Sebastian Faulks provides Bertie Wooster with psychological depth – but at what cost?
The Telegraph - 02 Nov 2013
Bertie Wooster, after a 6am alarm that “sounded like a dozen iron dustbins being chucked down a flight of stone steps”, brings a cup of tea to Jeeves, sitting in bed wearing a burgundy dressing gown with a light paisley pattern and reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
The familiar Wodehousean characters and similes almost make it seem that a long-lost novel has been brought to light. In Britain, this familiarity is such that there is no need to explain who Jeeves is (though some, with invincible ignorance, still think him a butler, instead of a gentleman’s personal gentleman).
So what is Sebastian Faulks doing? This, it says on the cover, is “a homage to PG Wodehouse” (not quite an homage, then, or the full-blown French hommage). As listeners to Radio 4’s The Write Stuff know, Faulks is a fine knitter of pastiches, collected in a book, Pistache, in 2006. In that year he was commissioned to write a new James Bond novel. It’s all the rage: no classic author, from Jane Austen to Beatrix Potter, is safe
The Wodehouse estate then passed Faulks a tricky ball to run with. He says in an introduction that he “didn’t want to write too close an imitation” of the Master’s “glorious prose, let alone parody it”. His is a sort of “nostalgic variation”. Apparently Wodehouse’s descendants hope “that a new novel may help to bring the characters of Jeeves and Bertie to a younger readership”. That is a rum expectation.
To be sure, it is 20 years since Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry played the parts on television. But why should a “younger readership” go for Faulks, all-round good egg though he is? He is younger than Wodehouse, who would have been 132 last month if he’d lived, but even so, Faulks is 60. No matter.
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