Ultimately both wars are lost as Alan shaves the moustache; despite winning a hard-fought battle to gain Jeeves's approval which prompts Alan to think of it as his Eiffel Tower moustache: "at first met with resistance and then appreciated," and finds himself hitting the bottle so hard he has hallucinatory conversations and blackouts. Combined with being accused of stealing slippers from a female artist, this is not shaping up to be a relaxing environment in which Alan can get down to some serious writing.
Thankfully, the others artists aren't entirely serious about their own work either. The colony turns out to be basically an adult summer camp where artists can go to do what artists do best, which includes, according to Alan: working, taking naps, and hating themselves, not necessarily in that order. Ames populates the camp with an array of delightful characters including a fellow author named Tinkle, who spills his disastrous bill of health to Alan on their first meeting; the monstrous camp director, Dr. Hibben, whom Ames describes in lurid detail as a ghastly mix of animal, vegetable, and mineral, with just enough human to pass inspection; and Sigrid Beaubien, a woman to whose nose Alan attributes a newfound sexual fetish (nasalphilia, I suppose) of which Alan believes he is one of two men in history to suffer from (the other being chronicled in Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis.)
Despite attempts to work on his novel, Alan's time at the colony becomes little more than an excuse to get into a series of increasingly ridiculous situations, culminating in embarrassing sexual hijinks and botched criminal activity, which at the very least gives him ideas for future writing projects. Ames isn't one to wrap up with a happy ending as the novel concludes, appropriately so, with Alan irredeemably shaming himself, but of course not losing the respect of Jeeves, whose unwavering support of Alan is most apparent at the author's lowest moments.
As today's comic writers seem to be concentrating on short form writing, it's a very welcome breath to find a comic novel that is as consistently and thoroughly funny as is Wake Up, Sir! Perhaps Ames could become a flag-bearer for a new era of comic novelists. But who needs that kind of pressure? After all, if Ames is anything like his creation, it may send him into fits of neurosis.
As today's comic writers seem to be concentrating on short form writing, it's a very welcome breath to find a comic novel that is as consistently and thoroughly funny as is Wake Up, Sir! Perhaps Ames could become a flag-bearer for a new era of comic novelists. But who needs that kind of pressure? After all, if Ames is anything like his creation, it may send him into fits of neurosis.
