I read an interesting piece by Douglas Adams recently on the writing of P.G. Wodehouse. I have always enjoyed Wodehouse's writing but unfortunately the plots of his novels are so similar you can't tell them apart. Being unable to differentiate the plot of different novels has always been a bit of a turn off.

Adams counters this by stating that when you read Wodehouse, it isn't for the plot but the writing itself. His works can be compared, using a musical analogy, to variations on a tune. This is writing which strives to achieve an intense technical refinement, each new novel seeking to best the previous. Reading this made me feel like I was totally missing the point whenever I had read Wodehouse.

Wodehouse does not break new ground in story telling - his plots are as old as the hills and remarkably consistent. The real art is in the writing, his use of description, simile, and metaphor. Here are some examples of his skill:

• I started back to the house, and in the drive I met Jeeves. He was at the wheel of Stiffy's car. Beside him, looking like a Scotch elder rebuking sin, was the dog Bartholomew.
• The Duke’s moustache was rising and falling like seaweed on an ebb-tide.
• It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't.
• Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes.
• Like so many substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag.

Now I think I need to start reading Wodehouse again, but this time paying attention to the beauty of the wording and not simply the plot.