It’s jolly decent, old bean

We are no longer in Wodehouse’s pre-lapsarian world, where the only real romance was between Jeeves and his employer. Bertie has fallen for Georgiana Meadowes, who has the same surname as his previous, insane valet. How will this send readers back to the original stories of the canon, wonders Nicholas Lezard
Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster and Stephen Fry as Jeeves 'Jeeves and Wooster' TV Programme - 1993 SERIES 4 : EPISODE 1 - Return to New York Bertie is back in New York and enamoured of portrait painter Gwladys Pendlebury but Aunt Agatha is not enamoured of the painting of her Bertie commissioned and she is even more annoyed when her wayward twin sons, charged to Bertie's care before being shipped off for colonial posts, give him the slip to pursue a cabaret singer. Tuppy Glossop arrives to sell his family recipe for cock-a-leekie to soup magnate Slingsby to finance his nuptials to Elizabeth but slimy ad man Lucius Pim steals Gwladys from Bertie and makes Aunt Agatha the unwitting face of Slingsby's soups ...
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Nicholas Lezard31 October 2013

Jeeves and the Wedding Bells by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson, £16.99)

I used to get my PG Wodehouse fix in the form of those Penguins that had an illustration, invariably excellent, by “Ionicus” on the front cover and a quote from Evelyn Waugh on the back: “Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from a captivity that may be more irksome than our own,” etc. These lines became familiar to the point of invisibility but they hold this truth: that when we read Wodehouse, it’s to shove our cares to one side.

And so Sebastian Faulks has been invited by, or has perhaps asked, the Wodehouse estate to add one more book to the canon; or rather to place one alongside it, in homage, and in the hope of enticing a new generation of readers to get hold of the Real Thing. And the strange thing is that, after a couple of weeks’ reflection, I’m still unsure how well he has succeeded.

Faulks tries to get off the hook at the start by saying he’s written a “nostalgic variation”, not a straight impersonation. That’s wise but, nevertheless, here we have the familiar ingredients: Bertie and Jeeves in a country house getting in and out of absurd scrapes and emotional entanglements. In the Wodehouse canon this meant Bertie trying to reunite the sundered hearts of his friends while trying to get out of an unwelcome engagement himself; in this book you notice something is up the moment when Bertie describes one Georgiana Meadowes as “perhaps the most beautiful girl I had ever seen”. This odd note — the real Bertie would never have put it quite that baldly — prompted me to draw up a ledger in the endpapers: on the left side, things that jarred, and on the other, things that had me applauding.

The left side has about three times as many entries as the right but the right is by no means empty. There are plenty of times when Faulks — not hitherto known as an author for whom comedy has been a crucial part of his palette — gets the right note, but there are also plenty of times when the reader who knows Wodehouse will shudder. (The only “brainless” mistake is the often repeated one of calling the head the “old bean”. No! No! “Old bean” is a salutation; the head is simply “the bean”.)

But I detect a pattern: it is the intrusion of the real world. Georgiana (whose surname is, deliberately or not, the same as Bertie’s previous, insane valet), like Bertie, is an orphan, but we have a cause: the sinking of the RMS Lusitania. The action of the book takes place towards the end of the General Strike, ie a fixed point in history. A definite accusation of an improper sexual liaison is made at a dinner table. In other words, we are no longer in Wodehouse’s pre-lapsarian world, where the only real romance was between Jeeves and his employer. And there are times when the book looks like more of a homage to Downton Abbey than Wodehouse.

We also lose something important: the great gulf Wodehouse created between Wooster’s eloquence and his (supposed) intelligence, or lack thereof, for Georgiana has to fall in love with Bertie, and if she’s not stupid, then neither can he be. How this will send people back to the original stories I’m not sure, but if it does, Faulks’s hard work will not have been in vain.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £13.49, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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