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3.0 out of 5 stars
A Pleasant Surprise, Jun 19 2009
"The Gold Bat" was the third novel, and the fourth book that P. G. Wodehouse had published. As with all his previous stories, this one takes place at a school. Instead of St. Austin's as it was in "The Pothunters" and "Tales of St. Austin's", or Beckford College as it was for "A Prefect's Uncle", the setting this time is Wrykyn, a fictional public school which supposedly is based on Wodehouse's alma mater. The novel was published on September 13, 1904. At first I thought that given his previous history of including so many characters, that it would have been best had he set this novel at one of the schools he had already defined and used some of those characters again. However, by creating a new setting, it was easier to compare this novel with the first two, and to realize just how much he had improved in his story telling.
The hero of this story is Richard Trevor, the Captain of the first fifteen and the Head of Donaldson's House. He is a well respected student and athlete at the school, and the current holder of the Golden Bat, an award given to the captain of the cricket team that wins the inter-house cup. The main sport in the story, though, isn't cricket, it is football (a.k.a rugby), and Trevor is the captain of the school team. Other key characters are Clowes, who is Trevor's right-hand man; Milton, the Head of Seymour's House, which is Donaldson's main competition in football; O'Hara, an Irishman who is a bit of a troublemaker and a strong defender of Ireland and also a good boxer; Barry, the young player from the third fifteen who Trevor brings up to the first fifteen; and Rand-Brown, the player left out by Barry's leap-frogging into the first fifteen.
As Wodehouse became so adept at, here again there are numerous storylines. One of them is with regard to the decision to replace a key player Barry, a player who has shown a great deal of promise but is on the third fifteen, instead of taking the obvious choice of Rand-Brown from the second fifteen, because Rand-Brown has shown more than once that he lacks the best skills. Another storyline is about another student, O'Hara playing a prank and putting tar and leaves on the statue of the town's mayor, the problem being that he apparently lost the Gold Bat which he had borrowed from Trevor when he was carrying out the deed. Another storyline is about the re-emergence of The League, a mysterious group who puts pressure on students to do what they want, by causing them havoc. They turn their attention to Trevor after he makes his decision to put Barry on the first fifteen.
There are a few other smaller storylines as well, and it is here where Wodehouse has shown some great improvement over the first two novels. He weaves the storylines together well and creates an interesting story which keeps the reader's interest. Wodehouse also does a good job with the different characters, and it is easier to follow the key characters than in the previous books because they are more distinct. There are still too many characters; some of which get introduced in the last chapter, but on the positive side he does stick with a core set of characters for the most part, the others are, with one exception, not that important to the story. The humorous aspects of the story are not nearly as well done as in his works to come. The result is a very decent effort, much better than the previous works, but far from his best.
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