The Swoop!

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

An adapted and much abbreviated version, set in the United States, appeared in the July and August 1915 issues of Vanity Fair under the title The Military Invasion of America and with the subtitle A Remarkable Tale of the German-Japanese Invasion of 1916.

The original story was not published in the United States until 1979, four years after Wodehouse's death, when it was included in the collection The Swoop! and Other Stories.

Plot summary

The Swoop! tells of the simultaneous invasion of England by several armies — "England was not merely beneath the heel of the invader. It was beneath the heels of nine invaders. There was barely standing-room." — and features references to many well-known figures of the day, among them the politician Herbert Gladstone, novelist Edgar Wallace, actor-managers Seymour Hicks and George Edwardes, and boxer Bob Fitzsimmons.