Life at Blandings: Something Fresh, Summer Lightning and Heavy Weather

Rating:
Summary: 2nd-4th Books in the Blandings Castle Series
Review: Blandings Castle comes alive when the Empress of Blandings arrives, which she does in Summer Lightning. All fans of romantic comedies will enjoy these books very much.

Be sure to begin the series by reading, Leave It to Psmith, which has an outstanding plot and introduces most of the major characters in the series

Summer Lightning is better than many other P.G. Wodehouse books in that the plot and character development are more thorough than most which keeps the fun going longer.

Clarence, the ninth Earl of Emsworth, is at home in his castle in Shropshire where he dotes on his famous prize-winning pig, the Empress of Blandings. Having dispatched his earlier secretary, Baxter, Clarence is at peace contemplating how his pig will win again when he learns from his brother Galahad (Gally) that the neighbor's pig man is offering 3:1 odds against the Empress. Clarence and Gally presume that their neighbor, Sir Gregory Parsloe is planning to knobble the Empress. Their worst fears are borne out when the Empress disappears!

At the same time, Parsloe lives in fear that Gally will publish old stories about his wild younger days in Gally's new book. Clarence's and Gally's sister Connie wants to stop publication as well. Soon the castle is overrun with manuscript thieves!

At the same time, love is in the air. Clarence's new secretary, Hugo Carmody, is secretly and unsuitably in love with Millicent Threepwood, niece to Clarence, Connie and Gally, and Millicent is in love with him. But they need to get some financial help to pull off the merger.

Ronald Fish, a wealthy young man whose money is tied with Clarence, is also in love with an unsuitable person . . . one Sue Brown who is a chorus girl. Ronnie has proven himself to be a poor judge of investments in the past, and Clarence is skeptical of allowing any more money. It doesn't help when Clarence finds that Ronnie doesn't truly share his love of pigs!

Will love win out? Of course! It's a P.G. Wodehouse book. But before love wins, humor will take the day in many silly scenes worthy of Shakespeare's best in the forest of Arden.

Heavy Weather picks up where Summer Lightning leaves off. Ronnie Fish's jealousy gets Sue Brown and him into trouble when his mother, Lady Julia Fish, arrives to sunder the pair. Gally's manuscript continues to play a role throughout as does the Empress. This book would only be a three-stars book if you didn't read Summer Lightning first.

In most P.G. Wodehouse stories, the innocents and the not-so-innocents attempt to solve tricky family problems with feats of misdirection and partial truths. The result of these complicated ruses is usually a great deal of unexpected consequences that will tickle almost any funny bone. Heavy Weather is an unusually fine example of this type of story.

Monty Bodkin, who's rolling in dough, must hold a job for a year to win the approval of his fiancee's father. Then the wedding bells can chime. Monty isn't the most helpful fellow, and makes a hash out of his writing for Tiny Tots. He soon uses his uncle's influence a second time to get a new job as private secretary to Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, whose pride and joy is his prize-winning pig, the Empress of Blandings.

This new employment creates much consternation for Sue Brown, who is engaged to marry the jealous Ronnie Fish. Monty and Sue had been engaged earlier, and Sue's afraid that Ronnie won't be able to handle having Monty around. Wedding bells for Sue and Ronnie depend on getting Clarence to release trust funds for Ronnie. There are a few other problems, as well. For example, Sue earns her living as a chorus girl. What will Ronnie's mother, Lady Julia, think?

The key theme of the story is that true love will win out, if the lovers follow their hearts and seize opportunity when it arises. In that way, the end will charm almost anyone . . . much like Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream does.

In most stories like this, you can anticipate how the obstacles will be overcome. Well, Heavy Weather will surprise you, if you are like me. The plot complications and resolution are delightfully adept, acrobatic, and subtle. I felt like I was watching the elephants do their ballet dance again in Fantasia. The contradictions between the messy moments and the final neatness are brilliantly handled!

The conflict between the desire to have a good reputation and the willingness to do whatever it takes to succeed (including cutting all possible corners) is shown off to good effect in Heavy Weather. Developing this point creates questions about what real goodness is, versus assumed goodness from social position and family connections. In fact, inherited intelligence is also questioned for its morality. The more powerful minds in the story tend to use those capabilities to plot for self-advantage, rather than to accomplish anything meaningful for all involved. Those of limited intelligence, by contrast, tend to follow their hearts and try to do the right thing.

Good results follow in this story whenever people are loyal and honor goodness.

What can you accomplish by being loyal and honoring goodness today? And tomorrow?

Rating:
Summary: Absolute delight
Review: I love PG Wodehouse, and the Blandings books are by far my favorites. I have the hardback edition of this omnibus, and the prefaces by the author are every bit as charming and witty and sweet-natured as the three novels they introduce.

Rating:
Summary: wonderfully funny novels by a master of humor
Review: The three novels in this volume are three of the first four novels in P G Wodehouse's great Blandings Castle series (the other is Leave It to Psmith). Something Fresh isn't quite as good as Summer Lightning and Heavy Weather, because that memorable pig, the Empress of Blandings, has not yet appeared at the Castle. Heavy Weather takes place immediately after Summer Lightning, and the two are, in my opinion, two of Wodehouse's very best. Some of the great Wodehouse characters are here - the woolly-headed Ninth Earl of Emsworth, his sister, Lady Constance, and brother, The Honorable Galahad Threepwood, not to mention, among others, The Efficient Baxter. Not to be missed by anybody with a sense of humor.

Rating:
Summary: wonderfully funny novels by a master of humor
Review: The three novels in this volume are three of the first four novels in P G Wodehouse's great Blandings Castle series (the other is Leave It to Psmith). Something Fresh isn't quite as good as Summer Lightning and Heavy Weather, because that memorable pig, the Empress of Blandings, has not yet appeared at the Castle. Heavy Weather takes place immediately after Summer Lightning, and the two are, in my opinion, two of Wodehouse's very best. Some of the great Wodehouse characters are here - the woolly-headed Ninth Earl of Emsworth, his sister, Lady Constance, and brother, The Honorable Galahad Threepwood, not to mention, among others, The Efficient Baxter. Not to be missed by anybody with a sense of humor.

Rating:
Summary: Very funny with interesting characters
Review: This is my first P.G. Wodehouse book. I liked the stories so much that I immediately bought another of his books. The plots are amusing, but the characters are the center of the book. Lord Emsworth is described as a man who "never experienced the thirll of ambition fullfilled, ... but never knew the agony of ambition frustrated". Another very interesting character, Mr. Peters, who belongs to a group of men who "... cannot rest, who are so constituted that they can only take their leisure in the shape of a change of work". Interestingly, their personalities evolve as the story unfolds. Wodehouse satire excludes no one not even writers. He writes, "The reason why all we novelists with bulging foreheads an expensive educations are abandoning novels and taking to writing motion-picture secnarii is because the latter are so infinitely the more simple and pleasant". I also enjoyed his reference to the critics in the preface of "Summer Lightning".

It's certainly a very entertaining book, with a lot of opportunities for vocabulary building. I would recommend this book for students of English as a second language.