In an interview on The Comic Novel

I’m a huge Wodehouse fan. And I guess the reason I’m bringing this up is that Wood’s written this book about the role of laughter in novels, but he’s talking about laughter in all novels. What I want to understand is – why do you want to talk specifically about comic novels? Why the interest in them collectively? As a genre?

I don’t know. It has something to do with the connection with the way I think of these novels now and the way I used to think of these novels when I was 13 or 14 years old, like science fiction or the Lord of the Rings or something, where there’s this kind of – a fantastic space opened up within the ordinary, where people are made of mirth instead of flesh and bone. It’s that magical thinking, that magical thinking that everybody is allowed to indulge in for that short space of time in which the novel is allowed to persist, in spite of the pressures and the problems of reality. I mean in all these novels there’s a kind of background pressure of anxiety which is always just left there in the shadows. Just a little bit. And is always about to fatally puncture the pretentions of the characters but never quite does.

Can we talk about some of these books specifically? For example, PG Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters?

Sure. Wodehouse became popular towards the end of the First World War and in its immediate aftermath – a very traumatic episode for everyone involved. An episode that shattered many of the assumptions of the pre-war period. But Wodehouse is one of those people who became famous for the art of ignoring all that… for being oblivious and yet also incredibly observant. It’s a totally preposterous range of characteristics in an author that he could have been at once so good at poking fun at people’s pretensions – that he could have had such an exquisite command of language and also, in his own way, of human psychology - and yet seem at times like he was bumping around the world like Bertie Wooster. Was it an act he was putting on? Wood talks in the article I mentioned about Wodehouse’s admiration for the Nazis. I can’t remember exactly how this admiration was described but I think it was something like: he liked the way they all marched in line and were nice to him. I mean it’s crazy stuff. But you just don’t know. Is it self parody? How could all these qualities exist in this person?

So Wodehouse is sometimes Bertie. And also sometimes Jeeves? I mean he seems so brilliant at removing any obstacle to the reader’s pleasure.

Yes Jeeves also… but if you don’t think of Jeeves as a servant, or not only as a servant, then he’s also a kind of Mephistopheles. You sort of feel that the Bertie Woosters of this world – the people who want or can consider the world as a great confection of pleasure and of fun and trivia and nonsense and everything, are left open to all kinds of manipulation and scheming. Bertie Wooster has this simplicity that is just at the mercy of the world, and it just so happens that Jeeves always uses his power to help his boss, unless Bertie wears the wrong coloured socks one day and Jeeves wants to teach him a lesson. In that relationship there’s a real susceptibility that obviously never comes to any tragic end, but the innocence is… Bertie just doesn’t realize how manipulated and vulnerable he is…