Most helpful customer reviews
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2.0 out of 5 stars
The Wodehouse Starts Here, Dec 13 2008
"The Pothunters" was the first book that P. G. Wodehouse had published. It was first published in the U.K. on September 18, 1902, and featured the students and staff of St. Austin's, a school in England. Prior to that, it had appeared as a serial in "Public School Magazine" starting in January of 1902. Wodehouse had published stories about St. Austin's prior to this one, starting with "The Prize Poem" in July of 1901, but this is his first published in book form. Though this book clearly has some of the Wodehouse style, it is lacking in other areas making it primarily of interest as his first book rather than for the story itself.
The story opens with a competition at Aldershot where the best from the nearby schools come to compete. The chapter focuses on Tony Graham, who is representing St. Austin's, and his cousin Allen Thomson who is representing Rugby in the middleweight boxing category. Allen is known to be the superior boxer having won the contest in each of the previous three years, though Allen has an injury and Tony is a good fighter as well. In the finals, Allen is winning easily when Tony hits Allen with a knock-out blow and is the surprise winner. This is one of two key events, the second being covered in chapter two, which drives this story. The second event is a burglary at St. Austin's where a few of the sporting trophies, i.e. pots, from the school Pavilion, which the characters and the reader learn about after the fact. It is these two events, rather than the characters introduced at this point, which are key to the story. The main character ends up being Allen's brother Jim Thomson, who is caught between these events. The boxing match, because Allen had made a hedge bet against himself with his brother, and Jim doesn't have the money to pay it, and the first, because Jim broke into the Pavilion to recover some of his notes to study for a test.
The story passes from character to character throughout the book, but usually returning to Jim or impacting Jim and his problems in some way. Jim has an out to gain the money he needs, as his father has promised him money for each race he wins in the competition at St. Austin's. Jim has already won the half-mile, and if he can just win the mile his money problems will be over, but he has a serious competitor in Drake. Jim's problems grow as well, when he learns that in addition to the pots, some money was taken as well, and it coincidentally turns out to be the same amount that he needed to pay his debt.
Despite its title, there is very little pot-hunting taking place in this book. The students and staff discuss the theft, and Detective Roberts comes from Scotland Yard to investigate, but his investigations are not told within the pages of the book, only the results are presented near the end of the story. Through the majority of the book, it reads like a Wodehouse book, though not a great one. The reader enjoys the characters, though there are too many of them, and the general telling of the story. The last quarter of the book things change, starting with the revelation about who stole the pots. Wodehouse brings in a previously unmentioned person (difficult to believe given the number of characters referred to in the telling of this tale), and following this Wodehouse throws in the disappearance of Jim, which is a mystery created by omission of telling the whole story. These two cheap tricks make a decent but not great book much worse. Wodehouse also fails to really bring everything together the way he learned to do in his later and better works.
This is not the worst Wodehouse I have read, though it is close to it. I would not tell people to avoid it, especially if they are fans of Wodehouse and want to experience his earlier works, but at the same time there are clear reasons why people think of Jeeves and Wooster, Blandings, or Mr. Mulliner when they think of Wodehouse instead of these early school stories.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
The Pothunters - Wodehouse's First Novel, May 18 2003
There is a glowing review appended as an afterword to the story in this novel about schoolboy adventures in England. That review would be 5 stars, and I would probably agree, except I want to save 5 stars for later Wodehouse works such as Luck of the Bodkins. I discovered Wodehouse because Douglas Adams praises him in his final book, The Salmon of Doubt. I love Wodehouse and think of him as an older, even more English version of Adams. In Pothunters, some trophies are stolen from a boarding school, and the adventures of the boys involved are intricate, extremely well written, and quite entertaining. Wodehouse peppers his prose with extremely clever phrasing, which causes me to laugh out loud. In the Pothunters I only laughed once per chapter. In Luck of the Bodkins it was every other page. Still, this book is worth the reading!
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