Wodehouse Will Explode Your Funnybone!

Uncle Dynamite by P.G. Wodehouse
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It all begins innocently enough with a What, Ho! and then before you know it everyone's up to their necks in the soup!

Uncle Dynamite is Uncle Fred and each of us ought to have an Uncle Fred in their lives. He's the sort of energetic, well-intentioned chap to stir up the pot, sometimes when the pot doesn't necessarily need stirring.

To explain the plot I would need to twist your brain about six ways to Sunday and attach it to a Slinky, so it must suffice to say that hijinks abound in a heisty capery sort of way with a bit of the "who's who, now?" and a whole lot of "but, but I!!!"s. There's Bonnie Babies to be avoided at all cost and love is in the air...stifled air that's headed in the wrong direction. With a well-stocked set of grey matter quick on its feet, Uncle Fred's got a solution for everything. That said, solutions often involve deceit and disguise. But of course it's all a matter of perspective, and if you'd only view it from the correct one you'd see how it's all on the up-and-up and makes perfect sense!

For this volume of comedic mayhem, Wodehouse has employed his standard script and populated it with a few familiar faces. It's not inventive genius in the literary line that you read Wodehouse for, but rather to gurgle up a good laugh or two as you follow the daffy mishaps of his parade of pranksters and paradigms of English aristocracy circa the early-ish 20th century. Besides the impossible ridiculousness of it all, Uncle Dynamite is also plentifully stocked with some of the more absurd names the author's ever produced: Frederick Altamont Cornwalis Twistleton, aka Lord Ickenham; Reginald "Pongo" Twistleton; Major Brabazon-Plank; Sir Aylmer "Mugsy" Bostock.

And with that said, I'm going to end my review rather abruptly, because why? Because here comes the last period.

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