My Wodehouse group is meeting this week, and this book provides a great break. I actually can't summarize the plot because Wodehouse himself says his books are like musicals without the music.
It's set at Blandings, the stately home of absent-minded Lord Emsworth, (Clarence) who loves his enormous pig, the Empress of Blandings. There are impostors, ("Blandings has impostors like other castles have mice")and star-crossed lovers. Two imperious old competitors of Emsworth are trying to steal the Empress, and Lady Constance Keeble, Lord Emsworth's bossiest sister, is trying to run his life. The usual, in the Blandings stories.
But Lord Emsworth's old friend, Fred Twistleton, is here to sort things out, in his own special way, by introducing the impostor to Blandings in the first place. His job is to re-unite lovers, provide them with financial add, foil the would-be-Empress thieves, and sort out the blackmailing secretary and bossy sister.
It's Wodehouse's genius that another outing with the usual suspects is still fresh and fun. And re-readable decades after I first found him. Did you really need to know the outcome?
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