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Rating: 
Summary: Audio version just about perfect
Review: There are very few novels that can guarantee five good laughs a page and chuckles during all the spaces between, but the Bertie Wooster/Jeeves novels of P.G. Wodehouse fill the bill. It is even jollier when a good British comedian simply reads the novel to you, as does Jonathan Cecil in the Audio Partners release of the 1938 (1-57270-182-X). Here on 6 audiocassettes with a total running time of 7 hours is one of the stories you might have seen dramatized on Masterpiece Theatre a while ago. Oh, you know, the one about Bertie having to steal a cow-shaped creamer from Sir Watkyn Bassett for his Aunt Dahlia. Along the way, he becomes entangled in the on again, off again engagement between the newt-loving Gussie Fink-Nottle and the simpering Madeline Bassett, Roderick Spode who heads the Black Shorts (since all the Black Shirts have been bought up by an Italian of the period) and harbors a shameful secret), Stiffy Bynge who wants to marry the local clergyman H.P. "Stinker Pinker," and the local Constable whose helmet has been pinched. The plot is simple at first and then, as in any good farce, rapidly accelerates into the complexity of a Baroque French clock and with about as much socially redeeming value. We simply sit back and marvel at the mechanism as (to carry on the analogy) Wodehouse's puppet-like characters perform their intricate movements around the hapless Bertie Wooster who not for the first time in these stories tends to lose faith in Jeeves just as that master of intrigue is at his brainiest. All this in the inimitable Wodehouse upper-class British twit jargon and a world every bit as real as that of Damon Runyon and W.S. Gilbert, providing you accept certain premises. Jonathan Cecil was very badly miscast as Arthur Hastings in two or three Poirot films in which Peter Ustinov played the sleuth. Here he is a gem, reading as he does every word of the novel and acting out every character, male and female, in a different voice. His reading, Wodehouse's literary style and plotting, and all the rest made 7 hours on the exerciser pass pleasantly quickly. Highly recommended even for more relaxed listeners.
Rating:
Summary: This reader is perfect for Wodehouse.
Review: This tape, which our library has since lost or destroyed, is terrific. The reader, Jonathan Cecil, is amazing, entertaining and amusing, of course. After discovering this taped book I went on to read all of the Jeeves books, and I rented, borrowed or bought all the taped versions of this series read by Jonathan Cecil. Readers voices are a matter of taste but, for my money, this guy is the best.
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