What happens when the greatest comic prose stylist of the twentieth century decides that golf — not love, not money, not class warfare — is the central drama of human existence?
You get The Clicking of Cuthbert. And honestly? He might be right.
I was half-listening to this during a Saturday morning walk along the lakefront with Denise, and somewhere around the second story I stopped walking. Just stood there on the path like an idiot, laughing out loud while joggers swerved around me. Denise asked if I was okay. I was better than okay. I was in Wodehouse's world, where a man will sabotage his best friend's engagement over a disagreement about iron play, and it makes perfect emotional sense.
The Oldest Member Understands That Pause Is Punctuation
These stories — ten of them, all originally published in the 1920s — are framed by the Oldest Member, a fixture of the golf club who ambushes anyone foolish enough to sit near him. He's the narrator-within-the-narrator, the guy who corners you at a party and says "That reminds me of the time..." except his stories are actually worth hearing. The framing device gives Wodehouse license to be simultaneously sentimental and ruthless. The Oldest Member cares about these people. He also thinks they're complete fools. That's Wodehouse in a nutshell — affection without illusion.
The title story sets the template: a young man's literary pretensions clash with his beloved's passion for golf, and the resolution involves Russian novelists, a perfectly timed mashie shot, and the kind of absurd escalation that Wodehouse does better than anyone who's ever held a pen. "A Woman Is Only a Woman" takes the formula and twists it — two friends agree that whoever loses a golf match gets the girl, and both of them are trying to lose. The logic is demented. The execution is flawless. My students would hate this. I love it.
What strikes me listening to these in sequence, rather than picking them up one at a time as magazine pieces the way they were originally consumed, is how Wodehouse uses golf as a universal solvent for human motivation. Love, ambition, pride, revenge — they all get filtered through handicaps and putting greens until the stakes feel simultaneously enormous and completely absurd. This reminds me of what Hemingway said about writing one true sentence and building from there — except Wodehouse's true sentences are ridiculous, and that's precisely why they work. The prose deserves to be savored. Every clause is doing something. Every adjective earns its place.
Burchard's Game on the Green
Now, about Johnathan Burchard's narration. I'll be straight with you — I couldn't find much critical commentary on this particular performance, and the research cupboard was pretty bare on specifics. What I can tell you from my own ears: Burchard handles the period voice well enough. He's got a readable, pleasant British register that doesn't strain for comedy, which is actually the right instinct with Wodehouse. The worst thing a narrator can do with this material is push the jokes. Wodehouse's humor lives in the architecture of the sentence — the unexpected word choice, the delayed punchline, the metaphor that starts dignified and ends up face-first in a bunker. You need a narrator who trusts the text.
Burchard mostly trusts the text. There are moments where I wanted a little more differentiation between the Oldest Member's wry detachment and the breathless panic of young lovers explaining themselves, but at six hours, the performance stays comfortable without becoming monotonous. It's a solid reading. Not a transcendent one — not the kind of narration that makes you forget you're listening to an audiobook — but dependable.
At 1.0x speed (because the author chose those words), six hours is a perfect weekend companion. Short enough to finish in two or three walks. Long enough to let the cumulative absurdity build.
Who Gets the Most Out of This Tee Time
If you loved the Jeeves novels, this is their spiritual predecessor — the same comic machinery, the same gorgeous sentences, just aimed at fairways instead of country houses. You don't need to know a single thing about golf. I barely know which end of the club to hold, and it didn't matter. These are stories about people being magnificently, passionately wrong about their priorities, and if that's not the human condition, I don't know what is.
Skip this if you need plot momentum or if Edwardian comic prose makes you itch. This is a slow, warm bath in language. It doesn't build to revelations. It accumulates charm.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For
This is why we still read the classics — because a hundred years later, a story about a man who can't marry the woman he loves until he breaks ninety still feels urgent and true and hilariously alive. Wodehouse didn't write great golf stories. He wrote great people stories, and he set them on a golf course because he understood that obsession is obsession, whether the object is a woman or a seven-iron. Put this on during your next long walk. You'll stop in the middle of the path too. The closest thing I've heard recently that captures that same feeling of being ambushed by someone else's voice and stopped cold is All Over But the Shoutin' — different world entirely, but Rick Bragg has that same gift for making you feel like the story is being told specifically to you, and the audiobook is worth every minute.
