Plots now run so much in grooves that the fun is almost one hundred per cent linguistic. Bertie and Co. get into fun situations - he is tied up and gagged, horsewhipped, made to fall in a middenish puddle and later a swimming pool. But it's the narrative grammar and syntax murdered by Bertie that is the main strand of humour. When it's fresh and new, it's good. But there is quite a lot of old, cold stuff, too. Sad, but, dash it, Wodehouse is rising ninety-three.

Bertie, with spots on his chest, is told by a doctor to go to the country and live a quiet, fresh-air life. He goes, with Jeeves, to Maiden Eggesford, to a cottage on the estate of a Colonel Briscoe, brother of the Vicar. Aunt Dahlia is staying at the Colonel's house. Jeeves has an aunt in Maiden Eggesford, too. Colonel Briscoe has a racehorse, Simla, which is hotly rivalled by his neighbour Colonel Cook's Potato Chip for an important local race. Potato Chip pines in his stable if his friend the cat isn't there. Aunt Dahlia and all the Briscoes, including the Vicar's daughter Angelica (remember her from the fizzing short story Tried in the Furnace?) have their shirts on Simla and Aunt Dahlia thinks to safeguard their investments by stealing the cat from Potato Chip so that he'll pine and lose the race. Of course she expects Bertie to house the hijacked cat until after the race.

The young love interest is Orlo Porter, an Oxford Union Communist, who yearns to marry Vanessa Cook, whose father, Colonel Cook, above, is Orlo's sole trustee and who won't unbelt Orlo's money to let him marry his daughter. Vanessa (to whom Bertie had proposed marriage some time previously) quarrels with Orlo because he hasn't the guts to go and thump the table with her fierce horse-whipping father. At one stage she says, 'Right, Bertie, I will marry you.' This would be for Bertie worse even than Florence Craye. Vanessa is dominant and disapproving and proposes that Bertie shall, when they are married, give up smoking, his silly laugh and the Drones.

Simla wins the race on a technicality. Orlo and Vanessa elope. Colonel Cook and his friend (Bertie's enemy in the last book) Major Plank are made to look silly. Why Plank, and Jeeves's aunt for that matter, are there at all is a mystery. Aunt Dahlia wins a lot of money and Bertie and Jeeves escape to the quiet life in New York, far from aunts.

Source: Richard Usborne. Plum Sauce. A P G Wodehouse Companion.