He was overcome by the poignancy of the situation. Here was a girl who had frankly admitted that in her opinion he was Prince Charming galloping up on his white horse and would have liked nothing better than to be folded in his embrace and hugged till her ribs squeaked, and here was he all eagerness to do the folding and hugging, and no chance of business resulting because the honour of the Bodkins said it mustn’t. Beat that for irony, he thought as he rubbed his shin. It was the sort of thing Thomas Hardy would have got a three-volume novel out of.

Having intensely enjoyed, and positively reviewed, The Luck of the Bodkins the other day, I thought I might as well go right ahead and review the sequel, Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin. (Monty also figures largely in a previous book, Heavy Weather, a Blandings story. I’ll have to be getting on to that one too, though it will be out of sequence.)

PG & MB redresses one of the few niggling problems that exist with TLOtB, otherwise a near-perfect confection. The sensitive reader can’t avoid the nagging sense that in getting engaged to Gertrude Butterwick, All England field hockey player, Monty has made a blunder. Monty is much like Bertie Wooster – except that he wants to be married – and one can hear Jeeves saying, if Bertie had ever found himself handcuffed to La Butterwick, “The young lady is undoubtedly healthy and vigorous, sir. But might I suggest that a person with her record of breaking multiple engagements might conceivably be a touch too volatile in temperament for the establishment of a felicitous domestic partnership?”

In short, the reader wants Monty to be happy, and under Gertrude’s thumb he’s likely to sink to the level of a third-rate power. Monty requires a woman a little more cheerful. A little more trusting. A woman less subservient to the commands of her blighted, vegetarian father.

So when Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin opens, one year to the day from the close of the previous novel –

[At this point I need to break off and blather a moment about the question of time in Wodehouse. The Luck of the Bodkins was published in 1935, and somewhere in the last couple pages it’s mentioned that Prohibition was recently repealed in the US. Monty’s deal with Gertrude’s father calls for him to hold a paying job for one year before they can be married. At the beginning of PG & MB, we’re told that that year has now passed. But PG & MB was published in 1972, nearly forty years later. One of its first pages mentions TV studio audiences. In the dreary world you and I inhabit, there was no point in history at which the first thing could have been separated by a single year from the second. But this is Wodehouse world, that foretaste of Paradise in which time exists only for the purposes of the story, and the world never changes much.]

So, as I was saying, this book starts one year after we left off. Monty has been toiling away, doing unspecified tasks, as a technical advisor at Superba-Llewellyn Studios in Hollywood. His secretary, Sandy Miller, has fallen head-over-espadrilles in love with him, but she knows his heart belongs to Gertrude. And now, he announces, he’s headed back to England to claim his bride.

However, when he arrives, Monty finds old Mr. Butterwick unwilling to close the deal. He has learned, he tells Monty, that Monty acquired his job with Superba-Llewellyn through blackmail (which is true), and so it doesn’t count. Monty finally persuades the old blighter to give him one more year.

Then Sandy shows up, to his surprise. She’s in England with her boss, Ivor Llewellyn, who has taken a country house for an extended sojourn. He has done this at the bidding of his imperious wife Grayce, who wants him to write a history of his studio. In fact, he needs a secretary to help him with the book. The perfect job for Monty!

The action switches to the country house at that point, and comes to focus on a valuable pearl necklace currently belonging to Grayce, a gift from Ivor. Ivor confesses to Monty that, because Grayce has him on a strict budget, he pawned the necklace some time back and replaced it with cultured pearls. Now their daughter is getting married, and the necklace is supposed to go to her. Ivor will pay Monty handsomely to steal the necklace and drop it in the water somewhere. They are unaware that there are three actual jewel thieves also staying in the house, plotting to relieve him of the job.

In terms of classic Wodehouse prose, Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin stands equal to any other work in his corpus, despite the fact that he was over 90 when it was published. Plot-wise, I’d have to say he’d slipped a little. The book seems to wrap up prematurely, with a lot of possible plot twists passed over. There are long stretches where Monty really has no problems at all, and just seems unaware of it.

Still, a very amusing book, and it’s great to see Monty settle with a suitable girl.