YOU MIGHT THINK THAT there were reasons for letting P. G. Wodehouse slip away. The mist of a vanished society clings to the novels — the era, the class, the language, the manners — and a straight description would made them sound like fragile period pieces, threatening to shatter at a touch. Yet he survives and prospers with gusto, having pulled off the trick of transcending his own world with dazzling sleight of hand and with, as Jeeves himself would acknowledge, a certain espiãglerie.

The effervescence of his language is so invigorating, and his ear for its rhythms so sure, that Wodehouse is always fresh, even as his characters age and their times become antique. We know them still, the eager woman whose face was “shining like the seat of a bus-driver’s trousers”, or the young man on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes on to whose face there crept “the look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French”.

The Everyman’s Library hardback edition has now reached its fiftieth title (with The Inimitable Jeeves, Money for Nothing and Sam the Sudden the latest of its regular issues) and in these handsome volumes, with pages that smell of real paper and those fine covers by Andrzej Klimowski, you find that the sparkle hasn’t dimmed. They are a cause for regular celebration, and when the eightieth and last completes the set some time in the next decade it will be an excuse to start at the beginning again, perhaps with a preliminary cocktail from Jeeves’s cupboard to set us off con brio, the one that makes your eyeballs bounce off the wall and back to their sockets and leaves your throat feeling as if the Flying Scotsman has just passed through it.

By the end you might feel like the hapless nephew of Lord Emsworth at Blandings, whom we discover after one escapade with pale face, glassy eyes and disordered hair looking like “the poet Shelley after a big night out with Lord Byron”. But, as with the poet, it would be worth it. Those of us who have shelves of Wodehouse — the new Everyman’s Library, the battered Penguins, the mouldering remains of 1930s Herbert Jenkins editions with broken spines and floating pages — still find that at moments of torment we turn to the prize-giving at Market Snodsbury Grammar School, on whose platform Gussie Fink-Nottle, the fish-faced newt fancier, plunges to his nadir, or the Great Sermon Handicap, or the Earl of Emsworth’s panicky recourse to a hog-caller from the Midwest to restore the appetite of Empress of Blandings on the eve of the Shropshire Agricultural Show and the climactic battle for the silver medal.

At the end of Pig Hoo-o-o-o-ey! Emsworth is a lost soul in torment by the sty as he waits to see if the hog caller’s magic has worked. Then he hears “a sort of gulpy, gurgly, ploppy, squishy, wofflesome sound, like a thousand eager men drinking soup in a foreign restaurant”. The Empress is eating.

Wodehouse himself said that he described a world that was out of focus. That isn’t quite it, because the landscape and its folk are diamond-bright and the sounds are as clear as a bell; but it is out of kilter. Something has jerked its axis askew. No one is better than Wodehouse at catching the quality of the knowledge harboured by everyone who knows that we all look ridiculous in the bath, the difference between the world as it is rumoured to be and the world as it is.

The trick, of course, is in treasuring what is beyond reach. Bertie Wooster probably wishes he could have won his Scripture Union prize without having had to scrawl the names of the Kings of Judah on his shirt cuffs, Psmith dreams of a society reordered on his own potty terms, Emsworth wishes that his sister could realise that Whiffle’s volume The Care of the Pig is more important than anything written by Shakespeare. Jeeves, however, knows the truth; that there will always be a time when genteel blackmail might require the services of the volume at the Junior Gannymede Club where gentlemen’s gentlemen record the foibles and darkest secrets of their employers, page by page. We are in a fallen world.

They shimmer and shine, even Madeleine Bassett (“the woman that God forgot”), Oofy Prosser and the weak-chinned saplings at the Drones, the braying golfers and empty heiresses clucking and cooing on ships and country-house lawns. Wodehouse gives them a life they sometimes don’t seem to deserve, but we relish. When Bertie alludes to “the sinister affair of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeleine Bassett, old Pop Bassett, Stiffy Byng, the Rev H. P. ‘Stinker’ Pinker, the 18th-century cow-creamer and the small, brown leather-covered notebook” I am off, in The Code of the Woosters, on a journey that has the thrilling glint of childhood in it.

Never be tempted to let them go. You might get bored, briefly, by golf or even by the entrants in the Drones darts contest (though never, of course, by the “surging sea of aunts”) but all will be well. Remember the time when Bertie was especially irritated by Jeeves's worries about a particular pair of sponge-bag trousers.

“There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself — do trousers matter?”

“The mood will pass, sir.”

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