Everything is backwards in a Jeeves novel. Most stories involve some kind of desire which seeks to be satisfied, mystery to be solved, love to be won. The central character here, Bertie Wooster, doesn’t want anything. It’s the people around him who want things. In this book, Boko seeks love. Florence is determined to better herself intellectually. Uncle Percy schemes to merge his shipping line with another to make a bigger shipping line. Bertie himself is just buffeted around by these people’s wants.

Bertie seems a dissolute young man interested only in ease and comfort. He has no curiosity, no drive to seek anything beyond his pleasant routine centred on the Drones Club. But his lack of interest in love, money, improving books, also amounts to a kind of profound innocence. He cannot be corrupted. He is immune to all forms of temptation or greed. He has enough money, love, wisdom. Enough is fine. He is used by others who want things, by Uncle Percy to make his shipping company deal work, by Boko to win Nobby as a wife, by Florence who wants to make a suitor jealous. But Bertie himself has something that all these people lack. He has contentment. The best of him comes out of the worst, like day coming out of night.

Jeeves in one of his quotes gives us George Bernard Shaw: ‘Fate drives us all to find our chiefest good in what we can, and not in what we would.’

In the Jeeves and Wooster mirror world, the superficial becomes significant. These books are wonderful examples of the serious potential of comedy, always such an underestimated, self-effacing genre of literature.

May We Feed the King, a 2026 novel by Rebecca Perry, opens with a medieval palace hiring a curator to dress its rooms to celebrate an important anniversary. This curator is all over the details of her job. She is particularly interested in representations of food, using various cleverly crafted fake food items to give the illusion of long-lost meals in progress.

The curator’s background research in the palace archives takes us on an imaginative journey through the reign of a reluctant king. This account takes up much of the book, presenting a story based on much gossip and hearsay. Even contemporary witnesses could not be sure what was really going on.

I was intrigued that the curator, initially a fussy eater, starts to develop a good appetite through the course of her project. Maybe she comes to terms with the fact that real food does not hang around for long. We live in a world where what keeps us alive is perishable. The curator is clearly dealing with relationship dramas in the background. Although there is plenty in life we can’t rely on, food, such a here-today-and-gone-tomorrow resource, is ironically what keeps us going.

This book might be about history, but I preferred to think it was about finding something we can rely on in a world where nothing lasts.

An interesting read, brutal in parts, sometimes confusing. It’s more a bruised windfall than shiny, freshly picked Braeburn – and all the better for that.

Right Ho, Jeeves is the second full length Jeeves and Wooster novel, published in October 1934.

In this book the order of things is challenged, and I don’t mean in the usual sense of modern governments wanting to offer opportunities for greater social mobility. In this book the person who gets above their station is not the servant but the master. After Bertie returns from a long holiday in Cannes, Jeeves discovers a white mess jacket with brass buttons, a memento of the trip. Bertie announces that he intends wearing this item routinely in London. The servant insists the jacket is unsuitable. The master resists. Big mistake.

This sets up a foolish challenge to the status quo. There are various relationship dramas going on amongst Bertie’s friends. Scholar of newts, Gussie Fink Nottle, is too shy to propose to Madeline Bassett. Tuppy Glossop has broken off his engagement with cousin Angela. So Bertie, still resentful about the mess jacket, dismisses Jeeves as the authority in these matters, and decides to sort everything out himself. The scene of his struggles is Brinkley Court, home of his Aunt Dahlia. Things go wrong, with the terrible inevitability of a chain reaction. This includes a riotous school prize-giving, where Gussie, full of the alcohol which Bertie prescribed as a way of providing courage, makes a compete exhibition of himself.

Jeeves sits back, watches as everything goes to pieces, then moves in to sort out the mess and punish insolence. This carefully organised slap down, involves a plan that appears to go awry, only for a deeper plan to go perfectly. Jeeves persuades Bertie to sound the Brinkley Court fire alarm late at night, in the supposed hope that acting on instinct, Tuppy will rush to rescue Angela, Gussie performing the same service for Madeline. In the event these individuals are just part of a disgruntled crew of evacuated residents and house guests milling about on a cold evening. And then in what appears to be a further unravelling, it is impossible to get back inside the house, because the servants are all at a dance at a neighbouring property, and the absent butler apparently has the key. Now the deeper plan comes into effect as Jeeves sends Bertie off on a gardener’s bike to the venue of the servants’ dance, eight miles away. He is supposed to retrieve the key, which Jeeves actually already has in his possession. The idea is that the entire company at Brinkley Court, now united in their loathing of incompetent Bertie, will reconcile their differences. This is exactly what happens.

Jeeves then accidentally on purpose puts a hot iron through the mess jacket, and his revenge is complete. Bertie, exhausted, a beaten man, with a very sore bottom from a spanking administered through bike riding, is in no position to resist, meekly accepting a restored order of things.

And this is such an interesting conception of order, a back to front arrangement where social levels are mirror images of each other, where things can seem all wrong, when they actually working out just as planned. Gussie’s speech at the prize giving is both a total disaster, and a glorious success, in the sense of providing the best entertainment the pupils have ever had at school. The reassurance of structure is combined with a freedom where anything can happen.

Next time plans seems to be unravelling, Right Ho Jeeves might be a book to remember. The same goes for times when you might be discontented with your lot in life. Maybe we should accept that no matter what happens, we will always be both master and servant, our failures somehow linked with our successes.