A certain kind of reader is unlikely to accept any kind of argument for P. G. Wodehouse’s Mike. Set in a private, all-boys school, the novel features a main character, the Mike of the title, with few distinguishing traits beyond being a good egg and an even better cricketer. Is it, perhaps, a satire of such institutions and people? Far from it: the main criticism of Sedleigh, the school in which the novel’s second half is set, is that it isn’t very good at cricket. The boyish things the pupils do are not grounds for anxiety or scorn. None of them appear in the least bit traumatised by the experience of being sent off to boarding school, sometimes by parents in some remote colonial outpost.
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