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.