This is the one in which we learn Jeeves's Christian name, in which Bertie
is Jeeves's guest at the Junior Ganymede Club, in which Bertie is
unwillingly, briefly and almost simultaneously re-engaged to Madeline
Bassett and Florence Craye, in which Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup, gets hit in
the eye with a potato in an electioneering fracas and is thus cured of his
idea of renouncing his title and standing for Parliament.
We're back at Brinkley, and the house is full of guests for the Market
Snodsbury by-election, Bertie's, and Aunt Dahlia's, friend Ginger Winship
is standing as Conservative candidate and has asked orator Spode to speak
on his platforms. Spode's fiancée, Madeline Bassett, comes too. Winship is
engaged now to Florence Craye and she comes, a very bossy fiancée as usual.
Ginger falls in love with his new secretary and will do anything to get
Florence to break their engagement. A final guest at Brinkley is financier
L. P. Runkle, who became rich on something that Tuppy Glossop's late
father, a research chemist, had invented. But Runkle had not rewarded the
inventor and Aunt Dahlia is determined, by Anatole's cooking, theft or
blackmail, to get Runkle to give the long-owed money to Tuppy so that he
can marry Angela.
A newcomer to Market Snodsbury is Bingley, once Brinkley, Bertie's valet in
a period (Thank You, Jeeves) when Jeeves had left him. Now, thanks to a
deceased grocer uncle, he is a man with a house, property and a butler;
though still a country member of the Junior Ganymede. He was once also
Ginger Winship's 'man', and Runkle's. And he has 'borrowed' the Junior
Ganymede Book of Revelations, containing facts about Ginger which, if
published, would turn the strait-laced electors of Market Snodsbury against
him.
Just what Ginger would now hope, since it would turn Florence against him
too. But Jeeves, with a knock-out drop, steals the book back from Bingley.
The book contains stuff about Runkle also. Ginger, on Jeeves's advice,
makes a speech advising the electors to vote for his opponent. Florence's
self-willed re-engagement to Bertie after that lasts for a single page and
she is still unattached, a proud and bossy beauty, when we hear of her,
here, for the last time.
When the Book of Revelations goes back to the Junior Ganymede, it will not
contain the seventeen pages Jeeves had contributed over the years about
Bertie.
A tired book, full of misprints and misprisions - e.g. Bertie says that
Arnold Abney, M.A. was the HM of his prep school (of course he meant the
Rev. Aubrey Upjohn, HM, Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea), Jeeves misquotes
Lucretius and Brinkley has changed his name arbitrarily and without
explanation. Wodehouse is writing very short now.
Source: Richard Usborne. Plum Sauce. A P G Wodehouse Companion.