Failing to master html links
Sep. 24th, 2006 02:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraMike, by PG Wodehouse (available on Project Gutenberg. (I had a link, but not only did it fail to seamlessly integrate with my entry but the people at Project Gutenberg have moved things, so interested readers will have to click a number of times and even type things to track it down).
I had in fact read the second half of this before - it was published split as Mike at Wrykyn and Mike and Psmith - and I'd like to thank the helpful people at Wikipaedia for sorting out my confusion at finding half the book familiar when I thought I haven't read it at all.
It is, however, an early book, and it is operating within the restrictions of the boy's school story. When Wodehouse goes into the masters' points of view you can see him expanding out into a more familiar style. This is, for example, from a conversation between them after discovering that all the boarders have taken the day off, in protest, to go picnicking:
“When I accepted the honourable post of Lower Fourth master in this abode of sin,” said Mr. Seymour, “it was on the distinct understanding that there was going to be a Lower Fourth. Yet I go into my form-room this morning, and what do I find? Simply Emptiness, and Pickersgill II. whistling ‘The Church Parade,’ all flat. I consider I have been hardly treated.”
And I can't omit Psmith's introduction, where he queries Mike about himself:
“Are you the Bully, the Pride of the School, or the Boy who is Led Astray and takes to Drink in Chapter Sixteen?”
“The last, for choice,” said Mike, “but I’ve only just arrived, so I don’t know.”
I haven't read the later Psmith books (as a child I was distracted by Jeeves), but they'll probably be appearing in order here, now that I've found they're on Gutenberg.
Just a few words about boys' school stories (I keep moving the apostrophe) - I've read a lot of these and enjoy them, even while admitting their frequent flaws, and I get the feeling Wodehouse takes the same view. Mike is a relatively good example of the genre - it does lack that sense of the world of school that you get in Talbot Baines Reed's better works, and although the behaviour here is much more believable than many it still lacks the emotional realism of, say, EF Benson's David Blaize (although the nearly fatally trampled while stopping runaway cart scene in that book does lose it points). But you could do a lot worse (I occasionally wallow guiltily in something by FW Farrar, for example). This isn't an attempt to push the bounds of the genre or remake it from within, but it isn't meant to be; and what it is trying to do, it does well.
I had in fact read the second half of this before - it was published split as Mike at Wrykyn and Mike and Psmith - and I'd like to thank the helpful people at Wikipaedia for sorting out my confusion at finding half the book familiar when I thought I haven't read it at all.
It is, however, an early book, and it is operating within the restrictions of the boy's school story. When Wodehouse goes into the masters' points of view you can see him expanding out into a more familiar style. This is, for example, from a conversation between them after discovering that all the boarders have taken the day off, in protest, to go picnicking:
“When I accepted the honourable post of Lower Fourth master in this abode of sin,” said Mr. Seymour, “it was on the distinct understanding that there was going to be a Lower Fourth. Yet I go into my form-room this morning, and what do I find? Simply Emptiness, and Pickersgill II. whistling ‘The Church Parade,’ all flat. I consider I have been hardly treated.”
And I can't omit Psmith's introduction, where he queries Mike about himself:
“Are you the Bully, the Pride of the School, or the Boy who is Led Astray and takes to Drink in Chapter Sixteen?”
“The last, for choice,” said Mike, “but I’ve only just arrived, so I don’t know.”
I haven't read the later Psmith books (as a child I was distracted by Jeeves), but they'll probably be appearing in order here, now that I've found they're on Gutenberg.
Just a few words about boys' school stories (I keep moving the apostrophe) - I've read a lot of these and enjoy them, even while admitting their frequent flaws, and I get the feeling Wodehouse takes the same view. Mike is a relatively good example of the genre - it does lack that sense of the world of school that you get in Talbot Baines Reed's better works, and although the behaviour here is much more believable than many it still lacks the emotional realism of, say, EF Benson's David Blaize (although the nearly fatally trampled while stopping runaway cart scene in that book does lose it points). But you could do a lot worse (I occasionally wallow guiltily in something by FW Farrar, for example). This isn't an attempt to push the bounds of the genre or remake it from within, but it isn't meant to be; and what it is trying to do, it does well.
