[Wodehouse's last work, the posthumous] Sunset at Blandings, is actually only the preliminary typescript of the first 16 chapters (out of a planned 22), with the author's somewhat contradictory plans for ending and revising the work, plus notes and appendixes by Richard Usborne.

The material of the novel will be familiar to readers of previous episodes of the Blandings "saga" (altogether, 12 novels and 10 short stories). A young woman is shipped off to the security of Blandings to keep her from a poor suitor who arrives under an assumed name (elsewhere we are told that Blandings Castle has impostors the way other houses have mice); confusions, thefts, and discoveries ensue until finally love triumphs. Wodehouse has produced magic from this formula before, but not here. The writing lacks the sparkle and stylistic fullness of earlier volumes in which, according to Evelyn Waugh, are found "on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to each page."

The plot also fails to thicken into the nimble twists of old, nor is there a single memorable minor character here to rank with such past notables as the Efficient Baxter, the allegedly bad Bart, Sir Gregory "Tubby" Parsloe-Parsloe, or the disloyal George Cyril Wellbeloved, the Communist pigman. Even the major characters fail to satisfy. Lord Emsworth seems almost alert, while his Bohemian brother, Galahad, who has nothing but rosy health and a noble heart to show for a lifetime of wine, chorus girls, and pranks, is not his usual clever self. Worst of all the Empress of Blandings, that "pig supreme," has retired and no longer competes for the Fat Pigs medal in the Shropshire Agricultural Show. All is in decline.

Yet any severe judgment would be unfair. The editor admits that only the skeleton of the final product was completed, little more than a fuller version of the scenario the author prepared for each novel. With Wodehouse at his best, as with the Empress herself, it is the fat alone that counts; but here the story seems almost to be taken seriously, as if the resolution of the plot and not its decoration mattered most….

This book will certainly be alright to the reader who already loves Wodehouse, but the uninitiated must be warned that Sunset at Blandings is not a good or even genuine Wodehouse novel. Wodehouse's own notes and plans for revision are chiefly interesting for how little they tell us about his art. Brief and purely practical, they identify what needs to be done ("can be improved") without revealing how. (p. 37)

Sunset at Blandings is chiefly useful for reminding us, if only negatively, how good Wodehouse can be at his best. In his earlier Blandings novels, as in the more famous Jeeves series, he creates some of the cleverest and yet gentlest comedy in English. This book shows that his vision ran pure to the end, with no trace of the bizarre and cruel strains found in modern humorists like Twain or Thurber. In his own way, Wodehouse clearly is a genius. This may seem too much to claim for a mere writer of funny books, "the performing flea" of English literature as Sean O'Casey sneered (an epithet which Wodehouse promptly used as the title for an autobiographical work), but it can be argued that with very few exceptions (Milton is perhaps the most obvious), the central tradition of English literature, from Chaucer through Shakespeare to Dickens, is a comic one. In fact, a good Blandings novel, in its complex plotting, generous humor, happy ending, and absolute command of language, suggests the happiest creation of Chaucer, his Nun's Priest's Tale; just as the Empress of Blandings is surely the most delightful animal in our literature since Chanticleer.

It would be interesting to know how 20th-century English literature will look a century or so from now; I suspect that P. G. Wodehouse will be ranked a good deal higher than many of the writers currently taken seriously by academic critics. Surely his craft will be appreciated—not only the inventive similes praised by Waugh, but also his mastery of sustained dialogue, and his ability to mix cliché and familiar quotation, English rotundity and American slang into a style that is at once full of comfortable echoes and uniquely his own. Sunset at Blandings barely hints at these achievements. For the great Wodehouse read Something New, Pigs Have Wings, or Full Moon in the Blandings series, or the Jeeves book Joy in the Morning or The Code of the Woosters. Then keep reading around in his enormously rich output. For if Wodehouse wrote nothing serious, as the title of one of his books has it, it is equally true that everything he finished was good. (pp. 37-8)