Quite some years ago, I had decided that I could not imagine living a life in which P. G. Wodehouse was not a constant presence. Today, I continue to place him among my top four authors of all time; I am so much in awe of his brilliant wit and humour and his superior writing.
The Anglers’ Rest public house bar … an irrepressible Mr. Mulliner, telling unbelievable (and I am using the word for its exact meaning) tales of his many relatives - and there you have it - the fantastic collection of short stories that go to form ‘Meet Mr. Mulliner’!
Through our meeting with Mr. Mulliner, we meet George Mulliner who was cursed with a terrible stammer, and was advised by a specialist in London to go and speak to three perfect strangers each day as a confidence building measure. We follow the adventures of Wilfred Mulliner, the inventor of Mulliner’s Magic Marvels, and see the tanning effects of Mulliner’s Raven Gypsy Face-Cream, Mulliner’s Snow of the Mountains Lotion which fixes piebald-ness, Mulliner’s Reduc-O that takes care of weight problems, and Mulliner’s Ease-o which relieves lumbago. We meet Augustine Mulliner, a meek young curate, and see what happens when he takes Buck-U-Uppo (a tonic which works directly on the corpuscles) with an intention to becoming more confident and assertive.
Like I said: unbelievable!
Like all the patrons at Anglers, we may start off pooh-poohing Mr. Mulliner, but soon get addicted to the tales of the various Mulliners and their stories that always end with ‘and everyone lives happily ever after.’
I always have this problem when, in an attempt to telling people how funny P. G. Wodehouse is, I rack my brain trying to pick one or two funny lines from the book, but I just can’t! The man was a genius, and genius cannot be presented in a neat little box of “top five funny lines”. So I’ll leave you with this random gem I picked from an endlessly dazzling spread:
“What’s this?” demanded Augustine, eyeing it dangerously.
“A nice fried egg, sir.”
“And what, pray, do you mean by nice? It may be an amiable egg. It may be a civil, well-meaning egg. But if you think it is fit for human consumption, adjust that impression. Go back to your kitchen, woman; select another; and remember this time that you are a cook, not an incinerating machine. Between an egg that is fried and an egg that is cremated there is a wide and substantial difference. This difference, if you wish to retain me as a lodger in these far too expensive rooms, you will endeavour to appreciate.”
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