Uneasy Money is an entertaining love story by P. G. Wodehouse. By today's standards, it would be a romantic comedy. This book was first published in 1916. And one might thing that the writing of that time would be somewhat alien today. I discovered P. G. Wodehouse by a roundabout way. And as it turns out, he was a great writer.
First, people roughly my age will recall a website, askjeeves.com, a search engine that I think launched in the 90s after the popularity of Yahoo! made searching the Internet a thing. Ask Jeeves was supposed to be a better search engine, until Google came out. It was eventually bought by ask.com and is still in operation.
Not knowing anything at the time, I assumed that Jeeves was what people called their butler. There was some reference to a story. But I never looked into it deeply. You would see the occasional movie line in which a butler would be called Jeeves. But that was the extent of my understanding.
For a while, I went about looking for free ebooks to download. I stumbled upon two books, My Man Jeeves and The Man With Two Left Feet. I figured that by reading them I would have a better understanding of how Jeeves became a part of the culture. I don't recall which one I read first. But it was delightfully entertaining. I rarely, if ever laugh out loud when reading books. But there were moments reading these books that made me do so.
As it turns out, Jeeves was the valet of Bertie Wooster, a young and wealthy Londoner who mostly spent his time on idle entertainment. For the word "Jeeves" to eventually become synonymous with for a personal manservant, one can surmise that the book series was highly popular at the time. And, having read a couple of them, they were popular with good reason.
After having read the two stories, I went in search of more and stumbled upon a British television show titles Jeeves and Wooster, based on the stories. The show starred Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster and Stephen Fry as Jeeves. The series was highly entertaining as well. If you are inclined, I recommend watching the series too.
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was a prolific writer of books, Hollywood films, and Broadway plays. I won't go into detail about his life, which is extensively covered on the Wikis. I will say that Wodehouse did not live the life of a lonely writer. His life was complicated by World War II when he lived in France during German occupation. It was to the point that he eventually had to move to the United States, where his writing career continued for the rest of his life.
Uneasy Money is the first non-Jeeves story I have read written by Wodehouse. The story has much of Wodehouse's unique way of telling stories, which include brief tangents relating to the characters that still play well into the story.
Uneasy Money, if you don't mind light spoilers, is about Lord Dawlish, a young Peer who inherited his title but no land or money with it. He is engaged to be married but never sets the date with his intended for lack of money. On the day he decides to take action to relieve his financial situation, he learns that he has inherited a great deal of money as a result of a chance encounter. Being a man of noble character, it doesn't seem right. So he decides to follow through with his trip to America to try to share his inheritance with the people who were disinherited, then return to marry his fiancee.
Unknown to him, his fiancee, Claire, had separately decided to go to America on invitation from her friend who had set her up to meet an American millionaire on the ship with the intent that he should ask Claire to marry him.
The story gets convoluted in a way that the reader can easily follow. And, while you know that there is a happily ever after in the works, you don't mind reading through it as the characters are what make the story worth reading. In my opinion, the story is just a simple device for the reader to get to know Wodehouse's characters, who are the real delight in his books.
I intend to look for more books by P. G. Wodehouse, especially more of the Jeeves stories, which are so entertaining. If you get the chance, I recommend starting with one of the Jeeves books for a guaranteed laugh and an introduction to Wodehouse's writing style, which is very English, but not at all serious as one might expect. I think the closest writing I have found to Wodehouse's is from Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
