‘Who but P.G. Wodehouse could have extracted high
comedy from the most noble and ancient game of golf? And who else could have
combined this comedy with a real appreciation of the game, drawn from personal
experience? Wodehouse's brilliant but human brand of humour is perfectly suited
to these stories of love, rivalry, revenge, and fulfilment on the links.’
The Clicking of
Cuthbert and Other Golf Stories is a collection of stories with golf as its
background theme and the British author PG Wodehouse attempts to bring out some humour. To start with, I am neither a
fan of golf nor a fan of Wodehouse but I would solemnly affirm that I did not
read this book with pre-conceived notions.
Most of the
stories involved humour (attempted) around golf, with a golfer being in love
with a woman being the central theme in all of them. It starts off with the Oldest Member narrating a golf story off
his memory. The stories are as follows:
1.
The Clicking of Cuthbert – The title
story where Cuthbert Banks who is passionate about golf, falls in love with a
woman who prefers intellectuals and fancies a writer.
2.
A Woman is only a Woman – Two friends,
also amateur golfers, fancy the same woman and decide that the one who wins a
golf match get to propose her.
3.
A Mixed Threesome – Mortimer, a rich man
who is totally disinterested in golf; is engaged to a woman who loves golf. She
fancies one of Mortimer’s friends – an explorer. Mortimer himself starts to
learn golf for her sake.
4.
Sundered Hearts – Mortimer is the main
character in this story as well, now so passionate about golf, gets married and
his wife goes missing, getting Mortimer to exhaust all his wealth in search of
her.
5.
The Salvation of George Mackintosh –
This is about George Mackintosh, a golfer engaged to a woman. The only problem with George is that he can't stop talking.
6.
Ordeal by Golf – The post of treasurer
goes vacant in a company and the Oldest
Member suggests the proprietor to decide the candidate through a game of
golf.
7.
The Long Hole - Two friends fancy the
same woman and they decide to settle it through golf. They get into a lot of
arguments over ‘rules of golf’ and leading to funny humorous incidents.
8.
The Heel of Achilles – An American millionaire
is engaged to a woman who lays a condition that she’d marry him subject to him
winning the American Amateur Golf Championship.
9.
The Rough Stuff – Ramsden Waters fancies
a woman, teaches her golf and they pair up for a golf match.
10.
The Coming of Gowf – A group submits a
story of King Merolchazzar modelled along the lines of a Babylonian kingdom but
seems to be in the vicinity of the British Isles. The king embraces Golf as his
new religion.
The book
maintained the consistency – each of them was around twenty pages. The book had
a really good start to the stories, The Clicking of
Cuthbert was excellent, humorous, short and well written. I would say the
same for the A Woman is only a Woman,
mostly because when I first read a story with that theme, it was funny. Apart
from that, Sundered Hearts was an
enjoyable read and so was The Long Hole, especially the golf
lawyer aspect in The Long Hole, notwithstanding the repetitive nature of two men fancying the same woman.
Barring those,
the other stories were repetitive or silly or mostly, it was both. I mean, what
sort of a woman accepts proposals solely based on golf skills? While the whole
thing is meant to be light hearted, there is no point generating humour through
means of absurdity which is what PG Wodehouse always seems to do. There could
have been a variety of aspects from which he could have generated humour
surrounding golf but then, the author chose the same – mostly two men fancying the same woman. I felt the story; The
Coming of Gowf was not funny and totally absurd. I also don’t
understand why the author chose be a narcissist through his own stories – wherein,
in Clicking of Cuthbert, a Russian author in the story claims, ‘No novelists anywhere any good except me. P.
G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad.’
On the whole, as
seen above, four stories were good and six were bad, and the last was quite
awful. The stories were highly repetitive and after reading this, I continue to
maintain my stand that PG Wodehouse is highly overrated (refer my review of his
book Pigs have Wings). Going by a
wholly mathematical approach, four out of ten stories were good, so the rating
of this book is four on ten.
Rating – 4/10
Have
a nice day,
Andy
Andy
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