By Sue de Groot for the Sunday Times
Jeeves and the Wedding Bells
Sebastian Faulkes
Hutchinson
****
“I’m all for incest and tortured souls in moderation,” PG Wodehouse told an interviewer in 1961, “but a good laugh never hurt anyone.”
There can be no greater compliment to a dead writer than a reading world so lost without his voice that it employs someone else to imitate him. Depending on the imposter’s performance, there might also be no greater insult – but the writer, being dead, won’t care.
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse would probably have forgiven Sebastian Faulks for a rotten tribute novel. Jeeves and the Wedding Bells is not rotten, however, not even in parts. It isn’t quite Wodehouse, but it is a joyful caper nonetheless. Even the master’s most exacting fans have grudgingly admitted that it didn’t turn their hearts to lead.
Faulks has taken Bertie Wooster, Wodehouse’s favourite leading man, and put him into uncomfortably hot water, as is required of any day in the Wooster almanac. From this broth he can only be rescued by his better half Jeeves, the butler so brainy that a search engine was named after him.
The plot is farcical, as one would expect, with thwarted desire, mistaken identity, village cricket, spilled pudding, vinegary maiden aunts and nights on the tiles (which, when you’re Wooster, means being locked out of the house after climbing out of your window onto the roof wearing only a sheet).
Apart from the language not being quite so limber and the slang substantially slimmed down (cars are still “motors” and cigarettes are still “gaspers”, but other terms have been scrapped), there is a crucial difference between Wodehouse and Faulks-as-Wodehouse. The title gives a clue. Wooster may have fallen in and out of deep admiration before, but this time is different – this time the object of his desire is one Georgiana Meadowes. In comparing her to his previous paramours, Wooster writes (with Faulks holding the pen): “Where these paragons of their sex left off, Georgiana Meadowes began. One rather wondered whether she should be allowed out at all, such a hazard did she pose to male shipping.”
There is more sentimentality at play in Jeeves and the Wedding Bells than Wodehouse would have seen fit to spray around, but it works. We get to know Jeeves (who discusses Schopenhauer with Miss Meadowes) as more than a polymath who polishes shoes, and Wooster as more than an amusing, accident-prone fop, because the story requires them to change places: Jeeves is upstairs and Wooster is downstairs. Both are impersonating other people at the same time as exchanging professions – which will all become perfectly clear when you read the book.
The fact that there is a Wodehouse tribute novel at all can be blamed on Downton Abbey and the resultant obsession with the English upper class (and its servants) in the satiny lull between world wars. But Downton is clumsy and leaden when compared to the gossamer strings pulled by Wodehouse, or indeed, Faulks as Wodehouse.
Faulks does a much better job of being Wodehouse than he did of being Fleming in his 2008 homage Devil May Care, perhaps because Bertie Wooster is a far more likeable chap than James Bond.
Shoehorning himself into Wooster’s yellow brogues may have done Faulks a power of good. “The great thing about Bertie is that he is a very generous-spirited, nice chap, with a sunny outlook on life,” Faulks told a Telegraph reporter. “Forcing myself to think like that was good for me … it made me look on the bright side.”
- Sue de Groot @degroots1
Book details
- Jeeves and the Wedding Bells by Sebastian Faulkes
EAN: 9780091954055
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