When I read people’s reactions to Jeeves and Wooster books, there’s usually mention of joy, positivity, everything working out, and no one really getting hurt. All this is true. Who am I to spoil a good thing.

But then, would a sense of darker undertones serve to lessen the books? If they were nothing more than frothy accounts of high jinks amongst the 1920s/1930s smart set, would I admire them as I do? Would anyone admire them as they do, without light and shade, whether shade is consciously acknowledged or not?

Now that I’ve got that of my chest we can have a look at Thank You, Jeeves, published in 1934. This was the first novel length Jeeves and Wooster story, and ironically it begins with Jeeves leaving Bertie’s employment due to the young master’s stubborn insistence on practising the banjolele. Jeeves is apparently a servant, but when his wishes are thwarted there is going to be trouble.

After Jeeves resigns, Bertie is left to his own devices. With a replacement valet called Brinkley, he goes off to live in a seaside cottage in Chuffnel Regis. Here Bertie gets tangled up with the affairs of old school friend, and Jeeves’s new employer, Lord Chuffnel, who is hosting American tycoon, J. Washburn Stoker. Chuffy hopes sell his mansion to Stoker, and propose marriage to his daughter, Pauline. When both deals threaten to fall apart, an apparent challenge to Stoker’s inheritance forces through the mansion sale, and removes any objection to the marriage plans. Both concessions are required to keep happy a psychiatrist friend of Chuffy’s, a vital expert witness proving that Stoker’s benefactor was of sound mind. A helpful side effect of all this is the setting free of Bertie from any risk of having to marry Pauline himself.

Bertie thinks the challenge to the inheritance is a stroke of luck. But no – Jeeves reveals that he called one of his American friends and arranged the whole thing as a ruse. Bertie realises Jeeves’s brilliance, and embraces the suggestion of his return.

So Bertie is back in his place, a ‘pawn in the game’ as the young master himself humbly admits. The former cosy arrangement is restored – Bertie as a non-banjolele playing, not very bright bachelor, an ideal employer for Jeeves, easy to dominate with intellect, with no wife around to relegate a powerful valet back into an ordinary servant role, or maybe replace him completely.

After Jeeves reveals his scheming, I couldn’t help wondering whether he has admitted to all his machinations. The replacement valet, Brinkley, turns out to be a drunken revolutionary. He chases Bertie with a knife and burns down the Chuffnel Regis cottage. Such a terrible experience discourages taking a risk on a new valet ever again. And Brinkley’s destructive antics destroy the hated banjolele, which was in the cottage. That’s convenient. It is hard not to question the nature of these events, given the planning of other situations that favoured the all-knowing Jeeves. It’s a testament to the quiet shades of this book that I found myself engaged in such conjectures..

I’m now going to admit that the Jeeves and Wooster books sometimes remind me of Casablanca, written a few years after Thank You, Jeeves, in 1938. Wealthy refugees fleeing wartime Europe are trapped in neutral Casablanca. Do they make some compromises and sit tight? Or do they try to escape? Bar owner Rick Blaine takes the route of acceptance and accommodation, until he eventually works the system to help someone get away.

Struggle against your lot, or accept what you have? Shades of this conundrum don’t just apply to Bertie. Brinkley is a revolutionary causing mayhem. Jeeves, meanwhile, accepts the system, choosing manipulation from within for his own advantage, and sometimes the advantage of others. He is a Rick Blaine whose power to make things better comes from his cynicism.

This book is an easy evening at Rick’s Bar in the 1930s. The band is playing, Sam is tinkling the ivories. But there’s a lot of hidden stuff going on amongst the apparently carefree clientele. Rick is keeping a watchful eye.

I’ve have often read P.G. Wodehouse but never got round to reviewing one of his books. The idea of trying was unsettling. How would it be done? I thought vaguely along the lines of arguing for hidden depths. But in the world of Bertie Wooster, depths, literary or otherwise, would be impolite at best, hazardous at worst. In The Code of the Woosters, characters displaying deep wells of intensity do not come over well. There’s aspiring fascist dictator, Roderick Spode, and incurable romantic Madeline Bassett. Easy-going Bertie is always struggling to avoid getting dragged down by these fanatics. Spode, disdainful of happy-go-lucky clubmen, is pushing for arrest and imprisonment. Madeline, under the impression that Bertie loves her madly, keeps proposing marriage.

While novels are often built around a central character trying to achieve something, Bertie has no aspirations beyond muddling along in his accustomed pleasant manner, going to the Drones Club and enjoying the cooking of Anatole, his Aunt Dahlia’s wonderful chef. The worst are full of passionate intensity, as Yeats put it, while Bertie feels at his best in lacking all conviction.

Well, I say that, but Bertie does have one conviction. He subscribes to the ‘Code of the Woosters’, whereby you should ‘never let a pal down’. A person who lives happily without aims finds himself in constant moral conundrums when pals try to recruit him in their plotting and scheming to achieve their own much desired ambitions, whether that’s getting married, procuring some silly milk jug as part of a silverware collection, or running financially precarious women’s magazines. Bertie tries to help while maintaining the Wooster neutrality. And in the end he will go to great lengths to protect his humble non-aspirations. If Bernie lives merely for Anatole’s cooking then he does so with gusto. At one point he is ready to go to prison for his principles in this regard. Even moderation can be carried to extremes it appears. And by the same token, there are occasions when hardliners seem slippery pragmatists in comparison to Bertie. They also, in their ridiculous strength of feeling, reveal themselves as superficial and silly compared to him.

In Yeats’ poem, which mentions the worst being full of passionate intensity, we are given the bleak news that ‘the centre cannot hold’, but in P.G. Wodehouse the centre and the extremes end up sharing attributes so that everything balances out in the end. Moderate people might not seem strong enough to win out against the Spodes of this world, and yet the centre eventually pulls everything towards it, under the influence a kind of benign gravity. Maybe that is why these books feel so reassuring, making them a great choice of reading when times are difficult, which is most of the time.