To the end of his days, Wodehouse never completely understood what he had done. Oh, he knew it was awful enough to bring him shame and ignominy, and that, as a Canadian journalist (unidentified in the biography) told him after the war, he "missed a good opportunity" to keep his mouth shut. But since he hadn't intended to cause any harm, he really didn't see what all the fuss was about. Eventually, the war ended, Wodehouse and Ethel moved to America, and he tried to pick up where he left off. Sadly for him, the world had changed irrevocably by then. There was little call for his short stories--always a primary source of income--in American magazines like The Saturday Evening Post. Broadway, too, had left him behind, with musicals such as South Pacific and My Fair Lady, both of which he despised--eclipsing the sunny inanities of his own shows such as Oh Kay. He was left once more to his novels--to Bertie and Jeeves and their comforting, long-lost world in which, no matter how many times Gussie Fink-Nottle got himself in a jam, things would always be pip-pip-cheerio in the end.

Wodehouse managed to outlive his shame. England finally came around and forgave him; he was even knighted by the Queen (whose mother was an avowed devotee of his novels). In the end, it was the books themselves that rehalilitated his repution--that and his essential decency. Jeeves and Bertie came to television, and new generations of readers who didn't know or didn't care how Wodehouse had spent the war, discovered the delights of his pratfalls, predicaments and often blindingly funny, exquisitely-wrought prose. That's why people continue to read anachronistic books that are light as air and can have no possible relevance to life in the 21st Century. But, like Wodehouse fans in the previous century, we are pleased to be lost for a moment in a world without worry, and to read a sublime rendering of the ridiculous by a writer who is arguably the most gifted comic prose stylist that England--and for that matter the world--has ever produced.

Clearly, Robert McCrum is an aficionado of that world and, as a novelistic himself, he does an excellent job of bringing Plum and his world to life. While Wodehouse is not always the most scintillating character (after all, he spent most of his time sitting alone in a room, banging out copy) the cast of characters and events swirling around him--Plum most often being the calm eye of the hurricane that was his life--make this a compelling and absorbing biography. One measure of its success is the way McCrum deftly recounts the most shameful episode of Wodehouse's life--his broadcasts for the Nazis and the ensuing fallout--in a way that doesn't excuse this lapse in judgment, but rather, explains is in terms of a character flaw that left him unable to navigate the trickiest moral dilemma of his life. One minor quibble--McCrum spends too much time for my taste recounting Wodehouse's many income tax woes--a recurring feature of his life. While this may be of moderate interest, perhaps, to my stepfather the accountant, these passages screamed "skim" to me. I don't care who are--Donald Trump, Al Capone, Elton John or even Tony Soprano--your tax problems are probably only engaging (and then likely not in a good way) to you.