To describe The Coming of Bill as a light comedy would be a stretch. There is but one chapter, in which the pugilist Steve Dingle engages in a hilarious conversation with the meddlesome and overbearing Mrs. Parker, where Wodehouse’s signature humor shines. Search as you may, it is hard to find other humorous instances in this book, not even when an orotund English butler named Keggs makes his occasional appearance in the story.

If Jill Mariner (Jill the Reckless) was the most endearing of all Wodehouse’s heroines, Ruth Bannister surely would have to be the most complex one. Ruth’s character undergoes so many transformations through the course of the story, it would be hard to pin her true nature. Overbearing women characters are dime a dozen in Wodehouse’s stories. Yet, before Lora Delane Parker, Aunt Agatha and Lady Constance Threepwood would seem meek and perfectly harmless.

Without question, this is the most unusual Wodehouse novel I’ve read. His classic humor may be absent in The Coming of Bill. But his masterful wielding of the English language, the way he can bend it to his every will, is very much evident in the story. Case in point: The robins which, though not so well advertised, rise just as punctually as the lark, were beginning to sing as they made their simple toilets before setting out to attend to the early worm.