P. G. Wodehouse’s Uncle Dynamite: The Title Says It All

I’m a huge fan of P. G. Wodehouse. He is one of the funniest authors in the history of literature, while at the same time maintaining an extraordinarily high quality of writing. Very few writers can turn a phrase as cleverly or more beautifully than Wodehouse.

The uncle in Uncle Dynamite is Lord Frederick Ickenham who has been featured in several Wodehouse tales along with his nephew, Pongo Twistleton. Traveling on a train to visit Pongo, Lord Ickenham meets Bill Oakshott and engages him in conversation. Bill is returning from South America where he went to try to forget the love of his life, Hermione Bostock, the daughter of an annoying uncle of Bill’s who has moved in and made himself at home in Bill’s manor. The modest Bill confides in Fred how much he dislikes his uncle, but refrains from disclosing his affection for Hermione. Which is a good thing, since Fred casually mentions that his nephew Pongo has recently gotten engaged to a young woman named Hermione Bostock!

Uncle Fred would like Pongo to rekindle his engagement to a protégée of his, the young sculptor Sally Painter, but Pongo is dead set on Hermione, despite her preventing him from drinking any alcohol and disapproving of Uncle Fred. And so the stage is set for another complicated farce in which Uncle Fred will work his magic to ensure all the young lovers are paired up properly.

Of course, there is lots of hilarious wordplay throughout. Right off the bat in Chapter 1, Uncle Fred explains that he is enjoying some freedom, because his wife has left England to attend a relative’s wedding:

‘Yes, my dear wife, I am glad to say, continues in the pink. I’ve just been seeing her off on the boat at Southampton. She is taking a trip to the West Indies.’
‘Jamaica?’
‘No, she went of her own free will.’

Wodehouse, P. G.. Uncle Dynamite (p. 8). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Uncle Fred has a penchant for posing as someone he’s not, which invariably leads to lots of hilarious encounters with people who actually know him. Pongo has learned not to trust him to behave himself, and has left him at Ickenham to spend the weekend at Oakshott, where Hermione, her parents, and Bill live. Through a series of event too complicated to explain here, Uncle Fred shows up, pretending to be Bill’s friend from his Brazilian adventures, Major Brabazon-Plank. The fly in the ointment is the fact that practically everyone at Oakshott either knows Uncle Fred or the real Major Brabazon-Plank, including the hapless village policeman, Officer Potter. Bill’s Uncle Aylmer Bostock is convinced Pongo is an imposter trying to steal his priceless “African curios”, when poor Pongo is practically the only person who is who he says he is.

Uncle Fred brazenly and breezily adjusts his story and his identity depending on circumstances to the point of absurdity. And that’s the point of reading a Wodehouse novel: the plot depends on utterly absurd coincidences and setbacks that could be overcome if someone actually came clean and told the truth, but it wouldn’t be such nearly so much fun. As always with Wodehouse, there are laugh-out-loud scenes and incomparably witty prose.

When Officer Potter remembers Uncle Fred from a previous time when he collared him at the dog races, Frederick Ickenham remains unflappable:

‘Brabazon-Plank, eh? You call yourself Brabazon-Plank, do you? Ho! You look to me more like George Robinson of 14 Nasturtium Road, East Dulwich.’

Lord Ickenham stared. He removed the cigar from his mouth and stared again. ‘Don’t tell me you’re the cop who pinched me that day at the dog races!’

‘Yus, I am.’

A bubbling cry like that of some strong swimmer in his agony proceeded from Pongo’s lips. He glared wildly at the helmeted figure of doom. Lord Ickenham, in sharp contradistinction, merely beamed, like one of a pair of lovers who have met at journey’s end.

‘Well, I’ll be dashed,’ he said cordially. ‘What a really remarkable thing. Fancy running into you again like this. I’d never have known you. You’ve grown a moustache since then, or something. My dear fellow, this is delightful. What are you doing in these parts?’

Wodehouse, P. G.. Uncle Dynamite (pp. 125-126). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Eventually, the real Major Brabazon-Plank shows up, as well as Sally’s brother, Otis, who is a nascent book publisher. He is eager to publish Hermione’s next book, so her father will call off the lawsuit he threatened. Like I said, it’s complicated. However, Uncle Fred comes out on top, “spreading sweetness and light”, and everyone ends up engaged to the one he or she truly loves, including Officer Potter.

Here is a small sampling of the understated but hysterical humor Wodehouse employs liberally throughout:

[Pongo] beamed on the girl, and having released his tongue, which had got entangled with his uvula, spoke in a genial and welcoming voice.
‘What ho, Bean.’
‘What ho, sir.’
‘It’s you, is it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You gave me a start.’
‘You gave me a start, sir.’
‘Making two starts in all,’ said Pongo, who had taken mathematics at school.

Wodehouse, P. G.. Uncle Dynamite (p. 136). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

‘I want to tell you about Pongo.’
‘What about him?’
‘He’s worried to death, the poor pet. My heart aches for him. He was in here not long ago, and he just sat in a chair and groaned.’
‘You’re sure he wasn’t singing?’

Wodehouse, P. G.. Uncle Dynamite (p. 207). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

‘It happened just after breakfast. My aunt was waiting for me to bring the car round, and Uncle Aylmer made some unpleasant cracks about the hat she was wearing. So she went up to her room to get another, and as she reached the door she heard someone moving about inside. When she went in, there was nobody to be seen, and then suddenly there came a sneeze from the wardrobe, and there was Pongo, crouching on the floor.’
‘She was sure?’
‘Sure?’
‘It wasn’t a shoe or a bit of fluff?’
‘No, it was Pongo.

Wodehouse, P. G.. Uncle Dynamite (pp. 211-212). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Wodehouse wrote several novels featuring Uncle Fred, Lord Ickenham, and you can pick them up and read them in any order. If only we could all live in a world where we each had an Uncle Fred who could step in and fix all of our financial and romantic troubles!

Kurt Schlichter’s and Irina Moises’ Lost Angeles: Noir, Humor, and Fantasy Combined

Kurt Schlichter, author of the excellent People’s Republic/Kelly Turnbull novels, has just released a new book co-written with his wife Irina Moises, Lost Angeles: Silver Bullets On The Sunset Strip. Perfect timing, since it is an homage to the pulp noir detectives Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler wrote about in the 1930s and 40s, and I recently read Chandler’s The Lady In The Lake.

Schlichter’s and Moises’ detective is Eddie Loud, and he is obviously modeled on Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. He’s tough and wisecracking, while struggling to live up to his moral code. However, things get really weird, really fast. Set in 1940 Los Angeles, Loud specializes in cases involving “demigods” – people who are part divine and virtually immortal. In the universe of Lost Angeles, the ancient Greek gods exist. However, with the advent and rise of Christianity, these “demigods” have retreated into an uneasy truce with mortals, rarely being seen in public. The male ones, like Apollo, Zeus, and Poseidon, occasionally sleep with a mortal, sometimes creating an immortal. Half-breeds are truly immortal, but quarter-breeds can be killed with a silver bullet or other weapon. With less than 1/64 divine blood, they’re basically mortal humans.

The case in this story involves a rare half-breed, Charles Gaultier, who has been kidnapped. His majordomo, Constance Showers, hires Loud to find him. As he begins his investigation, he is soon thrown together with another private investigator, Trixie Gamble, a gorgeous woman who traces her lineage back to Cassandra of Troy. Millennia ago, Apollo fell in love with Cassandra and bestowed on her the gift of prophecy. However, she spurned him, and in revenge he cursed her to be able to foretell the future, but never be believed. Trixie has inherited this gift/curse, and the results are hilarious.

Trixie offered to give me a ride in her little red convertible. I told her that if anybody saw me sitting in the passenger seat, they would think I was a swish. She got that faraway look in her eyes and said that someday most men wouldn’t mind that. I laughed. She was always saying crazy things.

Schlichter, Kurt; Moises, Irina. Lost Angeles: Silver Bullets On The Sunset Strip (p. 44). Kindle Edition.

“The question is who tipped them off we were on the case. Dufrasne?”

“Maybe Goldman,” Trixie said. “He should have listened to me. But regardless, we’re on the Nazis’ radar now.”

“Their what?” I asked, baffled.

“I don’t know what that means,” Trixie said, confused.

Schlichter, Kurt; Moises, Irina. Lost Angeles: Silver Bullets On The Sunset Strip (p. 69). Kindle Edition.

Vivien Leigh’s pic was staring down from the wall into my tomato bisque. Across the way, the genuine article was nibbling on a lobster salad when she wasn’t berating her fiancé, Laurence Olivier, about something. The tabloids were calling her a homewrecker for stealing him away from his wife.

“She doesn’t seem to care much about the scandal,” I observed to Trixie.

“You don’t have to when you just won Best Actress,” Trixie replied. Leigh had picked up a little naked gold man for Gone With the Wind.

“Hooray for Hollywood,” I said and slurped a spoonful of soup.

Trixie got that strange, far-away look again. “Someday, a man will be nominated for Best Actress. He might even win.”

I about spit out my mouth full.

Schlichter, Kurt; Moises, Irina. Lost Angeles: Silver Bullets On The Sunset Strip (p. 71). Kindle Edition.

Trixie is on a similar case, trying to find out where a demigod has disappeared to. His mortal lover has hired her. Unfortunately, she found him dead, in the trunk of a car, which is supposed to be impossible. Before she could figure out how that happened, the FBI showed up and whisked the body away.

So, Trixie and Eddie decide to team up and get to the bottom of who kidnapped Charles Gaultier and why. Before too long, they are tangling with German and American Nazis (remember, this is set in 1940, just before the US entered WWII), Hollywood and Russian communists, and mobsters. It’s all a lot of fun, with tons of Schlichter’s trademark sense of humor. He and Irina have dropped dozens of Easter eggs throughout the book. Here are a couple of examples:

As she finished her Dewars, I counted the bills. “Trust but verify” is my motto. I picked it up at The Trocadero one night when I overheard Ronald Reagan saying it to Jane Wyman at the next table.

Schlichter, Kurt; Moises, Irina. Lost Angeles: Silver Bullets On The Sunset Strip (p. 18). Kindle Edition.

Others gambled at tables set up along the walls. As we passed, a satyr dealt a blackjack to John Wayne. Clarke Gable, sadly, busted after being dealt a king on his twelve showing. He shrugged, frankly not giving a damn.

Schlichter, Kurt; Moises, Irina. Lost Angeles: Silver Bullets On The Sunset Strip (p. 157). Kindle Edition.

There’s even a reference to “Captain Geech and the Shrimp Shack Shooters”, a fictional beach movie band that was in the Tom Hanks movie, That Thing You Do.

In one respect, Loud is very different from Philip Marlowe: he has no hesitation using his gun, and in practically every scene he and Trixie leave behind a trail of carnage. The fact that the dead bodies are all Nazis and Commies makes it acceptable, though!

As the story works its way up to the climax involving the Nazis, the Soviets, the FBI, and the Mob, Schlichter and Moises engage in some interesting conjecture: what, exactly would it be like to be immortal? Would it be a blessing or a curse? They make a very good case that living forever among mortals would be the latter.

In the Afterword, Schlichter and Moises assure us that this is the first book in a projected series, which I think is great news. Lost Angeles: Silver Bullets on the Sunset Strip is a very entertaining read, and I love all the digs they get in at contemporary Hollywood culture. I was laughing out loud at several jokes, and the plot is very engaging. It’s a perfect mix of gritty noir and fantasy. Highly recommended if you are looking for a modern spoof of classic noir fiction.

Catherine Salton’s Christmas Tale: Raphael and the Noble Task

Book number 57 of 2024

In 2000, when our daughters were 10 and 6, I saw a list of new Christmas-themed books that included Catherine Salton’s Raphael and the Noble Task. I found it at the local bookstore and was immediately taken with David Weitzman’s beautiful illustrations. I read it aloud to the family, and we all enjoyed it very much. Even though it’s technically a children’s book, it will appeal to readers of all ages, much like C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series.

Raphael speaks with The Alchemist, another of his cathedral’s statues

I decided advent 2024 was as good a time as any to revisit this charming tale of a Gothic cathedral’s chimère (French for a statue of a chimera) named Raphael and his quest to find a Noble Task to justify his existence. Raphael is a griffin, placed above the cathedral’s main entrance. He has a lion’s body and legs, eagle’s wings, and the head and neck of a dragon. He is bored and lonely, and he visits the statue of an alchemist who refers to an older cathedral guardian named Parsifal who is no longer around. It is the alchemist who plants the idea of a noble task in Raphael’s head.

Once Raphael decides he needs to perform a noble task, he decides to ask other members of the cathedral statuary what he should do. He first goes to a couple of tomb effigies of a knight and his wife, but they’re so busy bickering they can’t help him. Next, he approaches a gargoyle who is near his niche, but, like all gargoyles, this one – named Madra-Dubh (Black Dog) – is very rude and condescending:

Raphael steeled his resolve. “You see, I’m trying to find something, and I think you might know where it is,” he said as quickly as possible.

“Oooh, and it’s trying to find something,” crowed Madra-Dubh as the others cackled gleefully. “Not good enough for the fawning idle-headed dewberry to sit in its donkey-spotted behind and do its right job, mark me! Nooo, it’s got to go thumping about pestering the working folk with foolish don’t-you-knows. Go drop some feathers, ye molting chicken-witted dragglebeak, and leave us in peace, then.” (pages 21 – 22)

Raphael eventually finds the scriptorium (library), and even though he can’t read, he sees an illustration in an illuminated manuscript. It depicts a knight in silver armor slaying a dragon. Because Raphael resembles the dragon, he begins to doubt his own integrity and wonder if he is actually evil. At this point in the story, there is beautiful scene set in a side chapel where Raphael, tortured by gnawing self-doubt, encounters a statue of Mary with her child Jesus, and he is immediately set at peace.

A young woman with a gentle expression gazed out at him from the darkness. Her plain blue gown fell in folds to her bare feet, and her hair was unbound, spreading over her shoulders in rippling veil. In her arms she cradled a baby, who reached up with one small hand to touch her face in a gesture of cam devotion. As Raphael stood wondering, his head cocked to one side, he felt as if his hurt and disappointment were being softly lifted away. For the young woman seemed to speak to him in a manner he did not fully understand; she did not move, nor did she actually say a word, but all the same, she told Raphael a long and beautiful story. In the icy darkness of that chapel, she spoke gently to Raphael alone. She spoke of joy in good times, and patience in hard, and of hope even in the bleakest hours of all. (page 41)

Once he has returned to his niche over the main portal, though, his self-doubt returns. And then one day, he sees a young woman in desperate straits hurry up the steps to leave her baby in the “foundling” box – a place for babies whose parents can’t feed them or care for them. In a flash Raphael has found his noble task!

What follows is great fun, as various communities in the cathedral all work together to help Raphael take care of his new charge. The gargoyles, the churchmice, and the pigeons all manage to put aside their differences and learn to cooperate.

Of course, the situation cannot last forever, and Raphael is faced with a terrible choice: his true noble task. Salton does a terrific job of weaving together the lives of the monks and other inhabitants of the village with the clandestine doings of the cathedral statuary, armies of mice, and flocks of pigeons. The whole tale is a marvelous allegory of how, despite the best of human (and chimère) intentions, without a little Divine intervention things would rapidly turn into tragedy. However, as Salton quotes Julian of Norwich at the very beginning of the book, “All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Raphael and the Noble Task is a wonderful book for families to read aloud at Christmastime. It’s relatively short: 157 pages, and as I mentioned before, David Weitzman’s illustrations are fantastic. It deserves a place alongside other Christmas classics like Dickens’ A Christmas Carol  and O’Henry’s The Gift of the Magi.

Charles Williams’ Many Dimensions – More Weird Fantasy From a Christian Perspective

Many Dimensions is Charles Williams’ second novel – published in 1931 – and it is quite good. In an earlier post, I reviewed his first novel, War In Heaven. Williams was an Inkling – the group of writers and thinkers that included J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield. While Williams wrote fantasy, his work is about as far from Middle Earth and Narnia as one can imagine.

The story begins with Sir Giles Tumulty, who returns from War In Heaven. He is a thoroughly repellent character, who is completely materialistic and amoral. In Many Dimensions, he has, through unexplained but probably unethical means, obtained the Stone of Solomon. It is a small cube of milky white substance with the letters of the Tetragrammaton inscribed on its faces. The stone seems to have unlimited powers, including the ability to transport its bearer to any location on earth instantaneously. Giles also suspects it can travel through time, and he intends to test his thesis on some innocent subject. He is being pursued by agents of the Persian government, who have safeguarded the stone for many centuries.

As Giles and his nephew, Reginald Montague, begin an analysis of the stone, they soon discover that they can strike off pieces of it which are identical to it in mass, size, appearance, and powers, while the original stone maintains its mass. Reginald immediately starts cooking up schemes to profit off of this seemingly limitless source of transportation.

Meanwhile, England’s Chief Justice, Lord Arglay, who is a brother-in-law of Sir Giles, comes into possession of one of these stones. He and his secretary, Chloe Burnett, soon realize how dangerous the proliferation of these stones of infinite power is to world stability. Arglay, Chloe, and the Hajji – a very old and wise Persian – decide to oppose Sir Giles, various government agencies interested in the stone’s millitary and intelligence applications, an American millionaire and his wife whom Montague snookered into paying 70,000 guineas for one, and various other antagonists who all want stones for selfish reasons.

I have already mentioned how awful a person Sir Giles is, but he ends up being one of those villains you love to hate. As Lord Arglay puts it,

“Giles always reminds me of the old riddle, ‘Would you rather be more abominable than you sound, or sound more abominable than you are?’ The answer is, ‘I would rather be neither, but I am both.'” (Charles Williams. Many Dimensions (Kindle Location 598). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.)

Williams gives Giles terrific epithets, curses, and insults to hurl at everyone around him:

“broken-down Houndsditch sewer rat”, “Blast your filthy gasbag of a mouth!”, “Encyclopedias are like slums, the rotten homes of diseased minds”, “you baboon-headed cockatoo”, and “half-caste earthworms” are just a few examples of his picaresque language.

That said, Sir Giles is quite evil in his single-minded pursuit of knowledge and power. In a conversation with some government secretaries, he illustrates what a monster he is:

‘You might,’ Sir Giles said, ‘use it as the perfect contraceptive.’ Mr. Sheldrake looked down his nose. The conversation seemed to him to be becoming obscene. ‘Under control,’ Lord Birlesmere said thoughtfully, ‘always, always under control. We must find out what it can do; you must, Sir Giles.’ ‘I ask nothing better,’ Sir Giles said. ‘But you Puritans have always made such a fuss about vivisection, let alone human vivisection.’ ‘No one,’ Lord Birlesmere exclaimed, ’is suggesting vivisection. There is a difference between harmless experiments and vivisection.’ ‘I can have living bodies?’ Sir Giles asked. ‘Well, there are prisons — and workhouses — and hospitals — and barracks,’ Birlesmere answered slowly. (Charles Williams. Many Dimensions (Kindle Locations 1850-1856). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.)

One thing I admire about Many Dimensions is Williams’ thoughtful treatment of the impications of time travel. Lord Arglay soon realizes that if a person were to use the stone to travel back to a time before he or she had the stone, they would have to live up to the point where they got the stone and traveled back in time. In other words, they would be trapped in an endless loop, forever reliving the point in time where they decided to go back in the past. Sir Giles reaches the same conclusion, and he tricks a gullible lab assistant into doing just that. Giles attempts to go thirty minutes into the future himself, but the stone only takes him ten minutes. He is soon haunted by the uncertainty of whether he is actually experiencing life, or recalling his memories of the past ten minutes.

As in War In Heaven, spirituality pervades Many Dimensions. However, where the spirituality in War In Heaven is explicitly Christian, in Many Dimensions it is a strange mix of Sufism and Judaism. The hero, Lord Arglay, is an agnostic who gradually comes around to believing in God through the faith of Chloe. The stone itself seems to be the First Matter, that which God created from nothing.

If I go any further, I’ll have to give spoilers, and I don’t want to do that. Suffice it to say that Many Dimensions is an excellent tale that leaves the readers pondering some weighty concepts. I highly recommend it to readers who enjoy considering the implications of what would happen if mankind had access to something that granted its every wish. Williams makes a strong case that the result would not be a utopia, but rather a hell.