So you’ve won the Scripture-knowledge prize, have you?”Sir, yes, sir.”Yes, ‘ said Gussie, ‘you look just the sort of little tick who would.’
P. G. ‘Plum’ Wodehouse has been described as ‘strenuously agnostic’, yet he still wrote brilliantly, affectionately – and hilariously – about the Anglican Church. Brimming with over 50 clergymen of every rank (including the Reverends ‘Pieface’ Brandon and Sidney Potter-Pirbright who looks like he’s been stuffed by an inexperienced taxidermist), his stories also contain over 2, 300 quotations from the King James Bible, proving Plum knew his Acts from his Ezekiel.
The tenth of Paul Kent’s occasional essays on matters Wodehousean takes us on a joyous journey from Plum’s childhood visits to his four clerical uncles, to his later attendance at séances and his none-too serious musings on the Hereafter (‘we’ll have to wait and see’). Proof, if proof were needed that in Wodehouse World nothing, but nothing is sacred.
关于作者
Paul Kent is the Vice-Chairman of the P G Wodehouse Society (UK), and has been a fan of the great man for longer than he cares to remember. Between 2019 and 2022, he published a trilogy of books that offers a comprehensive tour of Wodehouse’s creative imagination – ‘This is jolly old Fame’, ‘Mid-Season Form’ and ‘The Happiness of the World’ – which seeks to prove that Plum was not just a great comic writer, but a great writer, period. Books 4 and 5 of the trilogy – respectively ‘Plum’s Literary Heroes’ and ‘Plum at the Theatre’ – are currently in preparation; and the first ten occasional essays entitled What Ho! are available now: they are Wodehouse on Food, Sport, Love, Money, Class, Cats, Dogs, Hollywood, Fashion, Childhood, and Faith.