Jeeves, Wooster and God!

Over the past year or so I have been lucky enough to discover the delights of PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories.  To have reached the grand age of 43 and not to previously have read any of these fine slices of English humour and writing at its very best is nothing short of a travesty.  Why are these short stories and novels not a compulsory part of English Literature lessons in our schools?  Wodehouse is surely the equal of writers like Thomas Hardy and Harper Lee whose novels do appear in the English Literature lists.

I came to Jeeves and Wooster by way of the sublime Granada television series starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie which is repeated fairly regularly on ITV 3.  I hadn’t seen these on their original airing for some reason (perhaps they clashed with something I then enjoyed viewing) but I thoroughly enjoyed them as superb examples of English farce and was minded to read the original source material as the book is almost always better than the screen adaptation.  This indeed proved to be the case.

As those of you familiar with Wodehouse will readily attest the stories resolve around Bertie Wooster and his friends and relatives getting into a series of scrapes and complicated situations from which they inevitably try to extract themselves with disastrous consequences.  It is only when they turn to the wisdom of Wooster’s valet Jeeves that the situations almost magically resolve themselves in a way that is inevitably beneficial.  Put simply, when Wooster takes the advice of Jeeves his life goes well, when he does not the inevitable disaster occurs.

I hesitate to make a comparison between a fictional character and God, but one does occur to me.  I can’t help but think that when we, like Bertie Wooster, try to go our own way, life becomes very complicated; but when we follow the way of our Lord, Jesus Christ, life just seems to be better.  That is not to say that if we follow Jesus our life is without difficulties; but it is to say that if we are following Jesus and obeying all that he has commanded then our lives will be better than if we were not.