I will admit frankly that the only reason I'm choosing to feature this book at this time is that the cover seems so appropriate to the festive season. Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin is late period Wodehouse, first published in 1972 when he was over ninety years old. It forms the third part of what one might loosely call the Monty Bodkin Trilogy, the other two books being Heavy Weather (1933) and The Luck of the Bodkins (1935).
It's difficult to think what might have spurred PGW to continue this saga in the 1970s after such a long hiatus. Clearly, he felt the story had not been satisfactorily concluded in the previous instalment. As happened in the cases of other long-running sagas (the Fink-Nottle/Bassett romance springs to mind) he took a late decision to change the formula. Here, Monty Bodkin, long-term beau of the formidable Gertrude Butterwick, changes his mind. The way to happiness is complicated by the requirement to keep in the good books of dim but temperamental Hollywood mogul Ivor Llewellyn. In my memory, it was a not-so-good tale; but I was pleasantly surprised by it upon rereading it a few months ago. In these last novels, Wodehouse seems to relax a little. He is not so worried about plot, and the style is not so strenuous. (In the 1960s especially, the zest seemed to go out of Wodehouse, and he tried to replace it with unflagging busyness.) This novel is only 170 pages long, and its successors were even shorter.
It is set in Linotype Times. Here we go:
This edition was first published by Penguin in 1974, only two years after the first edition. The Ionicus cover dates from this time, too. I think it is one of his very best. The atmosphere of the nightclub is conveyed wonderfully (it looks much more fun than any actual nightclub could ever have been): Llewellyn dancing enthusiastically with the rather Grace-Kelly-ish heroine Sandy Miller while Monty Bodkin looks on, despondently. Get those reds and yellows! It's been mentioned to me that Ionicus's figures could be rather lifeless (and I agree), but surely that criticism couldn't be levelled here.
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