-Catholic Waugh was - not necessarily deeply racist, but satisfied with the hierarchies of the world, since he's near the top of them, and sure that democracy is good for the right kind of peoples, the ones with mostly pale skins - you are not going to agree with a lot of what he says.

In fact, when he tries to cover the expected objections to his position, he inadvertently implies that things were pretty horrible. Oh, sure, he says, some bishops probably abused their power, especially far from the capital - how could it be otherwise? - and, of course, the upper ranks of the priesthood was mostly made up of aristocratic younger sons, who are used to living in riches and splendor, so you can't be surprised that they continued to amass great wealth and spend it on themselves, even once they were  in religious orders. This goes on in several directions, throughout the book, and the astute reader gets a good sense of what Waugh would be happy with: the stable, organized world in which people like him are firmly on top and the Indians - he says, magnanimously, that they're not necessarily mentally inferior to "the white races," that Mexicans as a "race" have interbred between the Spanish and the "Indians" quite a lot (and he doesn't even more than very slightly hint that might be the source of their ongoing political problems), and some of those not-purely-Spanish chappies have even become quite good priests! - know their place down at the bottom of the heap.

It's too bad, because clearly Mexico was a horrible place in 1938. Waugh, though, is not the one who can describe those horrors in a way that anyone to the left of Roderick Spode will agree with. I would only recommend reading this if you've already gotten through all of the good Waugh, and probably some of the other all-too-Catholic pieces as well. Or, of course, if you are a fanatically right-wing Anglo-Catholic with fascist tendencies: it'll be right up your street.

The Great British Bump-Off: Kill Or Be Quilt by John Allison and Max Sarin

Allison and Sarin were the team behind (the bulk of) the Giant Days comics series, which ran for a number of years and was pretty successful, as I understand it. Before and since, Allison has also had an array of related webcomics - he started with Bobbins in the late '90s, transitioned that to Scarygoround for longer stories this century, ran an offshoot called Bad Machinery involving two sets of mystery-solving kids for about a decade, and has most recently done offshoots like Steeple and Solver - which are set in the same fictional world as Giant Days, though the Giant Days cast has not reappeared as often as other Allison characters have.

For some bizarre reason, John Allison is not a giant of world comics, beloved by millions, even though he has been making wonderful, smart comics with zippy dialogue, quirky plots, and fascinating characters for around thirty years now. In my darker moments, I think of that as yet another indication that we are a fallen race, and that we simply can't have nice things. More realistically, Allison can be quite British, which may have limited his appeal to the segments of the American public who have trouble breathing with their mouths closed. (Oops, there I go again with the cynicism.)

What I might grandly call the mainstream of Allison's work generally involves each new series having a few characters from the last series, doing something new with a somewhat different cast. Thus Bobbins turned into Scarygoround, with a cluster of the same people, and then a couple of those people turned up as background characters in Bad Machinery. The Bad Machinery kids are young adults now, and so they're popping up in their own series - fan-favorite Lotty Grote in the print-comics series Wicked Things and then Solver stories on the web was first.

But her mystery-solving compatriot Shauna Wickle has also gotten a spin-off: first The Great British Bump-Off, in which the mystery-loving young woman competed on a reality show whose real-world analog you may be able to figure out from the title.

And, about a year later, Allison and artist Max Sarin (with colors by Sammy Borras and letters by Jim Campbell) brought Shauna back for a sequel: The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt. It keeps the title of the first miniseries for continuity, but Shauna is not on that reality show, or any reality show, this time, nor does anyone actually get bumped off.

Instead, Shauna has borrowed a narrowboat for the summer, to wend her way down the canals and rivers of Jolly Olde and have some fun minor adventures. Unfortunately, her first stop is in Barton-on-Wendle, where her lack of knot-tying acumen leads to the boat getting free and gaining a very expensive scratch down one side. So she needs to get a job to pay for that repair, which drags her into the intrigues of the two quilt shops of Barton.

The proprietors of those shops hate each other, and accuse each other of trying to sabotage their shops - which is plausible, since the EV of one of them bursts into flames right after Shauna arrives and the other's shop has an extensive flood caused by a deliberately-blocked drain soon afterward. Shauna works in both shops, as an undercover spy for both proprietors against both proprietors, as she tries to figure out the villain behind the mayhem.

It all comes to a head at the big annual quilt convention in town, and Shauna does solve the mystery - and bring the quilting community of Barton-on-Wendle back into harmony, with the aid of the traditional feisty old lady quilter - in the end. It is lighter-hearted than some of Allison's stories - as I noted above, nobody gets murdered in this one, and there's no supernatural element, unlike Bad Machinery - and has a lovely ending, including return visits by many of the Bad Machinery cast.

I tend to be slightly old-school with Allison: I think no one draws his comics quite as well as he does. But Max Sarin is a very close second, with similar body language and faces. And drawing is, of course, time-consuming - an Allison who writes more than he draws can make more comics, which is a major enticement. So now I just have to figure out how to make an audience of millions fall in love with all things Allisonian, so that he will have to increase production to fill the massive demand.

If you haven't yet read John Allison's work, perhaps you can help? Buy one of his books, or, if you prefer free samples first, either this page or this one offer lists of currently-available Allison projects on his website. And then tell all your friends, so they can tell tell all their friends....

Spring Fever by P.G. Wodehouse

I am still zipping through P.G. Wodehouse books, hitting another one every two months or so. He wrote about a hundred of the things, so I still have some runway, but my unread-Wodehouse shelf is dwindling, and it may be time to fill it back up soon.

This time, I have a just-post-war comedy (well, they're nearly all comedies, once you get out of the first decade of his long career) unrelated to any of his major series, about a peer who looks like a butler and wants to marry his cook, get out of his stately pile, and settle down running a pub. That's Spring Fever, from 1948.

It also felt like another Wodehouse book that could have been adapted from a stage play, but I find from Wikipedia - which I have no reason to disbelieve - that it was actually the other way around; Spring Fever was adapted into a play, which was not produced, which was then adapted into another novel, The Old Reliable, which I've actually read recently.

Holding up the juvenile romance end of the plot are two young American friends. First is Stanwood Cobbold, a beefy ex-college football player not overly endowed with brains, sent by his tycoon father to London to extricate him from his entanglement with the mercurial movie star Eileen Stoker, whom he wants to marry. His smarter friend is Mycroft "Mike" Cardinal, junior Hollywood agent who is himself deeply head-over-heels with Lady Theresa "Terry" Cobbold, third and nicest daughter of the Earl Lord Shortlands, called "Shorty" by Terry.

Shorty is the aforementioned peer who wants to marry his cook. He owns the stately pile Beevor, in Kent, and hates it. Mrs. Punter, that cook, wants to marry a man with two hundred pounds to invest in a London pub, so she can get out of service and into business for herself. She has some standards for who that man will be, but is willing to be somewhat flexible in her ends. Shorty, sadly, doesn't have two hundred pounds, which torments him. Worse, his rival in love is his own butler, the wily and scheming Mervyn Spink, whose success at betting threatens to give him the financial leg up in their competition.

Mostly in charge at Bevor is Shorty's domineering eldest daughter Lady Adela Topping, married to the rich American Desborough, whose money keeps the castle as solvent as it's possible for an English castle in 1948 to be. The middle daughter is Lady Claire; she doesn't do much in the book but is heading towards marriage with a well-off but deeply tedious playwright currently staying at Beevor.

Also important is Stanwood's man Augustus Robb, a reformed burglar and current teetotaler. 

The last major piece of the plot is a fantastically valuable stamp, discovered in an old album in Beevor and squabbled over by Shorty and Spink. As part of their machinations, the two young men arrive at Beevor as impostors: first Mike, pretending to be Stanwood (who wanted to stay in London to be with Eileen, filming a picture there), and then Stanwood, pretending to be someone who can vouch for Spink's claim to the stamp.

There's a fair bit of plotting among various factions to get the stamp and further their schemes, some running about, the usual severed-hearts stuff, a failed safebreaking and related drunk scene, and other usual Wodehouse bits. In the end, both young couples ride off into the sunset (or, rather, the registry office) to get married as quickly as possible. Shorty finds happiness in a slightly different way, which is not usual for Wodehouse - generally, if he sets up potential marriages at the beginning of the book, he ticks off every single one of them at the end.

It's all slightly quicker and tighter than it could possibly have been - one reason why I thought it might have been a play - with opportunities for additional comedy material (such as the stuffy playwright) left almost entirely as suggestions. In my mind, Spring Fever is a three-hundred-page novel that would have been better off about four hundred pages, with possibly the addition of a policeman, bringing Eileen onto stage at least once, and some actual thefts of the stamp for spice.

But the book Wodehouse actually wrote is just fine and quite entertaining in his best manner, so that's a pure quibble.

The Mating Season by P.G. Wodehouse

You can think of The Mating Season as the finale of one of the greatest comedy trilogies of all time - it closely followed the wonderful Jeeves & Wooster novels The Code of the Woosters and Joy in the Morning, and the next time Jeeves appeared, it would be in the Wooster-less Ring for Jeeves.

It isn't, in any appreciable way, the end of a trilogy, mind you. But you can definitely think of it like that.

I just did, for example: quad erat demonstrandum.

And I have to immediately apologize, because reading a good Bertie Wooster novel puts the old grey matter into Bertie Wooster mode, and I start faffing off in all directions for no good reason.

The Mating Season was the new novel about Jeeves and Wooster in 1949, fifth of what would eventually be twelve novels (plus a passel of short stories, with four major collections and a scattering of others in miscellaneous books). That puts it towards the end of prime-period Wodehouse: he started writing at the turn of the century, got good at humor within a decade and magnificent sometime in the '20s, had a great run in the '30s and '40s that slowed in the '50s, and finished up with somewhat shorter, less complex books before he died, knighted and in his mid-nineties, in 1975. There are roughly a hundred Wodehouse books, just counting titles he published in his lifetime; if you include repackagings and similar things, the total is even higher.

But this is one of the best ones, even with the caveat that all of the Jeeves stories are good - oh, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (the last novel finished by Wodehouse in his life, published in 1974) isn't where I'd recommend starting, but it's just fine about mid-way through. Mating Season, similarly, I'd put a few books in - it builds on the earlier novels, and works better if you know some of the characters already.

Wodehouse worked with a number of common situations and plot devices, something like a formal banquet at a big country-house, so that the broad outlines would be similar but the details and recomplications are specific to the particular book. So this one has Madeleine Basset in it - she's always one of my favorites; so soppy - but mostly at a distance, and only showing up for one major scene. 

Someone has probably developed a schema for all of those Wodehouseian elements, but I haven't seen it. Mating Season is the one where Bertie Wooster, our narrator and hero, is visiting Deverill Hall pretending to be the noted orange-juice drinker and newt fancier Gussie Fink-Nottle, who is also present, pretending to be him. 

(The copy I read this time was missing roughly a signature - probably a binding error, since there's no gap in the pages - and it came right at the point where this switcheroo was explained. I vaguely remembered it from the last time I read Mating Season, and hummed over the rest.)

Along the way, there are four pairs of hearts who are sundered at least once during the narrative and need to be reunited, not least because one of them (the aforementioned soppy Miss Bassett) will attach herself to Bertie if he's not careful. And the reuniting, as always, falls to Bertie, with support from Jeeves.

Anyway, this is a Jeeves and Wooster novel: it's set mostly in a country house, there are impostors, and Bertie sums up the sundered and reunited hearts at the end to put a bow on up the proceedings. Jeeves is absent much of the time, meaning his counsel is not available at important moments and things can go wrong in amusing ways for a while. I still think Joy in the Morning is the absolute best Jeeves novel, but this one has a lot of great material - Wodehouse's writing is particularly amusing and sprightly here, with a lot of good lines in that goofy, slightly confused Bertie voice.

Waugh in Abyssinia by Evelyn Waugh

I had never thought to ask "How much of Scoop is actually true?" I had assumed that a satirical novel set during an abortive African war would be almost entirely untethered from the actual facts of the Abyssinian/Italian war of 1936.

And then I read Waugh in Abyssinia [1], the book Evelyn Waugh wrote immediately before Scoop, a non-fictional account of his time as a newspaper reporter covering that war - well, mostly the early period, when it looked like there would be a war but it hadn't quite started yet, with a late coda covering a short second visit, more than six months later, to see the Italian occupation. And I was amazed to see how many of the bizarre, goofy details of Scoop were straight out of the actual war and Waugh's own experiences.

I don't know of any edition that brings the two books together, but that could be a fascinating thing, especially if there was a scholar who could draw out the comparisons and who knew the real (messy, complicated, not necessarily explicated perfectly by Waugh) history, too.

Abyssinia is an interesting, fascinating read in any case - Waugh is particularly good on the weird contingent atmosphere in a corrupt society on the brink of a war that hasn't quite started yet - but it's particularly strong for a reader who has recently read Scoop, which, by random coincidence, I had.

On the other hand, Waugh mostly suppressed this book - and his other three pre-war travel books - post-WWII, publishing a "good parts" version of all four under the title When the Going Was Good and declaring nothing else in those books was worth reading. In the case of Abyssinia, I suspect his glowing accounts of Italian road-building and civilization-bringing in the closing chapter - with some language that shades far too close to "these fascist chappies really know how to run a society, and we should follow their lead" in retrospect - was the big issue.

But Waugh was always moderately racist, and Abyssinia under Halie Selassie was, by all accounts, deeply corrupt, badly run, and full of factions who kept just this side of actual open battle. I'm finding Waugh's travel books' strengths are largely related to how weird and complex and irrational the places he visited were - and Abyssinia, just before the war, was about as weird and complex and irrational as any real-world place ever could be.

Waugh is not writing about the larger geopolitical context here, but it was certainly in the back of his mind, and the minds of his readers, in 1936. Europe was stumbling towards war - medium-sized ones, like the Spanish Civil War, and the Big One that came a few years later - and Abyssinia could be a microcosm of that. In that context, Waugh's hopeful note at the end - that this war was quick, and the conquerors seemed, in the early stages, to be competent and doing productive things - could be seen as optimism, or self-delusion, or a dozen other things on that spectrum, depending on the reader.

Abyssinia also has a lot of excellent Waugh sentences and thoughts; I dog-eared more passages here - and it's a short book - than I usually do. Waugh was grumpy, misanthropic, and, at this point in his life, more than slightly flirting with fascist sympathies - but he was also a fine thinker and observer, sometimes because of his prejudices and sometimes in spite of them.

[1] I read it in the big '90s omnibus Waugh Abroad, which collects all seven of his travel books.

The Small Bachelor by P.G. Wodehouse

I'm sure this novel originated in someone talking about "a small bachelor apartment," which got Wodehouse into thinking about who would obviously live in such a place. Well, actually, The Small Bachelor was originally a 1917 musical comedy by Wodehouse and Guy Bolton before Wodehouse novelized it a decade later, so it might have been Bolton who had that thought.

But you know what I mean: someone made that leap, saw a title in it, and, after the writing mills had ground sufficiently, first the play and then the novel emerged.

The novel was serialized in Liberty magazine in 1926 and published in book form a year later, so it's nearly a century old. Some of the details - that was the era of Prohibition, and a raid on a restaurant that provides illegal libations is prominently featured in the climax - are a bit outdated, but Wodehouse's love stories and his broadly-drawn characters are as close to universal as anything is in this world.

The titular bachelor is the timid George Finch, a young man from Idaho who inherited a pile of cash from a relative and moved to Greenwich Village to become an artist. We don't see him paint or interact with models; the narrative and several characters declare he's a lousy artist, but his career (or lack thereof) is mostly a signpost rather than a plot element. He lives in a small penthouse on top of the Sheridan Apartment Building, well-provided with a sleeping porch that will be important to the action and with a fire escape that leads down to the aforementioned restaurant, the Purple Chicken.

George, in best Wodehouse manner, saw a young lady (Molly Waddington) on the street and fell in love with her. Luckily, she reciprocated almost immediately; she's been looking for a small cuddly man who gets flustered when she smiles at him.

Unluckily, Molly is provided with a formidable stepmother and a formerly rich and now henpecked father, Sigsbee H. Waddington. Both have odd manias: Sigsbee is obsessed with The West (as in the romantic image of cowboys from Zane Grey novels and Tom Mix movies), and Mrs. Waddington is hellbent on getting her stepdaughter married to a young English nobleman, Lord Hunstanton. She also takes against George immediately, mostly because he's an artist and so (she assumes) both poor and licentious - neither of which are even close to true. 

Also: there's nothing really wrong with Hunstanton, and he doesn't get a lot to do in the novel - he's not a villain, just the wrong guy for Molly.

That's not nearly enough complications for a Wodehouse story, so George's valet, Frederick Mullett, is also a reformed burglar affianced to a very successful pickpocket, Fanny Welch. A policeman who wants to be a poet, Garroway, also figures prominently. The glue bringing most of these characters together is the successful self-help writer J. Hamilton Beamish, who lives in an apartment downstairs from George. Oh, and also Mrs. Waddington's favorite medium, Madam Eulalie, who Beamish falls in love with and also coincidentally comes from the same small Idaho town as George. Also important, very Wodehousianly, is a sheaf of stock certificates in a motion-picture company which are currently valueless and which Sigsbee wants to unload on someone, as well as a supposedly very valuable pearl necklace, meant to be part of Molly's trousseau, which Sigsbee had replaced with a cheap fake in order to get the funds to buy those stock certificates.

About midway through the novel - I'm going to guess to be the big scene before the intermission when this was a play - there's a Long Island wedding, at which Fanny Welch is hired by Sigsbee to pretend to be an abandoned love of George's and steal the necklace in the ensuing confusion. The wedding doesn't happen, of course, and the action shifts for the rest of the novel to primarily that small bachelor apartment and nearby environs, where policemen are assaulted, gossip columnists are plied with salacious details of the busted wedding, various characters hide under beds or are locked in the apartment, the Purple Chicken is raided by a large number of brawny policemen with several major characters present, windows are used for illegal entry and hot soup is very nearly stolen.

In the end, Sigsbee regains a fortune, Mrs. Waddington is humbled, and George heads off into wedded bliss with Molly. Along the way, Mullett and Fanny have already married, and Beamish and Eulalie are on their way to the registrar as well - I can't recall a Wodehouse book with such a blizzard of wedding rice at the end.

This is not one of Wodehouse's very best books - there are a number of elements that aren't leveraged as well as they could have been, and others that a maturer Wodehouse would have made more out of - but it's a solid B- Wodehouse, funny and quick and amusing, particularly for being a century old.

The Man With Two Left Feet by P.G. Wodehouse

It can be odd to think of a book like this - a decade and a half into the author's career, his second collection of short stories and roughly twentieth book overall - as being part of the extreme early phase of his career. But that's what happens when you live to 93, publish a hundred books, and have a career stretching from 1902 to 1975.

The Man With Two Left Feet is an early P.G. Wodehouse book, from the era where he was transitioning from his early school stories into the frothy comedies he's best-known for. It was published in 1917, collecting a baker's dozen stories that appeared in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic in the previous years. It's cast most in light-magazine mode, with stories the reader is meant to take seriously but humorously, and there are a few elements and plot details Wodehouse would re-use later to better effect.

It does have the first Jeeves story, "Extricating Young Gussie," so early that Bertie has not yet developed a surname. Other than that, there are no recurring Wodehouse characters here - there are two linked stories told from the POV of a dog, under the title "The Mixer," but that's as close as we get. 

As with a lot of Wodehouse, the plot structure tends to be romance - young men pursuing young women with mostly pure motives in mind, or young women going about their lives and having young men pop up and romance them. There is a bit of larcenous behavior, especially in the first of the stories narrated by the dog, in the mature-Wodehouse manner and light tone. And most of the stories take place in New York: Wodehouse was successful for about a decade before this book by writing stories about exotic New York for London audiences and (less often) about exotic London for New York audiences.

So this is transitional Wodehouse, a little more conventional and pat-ending than we're used to - "At Geisenheimer's" in particular has a snapper of a mid-teens magazine ending that is just fine but doesn't feel particularly Wodehousian. I wouldn't recommend it to any reader who isn't at least forty books deep into Wodehouse; this is one of his works to save for the back half of your reading spree.

Ninety-Two Days by Evelyn Waugh

I doubt there is a travel book with as much of a throw-my-hands-up title as Evelyn Waugh's Ninety-Two Days. It's as if he was saying, "Look, I went to a place and spent some time there, and this is the book I wrote about it. Can't say it any more clearly than that."

I'm getting the sense that Waugh's travel books were often, perhaps always aimless and faintly mercenary - his older brother Alec had, I believe, already made a successful career as a travel writer, and maybe it took some time for Evelyn Waugh's novels to be seen as the magnificent things they are. [1] Whatever the reason, his travel books can be close to the pure old-fashioned "I am an Englishman, one of the world's aristocrats and a deeply cultured individual. I will go to This Strange and Foreign Land and tell you about it."

See my post, earlier this year, on Remote People, for some more detail. That trip had a slightly more obvious trigger, and yet also involved a lot of random bumming around in search of local color.

In December of 1932, Waugh went to Guiana, more or less because it was a British colony in a different part of the world, and he wanted to see how things there compared to what he'd seen in British Africa (in Remote People). He traveled up-country, by horse and foot, crossing the border into Brazil, and then came back, via a somewhat different route that also included some boats.

The point was not to visit some particular place or person, though he did pass by the famous Kaieteur falls, or to understand local government, or even any obvious anthropological interest in the people of Guiana. No, it purely seemed to be "this is a part of the world my people own; I want to take a look at it." And so he did, spending, as he noted, ninety-two days doing so.

If one were cruel, one would here note that there is no point to Ninety-Two Days. Waugh didn't plan to learn anything specific, and he succeeded at that. He wandered around what seems to be a fairly harsh, somewhat depopulated wilderness for three months, battling insects and heat and dehydration, meeting only a few particularly colorful characters (all white settlers), and spends most of his pages talking about logistics, privations, and hardships. He was supported by a variety of porters and guides and assistants, and makes some effort, in that very eugenics-era way, to make clear which of them were natives and which were black and which were various "mixed breeds," using the local terms and explaining them. But most of those people are just names, sometimes a few traits - usually that this one was lazier than Waugh would prefer for a local hired for a pittance to carry heavy burdens through a tropical wilderness - and that's it.

Of course, all this is written by Evelyn Waugh, who even this early in his career was a master of prose and deeply entertaining. It's an often-true cliché that travel books are better the more uncomfortable they were for the writer, and this trip was deeply uncomfortable for Waugh. There's a lot of insight and fine writing and thoughtful sentences throughout: the whole thing might seem vaguely pointless, but it created a deeply readable book, of the kind where the reader is happier the greater the contrast between Waugh's travails and the reader's comfort, perhaps in a nicely overstuffed chair.

Waugh's novels are more important than his travel books, and I suspect (only having read a few so far) that this is one of the least of his travel books. So I would not recommend coming to Ninety-Two Days early in one's Waugh reading. But if you've already read about a dozen Waugh books, it will definitely suit.

[1] There's a point in the book where Evelyn Waugh points out that he and Alec have divided the world between them - well, I think it's more that Alec declared particular regions (like North American and the Caribbean) as "his" and warned Evelyn off his turf. Guiana is allowed, but his journey there was out of bounds.

Love Languages by James Albon

One minor organizational note to start off with: I tag books based on the author, rather than the content. So James Albon is British, like his protagonist in Love Languages, and I tag it that way. But the book mostly takes place in France (untagged), and the other main character is from Hong Kong (also untagged). There is a method to it, you see.

Love Languages is a lovely, painted story of two people who meet as foreigners in Paris, becoming friends, and, eventually, more than that. Sarah Huxley is working for some multinational company doing something complicated in an office filled with annoying young Frenchmen - she's British, and is, or at least recently was, on the way up in this company, doing whatever it is she does as part of whatever it is they do. She's probably around thirty - young enough that advancing quickly still feels like the standard, old enough that everything seems to be settling into patterns she's not sure she likes. (Albon keeps it all on the jargon level, so it's annoying and all-encompassing and messy but entirely opaque, like other people's weird jobs.)

Sarah is feeling unhappy, disconnected, dissatisfied. Her French isn't as good as she'd like it to be; conversation flows around her, at work and in the streets, and she catches enough to get by but not enough to feel part of anything. One day she runs into another young woman, Ping Loh, outside a patisserie. Ping is working as an au pair for a rich couple; both she and they are from Hong Kong.

Sarah and Ping bump into each other again, and pick up a friendship - meeting and talking regularly. Ping speaks a little English; Sarah speaks a little Cantonese from a Hong Kong trip a few years back; they both are OK in French but not as fluent as they want to be. So they talk in a personal pidgin or creole, hopping languages to use the right word and teaching each other. Albon presents this on the page with the actual words they say and then flagged with the meanings in English for the reader - so we know both what they're saying and how they're saying it; it's an elegant and powerful style.

There's a subplot about a slow-moving crisis at Sarah's work - something went wrong, and the company is trying out various explanations, none of which seem to be working. It's all in that opaque style, so we never know what the issue is - we don't even know what this company does - but we can tell that the major activity within the company, and particularly within Sarah's department, is trying to assign blame to someone else, to dodge responsibility. And this is making Sarah more and more frustrated as the book goes on: she wants to do things, to be useful, not to just make pointless documents and maneuver in the Superior Working Strategy Group Direction Meeting.

That slowly boils in the background as Sarah learns more about Ping's life and the two of them get closer and more comfortable with each other. We readers know they are closer than they're admitting to each other; Albon signposts it with a scene where they talk about how one says "I love you" in their languages - Ping says that it's basically never said out loud in Hong Kong, that people "just know."

But then there's a crisis in Ping's work as well: she's annoyed her never-seen dragon-lady-ish boss, the mother of the baby she takes care of, and she loses her job. She moves in with Sarah briefly, as her best friend in Paris, and the two have a moment...which sends Ping flying back to Hong Kong, incommunicado.

But of course a love story can't end there, and it doesn't. This is a sunny, beautiful story - both in the colors and the story - and Albon knows what he needs to do for an ending. He does: it ends really well, and the reader is happy for Sarah and Ping. Love Languages is a love story mostly set in Paris with two people from elsewhere who learn to talk to each other more deeply, and in their own unique way, unlike anyone else in the world - it's a wonderful, lovely gem of a story, at its core positive and happy and bright.

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

If you can divide anything into two groups, then humorous novels can be split into the sweet and the tart. Sweet is more popular, I think - Wodehouse is the great British exemplar, the most relevant for today's discussion. But also think Three Men in a Boat or The Importance of Being Earnest: sweet humor is often silly (Douglas Adams is another example from a later generation), and the stakes in the book might be important, but they're rarely dangerous.

Tart humor can edge into the sour - and here I might start mentioning Evelyn Waugh - with an undertone of disgust and unhappiness with humanity in general. If sweet humor thinks people are generally amusing and is fond of them, tart humor thinks people are inherently flawed, broken things, and all you can do is laugh at the awful things they do. On my side of the Atlantic, the great tart humorous novel of the last century is Catch-22; a lot of Kurt Vonnegut falls into that category as well.

Waugh is one of the masters of the tart humorous novel, and Scoop is one of his best books. It was published in 1937, loosely based on a trip he took two years before to Ethiopia as a correspondent for the Daily Mail to cover an expected war there. It follows one of the traditional humorous novel plots: a naïf is tossed into a situation he doesn't expect or understand, where he is too innocent to see the true picture, and where he blunders through mostly due to that innocence.

You see, the novelist John Boot asks a friend, the wife of a cabinet minister - I'm not sure if we're supposed to assume he's also having an affair with her; if so, he's only one of perhaps dozens - to help get him out of the country quickly and on a newspaper's dime, to avoid a woman he has become entangled with. She pushes the appropriate levers, but the Beast newspaper's functionaries and proprietor (Lord Copper) instead send one William Boot, who writes a twee weekly here's-some-random-rural-color feature for the Beast from his ancestral manse somewhere in the green and pleasant heartlands.

William Boot is not a foreign correspondent, and not really a reporter of any kind. But he's outfitted at vast expense and to a massive extent, and packed off to Ishmaelia, where everyone who's anyone is sure a civil war is brewing. There is no sign of a civil war in Ishmaelia, where the Jackson family - originally imported from America a few generations ago, and having proliferated to the point where one of them runs nearly every major commercial operation or government agency, up to the Presidency - are firmly in control, and vaguely popular with the people.

But of course the joke is that journalists create wars by reporting on them, and that's more or less what happens in Ishmaelia. The Fascists and Communists - or one could say the Germans and Russians, if you want to be more geopolitical and less ideological - are maneuvering, we at first think to get Ishmaelia into their spheres of influence. (We later learn that they, and various capitalists, are much more interested in Ishmaelia's mineral wealth, which is the real source of all the conflict - money, and potentially a lot of it.)

Boot - William, who we follow for the majority of the novel - is thrown into Ishmaelia and into the society of reporters, most of whom are friendly but competitive. He falls in love with a young woman whose husband - they are possibly not quite legitimately married, and he may have run off on her - is conveniently away. He wanders through his life there, not filing any dispatches for long stretches of time because nothing is actually happening. (Of course, Waugh's point is that reporters' job is to make up things, because nothing is really happening.) This makes his masters back in London unhappy, but it's the mid-30s, so communication is by cable - a few words at huge expense - and transportation takes months, so they send oddly-worded threats demanding more and better news from him, which he often misses seeing in the first place.

Boot ends up reporting actual major news, when there actually is something like a coup in Ishmaelia, and does the reflexive right thing - as defined by Waugh - because he's that kind of decent upstanding rural British upper-class chappie, and eventually gets to go back to England, returning home to his decaying manse and collection of oddball relatives. It's more-or-less a happy ending; he doesn't get the girl, but she was someone else's wife to begin with.

Waugh tells this story in often very short scenes; he had the knack, so important in humor, of dropping into a scene, showing just exactly what he needed to, and then bouncing back out to something else. Humor relies on speed and contrast and insights and reversals and precision of language, all of which Waugh brings to bear brilliantly in Scoop. It is a tart novel, verging on a sour one, with a message that the world is essentially corrupt and horrible, but it gives us a deeply amusing, penetrating view of that world, distanced enough than the darts don't pain us.

How to Be a Motorist by Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne

Humor can often date oddly - what one generation thinks is screamingly funny can fall flat with their children. Or worse, the cultural references shift or disappear, so the kids or grandkids are left wondering what was supposed to be funny.

Heath Robinson was a British illustrator and cartoonist in the first half of the twentieth century, specializing in over-complicated contraptions and odd combinations of items to do everyday things. (My understanding is that he had a solid career before that, and fell into the overcomplication line during The Great War, but I could easily be wrong.) At one point, the comparison was that Robinson was to UK illustration what Rube Goldberg was to US illustration - though I think both of them are half-forgotten these days, another two generations on.

So Robinson did a lot of illustrations and drawings, for magazines, for newspapers, probably for other outlets. They piled up, and fell into categories at least some of the time. Someone, possibly Robinson himself, thought it would be a jolly good thing to gather up those drawings and put them into a form people could continue to buy, so they could make him some more money.

And so there was a series of at least four short humorous "How to" books, with Robinson illustrations surrounded by new text by K.R.G. Browne. One of them was 1939's How to Be a Motorist, and I found a copy of that cheap recently, and read the thing.

It's a time capsule, necessarily. It's about the automobiles of 1939, which are somewhat different from those of eighty-five years later, and about the roads and rules of 1939 Britain, which are also somewhat different from the roads and rules near me, and are probably pretty different even from contemporary Britain. Browne says repeatedly that cars are more dependable and less dependent on the specialized knowledge of their operators than they used to be, which is true as far as it goes, but it went a lot father after that.

This is a book that very clearly started as a stack of drawings, which was organized into a sequence by Robinson or Browne or both, and then Browne wrote words to connect them all into a generally coherent narrative. It's also got a slightly musty tone to it, with Browne repeatedly referring to "my friend Mr. Heath Robinson" as if we might have forgotten why we bought the book. (It's always "Mr. Heath Robinson," too - stiff upper lip and all that.)

I was happy to find that it was still amusing, and that the problems of 1939 motoring are not vastly different - at least in exaggerated parody form - from those of today. Browne is working in a slightly stiffer mode than I'd prefer, but he was a British guy born in 1895, so one has to make allowances. This is a light silly book, just as much now as it was in 1939, but it's still generally funny.

I will say that the small format makes Robinson's drawings more cramped than I might have preferred - a bigger art-book style presentation is probably a stronger choice for Robinson appreciation, and, assuming I do go back to check out more Robinson, I'll probably head in that direction next time.

Leave It to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse

Psmith was one of the first and now probably the least-known of P.G. Wodehouse's series characters [1]: he appeared in four novels, and is part of Wodehouse's transition from his original style of school stories into the wider comedic novels of his mature period.

Leave It to Psmith is the fourth, last, and best of those novels: it appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1923 as a serial and then soon afterward in book form. It is also a Blandings Castle novel; even this early, Wodehouse was mixing and matching his series, as if they all lived in the same, consistent world. It's actually only the second Blandings novel, after the 1915 Something Fresh; it's early enough that Lord Emsworth is still obsessed with flowers rather than pigs.

We originally met Psmith in school, where he quickly overshadowed the supposed hero, Mike Jackson. He's tall, thin, well-dressed, and gifted with both an unstoppable flow of patter and an unassailable belief in his ability to handle anything at all. (The reader can see why Wodehouse dropped him so early: a character who can accomplish anything can become difficult to handle in the main role, and works better as a supporting act, as with Jeeves or Uncle Fred.) The two middle Psmith books - Psmith in the City and Psmith, Journalist - were transitional books, mixing comedy and thriller plots. Leave It is basically mature Wodehouse, with some guns and criminals but treating them in a comic way.

Psmith is a young man looking out for his next adventure here; he has been working for a relative in a business involving fish - actual, cold, dead fish, which Psmith has come to realize he does not like at all - and is now ready to do just about anything else:

LEAVE IT TO PSMITH!
Psmith Will Help You
Psmith Is Ready For Anything
DO YOU WANT
Someone To Manage Your Affairs?
Someone To Handle Your Business?
Someone To Take The Dog For A Run?
Someone To Assassinate Your Aunt?
PSMITH WILL DO IT
CRIME NOT OBJECTED TO
Whatever Job You Have To Offer
(Provided It Has Nothing To Do With Fish)
LEAVE IT TO PSMITH!

That's the advertisement he places in a major London newspaper. It draws the attention of Lord Emsworth's dim son Freddie, who - as so often is the case in Wodehouse - desires to help his uncle steal his (the uncle's) wife's necklace and use that to support his (still the uncle's) stepdaughter. The stepdaughter, to make it even more complex, is married to Mike Jackson, Psmith's old school chum.

Freddie travels to London, to meet Psmith, at the same time Emsworth is heading up to meet a famous Canadian poet and bring that poet to stay at Blandings for an extended visit - Lady Constance, Emsworth's sister and the current owner of the necklace to be stolen, is very fond of literary figures and have been inflicting a series on them on Blandings for several years.

Of course this all leads to Psmith coming to Blandings as an impostor, pretending to be that Canadian poet. And he has fallen in love with the young woman just hired to catalog the Blandings library. And there are other, more sinister figures, looking to steal the necklace as well.

This is mature-period Wodehouse, so it's complex and witty and full of wonderful writing - his later books were still fun and wonderfully written, but the plots tended to thin down a bit. Here Wodehouse is still on the way up, adding in complication after complication and delighting in the chaos it creates.

Wodehouse's books are not serious in any way, and are wonderful precisely because of that. They create their own world, and explore all the permutations of that stranger, sillier, more entertaining and lovely world - this is one of the earliest of his best books, and a good place to start for readers who haven't discovered Wodehouse yet. It's also a good place to dive in for people who have only read Jeeves and Wooster - Blandings has another half-dozen novels basically as good as this, even if the prior Psmith books are odder and quirkier.

[1] With an asterisk on both counts for Ukridge, who was slightly earlier and even more obscure now.