“It will be news to the Man in the Street to learn that, with the possible exception of the Black Hand, the Scouts are perhaps the most carefully-organised secret society in the world.”
The Swoop is one of the few PG Wodehouse stories that does not involve:
a) A love-stricken chap
b) A beautiful girl
c) An overbearing aunt
d) Theft or attempted theft at a stereotypical country house
In fact, it is very unlike most PG Wodehouse books I’ve read, in that it doesn’t include a lot of the twists and turns and mistaken identities and broken engagements and other convoluted situations from which Jeeves is ever extricating Bertie Wooster.
Instead, this story is about Clarence Chugwater and his fellow Boy Scouts as they oust an invasion on England from…well, everyone. Despite being different from the other books I’ve read by Wodehouse, there are still the hijinks, the lightning-quick wordplay, and the over-the-top characters.
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| First edition cover. Source: Wikipedia |
“‘England, my England!” cried Clarence his face shining
with a holy patriotism. “England, thou art free! Thou hast risen from the ashes
of the dead self. Let the nations learn from this that is it when apparently crushed
that the Briton is to more than every be feared.’
‘Thad’s
bad grabbar,’ said the Prince [Otto of Saxe-Pfennig, of Germany, who by this
point has a horrible cold] critically.
‘It isn’t,’
said Clarence with warmth.
‘It is, I tell you. Id’s a splid idfididive.’”
The only thing I didn’t like about the characters were that
they were flat and stereotypical, and never fleshed out as the book went
forward. One could argue the same thing about Bertie and Jeeves and Wodehouse’s
other faithful standbys. But the real reason I think it stands out in The Swoop was because it’s missing a
romance, and in Wodehouse’s romances there tends to be some character growth
between the hero and heroine as they get over misunderstandings and
preconceptions and learn to accept each other’s flaws.
“‘The wise man,’ said the Russian, still determined on
evasion, ‘never takes sides, unless they are sides of bacon.’”
What I liked best about this book was the Hardy Boys + Home Alone + The Goonies sort of vibe. It turns out that England is not run from
the throne or parliament, or even by adults. It’s run by the Boy Scouts. And
their main method of fighting the invasion throughout the book is organization,
self-assuredness, and (of course!) being prepared. That, and very disapproving
looks.
“There is nothing so terrible to the highly-strung foreigner
as the cold, contemptuous, patronizing gaze of the Englishman. It gave the
invaders a perpetual feeling of doing the wrong thing.”
This side of two world wars the whole concept of
invasion-as-humor seems strange. But neither of those had happened in 1909 when
Wodehouse wrote this, when as far as international politics were concerned
Britain was fairly stable since Queen Victoria had ensured her family
intermarried with a ton of other royal families. Still, it will strike modern
readers as portentous that, as some countries bow out of the invasion (The UK
is a rather small place to split amongst themselves, after all), two of the
longest holders-on are Germany and Russia.
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