The Swoop

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**Title** **The Swoop!, or How Clarence Saved England**
Author	P. G. Wodehouse
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	Satire
Publisher	Alston Rivers, Ltd.
Released	April 16, 1909
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
ISBN	NA

The Swoop is a short comic novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the U.K. by Alston Rivers, Ltd., London, on April 16, 1909. Its full title reads The Swoop!, or How Clarence Saved England, subtitled A Tale of the Great Invasion.

An adapted version, under the title The Military Invasion of America and with the setting switched to the United States, appeared in the July and August 1915 issues of Vanity Fair. It was subtitled A Remarkable Tale Of The German-Japanese Invasion Of 1916. The original story appeared in the U.S. in the collection The Swoop! and Other Stories, (1979).

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The book is a comical satire, telling of the invasion of England by armies from Germany, Russia and various other nations, featuring several well-known political figures of the age. The invaders are hampered by bickering amongst themselves, the lure of music hall fame, and the common cold, before finally meeting their nemesis in the form of a band of Boy Scouts, led by the indomitable Clarence Chugwater.

In the rewritten version, The Military Invasion of America, the United States is invaded by armies from Germany and Japan, who also come up against the mighty Clarence Chugwater.

[edit] Literary significance & criticism

The writing style is noticeably different from most of Wodehouse's output; it is a freewheeling, rapid-paced farce packed with one-liners and slapstick: "Thus was London bombarded. Fortunately it was August, and there was nobody in town."

As with much literature of the period (such as the novels of John Buchan), the book has been criticised for racism; it is considered unsuitable for a youthful audience, and has in some cases been withdrawn from general availability in public libraries. The early part of the story displays an infantile racism typical for the time, with almost all the invading nations subjected to crude stereotyping. This varies in severity considerably - the Young Turks are depicted as playful student types, the invaders from Monaco are keen gamblers, constantly suggesting card games or other games of chance, and the Chinese are scholarly and flawlessly polite but utterly incomprehensible; meanwhile the group from Somaliland are headed by a "Mad Mullah" (a reference to Somali leader Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, but here mad in a very Wodehousian, I-think-I'm-a-teapot way), and the Morrocans are thieving brigands led by Raisuli (the character played by Sean Connery in The Wind and the Lion). Most offensively, the force from the (fictitious) "distant isle of Bollygolla" are depicted as dark-skinned savages with poor table manners, and combine aspects of the period's racial archetypes usually applied to Native Americans (particularly scalping) with those associated with inhabitants of the Pacific Islands and Sub-Saharan Africa; on their arrival, they are mistaken for an attempt by theatrical producer Charles Frohman to revive the then almost defunct and now generally reprobated practice of blackface minstrelsy.

The rewritten U.S. version has this first part of the book removed entirely, and commences with the U.S. already overrun with troops from the two invading countries.