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.