Welcome to the third installment of our brand new Tale for Our Time, an ocean-going romp by P G Wodehouse, published in 1922. You can enjoy The Girl on the Boat episode by episode, night by night, twenty minutes before you lower your lamp. Or, alternatively, do feel free to binge-listen: you can find the earlier installments here. As Maggie, a Pennsylvania member of The Mark Steyn Club, enthuses:
I'm not very eloquent, so I'll just leap to my feet and shout, 'Bravo!!'
That's more than eloquent enough, Maggie. Much appreciated.
In tonight's episode, to quote Wodehouse's Broadway admirers Rodgers & Hart, "some things that happen for the first time seems to be happening again":
A story, if it is to grip the reader, should, I am aware, go always forward. It should march. It should leap from crag to crag like the chamois of the Alps. If there is one thing I hate, it is a novel which gets you interested in the hero in chapter one and then cuts back in chapter two to tell you all about his grandfather. Nevertheless, at this point we must go back a space.
If that third sentence above rings familiar, it's because fifteen years later Plum recycled it in the better-known novel Summer Moonshine:
Like so many substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag.
The above version is often cited as an example of Wodehousian perfection. And yes, it's improved by being applied to a chap "springing from blonde to blonde", but I rather like the way, originally, the author applied it whimsically to a narrator apologising for his lack of narrative thrust.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Episode Three of The Girl on the Boat simply by clicking here and logging-in.
If you've yet to hear any of our first sixty-nine Tales for Our Time, you can do so by joining The Mark Steyn Club. Or, if you need an extra-special present for someone, why not give your loved one a Gift Membership and start him or her off with near six dozen cracking yarns? And please join me tomorrow for another episode of The Girl on the Boat.