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Notes -
I found it an enjoyable book, but it also came across as incredibly fake--not necessarily in a bad way, as I don't care if an author is an authentic whatever-he's-writing-about because the whole point of fiction is telling interesting stories, but it was very apparent he was writing about being English as an outsider. I read Remains after reading a long list of English authors when I was trying to get a feel for what 1905-1914 and 1920-30 England was Really Like: Huxley's Crome Yellow, Forster's Room with a View and Howards End, two of Ford's Parade's End books, the 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time by Powell (over a million words and went by in a flash; I look forward to re-reading it), a number of Waugh's novels, and others I'm forgetting right now. Remains is a character study using some English trappings, but after reading so many authors who lived through English society of that era, it doesn't compare.
And coincidentally enough on the topic of English society, I'm about halfway done with the 4th Jeeves omnibus. In some ways, bits of Wodehouse's jokes and characters are wearing out their welcome, but in others, his writing has gotten so much better he went along that some of the sentences are breathtakingly brilliant and funny.
On that note, I'm currently reading Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, and it's very helpful to try and get into the mind of an Englishman from that period - the ways of thinking they brought into and then out of the War.
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