Summer Lightning: Summary & Reading Guide

The Empress, Gally’s memoirs and one crowded summer

Summer Lightning is where I hand a new Blandings reader who wants the castle at full comic occupancy. Lord Emsworth would like to attend to the Empress, his prize pig, and be left alone. His brother Galahad is preparing memoirs that alarm people who remember their own youthful conduct. Ronnie Fish and Sue Brown have a romance to pursue, while Hugo Carmody has plans and responsibilities of his own. The Empress becomes the object of a scheme, and the castle’s inhabitants discover that very different ambitions can collide around one animal. It is a novel built from interlocking desires rather than a simple pig chase. A first reader can follow the visible mystery, while the returning fan savours how each member of the household defines a satisfactory peace.

The Empress has a peculiar power in the series. To Emsworth she is not an amusing symbol of rural eccentricity; she matters. His devotion gives the castle a centre of gravity that family politics cannot entirely dislodge. A plan involving the pig therefore threatens the one part of his world he understands perfectly. The joke is affectionate because Wodehouse lets Emsworth’s concern be sincere even when other people find it disproportionate. The more his relatives insist that marriages, reputations and domestic management deserve priority, the clearer it becomes that the Empress is his most reliable companion. I would rather read that relationship on the page than have a guide reduce it to the label “prize-winning pig.”

Galahad’s memoirs are another excellent comic object, one made of words rather than bacon and bone. The possibility of publication can unsettle respectable people before a single page is printed. Gally has the memories; other people have reputations to protect; the manuscript can be hidden, pursued or used as a bargaining chip. That plot line speaks beautifully to the book’s broader concern with control. Lady Constance would like the house to run properly. Young lovers would like decisions about their own futures. Emsworth would like uninterrupted pig business. Gally would like to tell his stories. Nobody can simply order the others to want the same outcome. Wodehouse’s art lies in letting several schemes move at once while each remains legible.

Ronnie and Sue give the novel its warm romantic impulse. Their prospects are not solved by declaring love at the beginning; status, money and family expectations all have a say. Hugo is drawn into the castle’s practical arrangements and becomes another agent whose actions can be misread. A useful reading trick is to ask, in each scene, what the speaker wants from the person addressed and what that person believes the speaker wants. Blandings comedy often blooms in the distance between those answers. It never feels like a cold exercise, because the characters are so variously hopeful, vain, kind and preoccupied. Even an apparently foolish move has a human motive beneath it.

This novel also teaches the reader how the castle works as a space. Its rooms and grounds make it possible for a manuscript, a person or the Empress to move beyond immediate sight without leaving the social network. The surrounding Market Blandings adds a different scale of observation. Emsworth’s wish to withdraw into his own interests must contend with a house that is always receiving news and guests. On a rereading, I enjoy following the routes that information takes. Wodehouse has made geography serve timing: a delayed encounter can keep a misconception alive, while a sudden arrival can turn a well-prepared plan inside out. The place is an instrument of the plot, not a painted backdrop.

The publication record carries a particularly memorable regional title. The American book Fish Preferred appeared from Doubleday, Doran on 1 July 1929; Herbert Jenkins published the British Summer Lightning later that month. Earlier UK and US serials both used Summer Lightning. Thus Fish Preferred is an American book title, not the original name of every version on either side of the Atlantic. A collector may encounter magazine parts, a full regional book, or a later reprint; each deserves its own description. The specialist annotations record the serial routes and first book dates. A reader looking for the novel can use either book title, while a researcher should state which text and edition supplied a detail.

Heavy Weather follows directly, with its fictional action only a short time later. I recommend reading Summer Lightning first if you intend to enjoy that pair as a pair. It introduces the immediate positions around Gally’s manuscript and the Empress that the later novel can use without rebuilding them from scratch. Yet Summer Lightning is a complete and generous experience by itself. The comic resolution has its own satisfactions, and the return visit need not be treated as compulsory homework. If you have only read Something Fresh, notice how much more crowded Blandings has become. The scarab caper opened the gates; this novel fills the house with family ambitions and gives its famous pig a claim on the centre of the stage.

I return for the mixture of velocity and calm. Everybody around Lord Emsworth seems to be pursuing somebody or something, while he wants a simple afternoon with the Empress. Gally’s memories make the past dangerous, the younger people make the future urgent, and the pig makes the present impossible to ignore. Wodehouse keeps all three times in play without letting the book become solemn. If you are choosing one Blandings novel beyond the beginning, this is a splendid candidate. Start with the American or British title your edition carries, keep the main desires in mind, and let the castle’s wonderful traffic do the rest.