Jeeves in the Offing Book

"He couldn't have moved quicker if he had been the dachshund Poppet, who at this juncture was running round in circles, trying, if I read his thoughts aright, to work off the rather heavy lunch he had had earlier in the afternoon."


Usually I do not have trouble finding bazillion of quotes to use in my review for any book of the series. Sadly this time I came up with only (see above) and it is not outrageously funny. One has to take what one can get I suppose. It is a sign that the series runs out of steam by the time its book count reached twelve?

One perfectly fine day Bertie Wooster was minding his business thinking his life could not possible be happier. He was reading a newspaper while eating a typical English breakfast

when he stumbled upon an announcement of his own engagement to Bobbie Wickham - he had no clue he was engaged. This made him realize that while his life could not be happier it could get much, much worse.

It did. Soon after his Aunt Dahlia called him inviting him to visit for the purpose of helping entertaining her important guests, Bobbie Wickham among them. To make matters really bad, Jeeves was on vacation at the moment (judging a swimsuit competition among other things as it later turned out). So Bertie went and all the hell broke loose - as it is usually the case with him.

In one of the previous books I complained Jeeves without Bertie is boring.

This book made me realized that Bertie without Jeeves can carry the story for a while, but it also becomes stale after some time. Jeeves did show up by the end of the book, but his contribution to the action was minimal and not too impressive. Helpful still tough.

I was often amused reading the story. I even laughed out loud a couple of times. In the end I was disappointed. Considering that it included such colorful and excellent characters that were great in the early tales as Aunt Dahlia, Bobbie Wickham, Roderick Glossop, and even the famous cow creamer, it was fairly average as far as humor concerned. Any single person (or thing) from the list above could carry outrageously funny story. Here, taken together they were mildly amusing.


I admit the rating should be higher than just 3 stars. In this case it reflects my disappointment that the aforementioned actors of the drama (and make no mistakes, from Bertie's point of view his tales are always dramas) could not deliver something better.