Sebastian Faulks’ resurrection of Wodehouse’s two most spectacularly beloved characters, the inimitable gentleman’s gentleman, Jeeves, and his blithering, buffoonish employer, Bertie Wooster, had made its way onto my reading list well before it actually existed in any sort of physical form available to the general public. I forget quite where I heard of it (undoubtedly, I came across it on some sort of dark and dodgy corner of the Intarwebz), but I do recall being terribly thrilled when I saw it featured prominently in one of the Piccadilly-facing display windows of Waterstones.

The core elements are all present: a country estate, an intimidating elderly female, a cantankerous peer, an old college friend, an object of affection and the mandatory village fête. However, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells opens with a complete role-reversal — it is Jeeves who is being put up in the old country manor while Bertram Wilberforce Wooster finds himself being a son of toil beneath tonnes of soil (well, below-stairs, at any rate). Why, you may ask? Because Bertie has, with all the loyalty and enthusiasm of Monty Beresford’s golden retriever on the fourth of June, agreed to help his old friend Woody Beeching reconcile with his fiancé Amelia, daughter of notorious curmudgeon Sir Henry Hackwood and witness to Woody’s innocent non-flirtation with another woman. But because Hackwood has had run-ins with Wooster, B. in the past, it is Jeeves who must impersonate a peer of the land to get access to Hackwood’s estate, his daughter and effect a reconciliation.

Further complicating the whole mess are members of the Venables family, potential in-laws of Georgiana Meadowes, a young lady who is part of the Hackwood clan and with whom Bertie has spent a rather ... non-Platonic, shall we say, time on the Cote d’Azur. Venables senior is incapable of doing anything other than speaking of his time in India (specifically in the mythical land of Chanamasala, where he was well-nigh indispensable to all and sundry), while the Mrs. looks like a Persian cat in human form, and Venables junior is a weedy writer of travelogues that are such bilge, even Bertie can tell they’re no Spinoza. In the midst of all this, poor Bertie finds himself playing the part of valet, while Jeeves, swaddled in a magnificent paisley dressing-gown, takes on the role of one Lord Etringham, and makes inroads into Sir Henry’s good graces by giving him betting tips on an assortment of horse-races.

Faulks’ novel is by no means a perfect imitation of Wodehouse’s own style, don’t get me wrong; the rather daft Bertie seems to be more erudite than in the original, and some of the scenarios press against the boundaries of even Wodehouse’s farce, but Jeeves and the Wedding Bells is so close to the original tone and content of the Jeeves and Wooster novels that you’d have to be peculiarly unhappy with your lot in life to really take issue with any of this. Admittedly, I haven’t much familiarity with Faulks’ other works (beyond knowing that he wrote Birdsong), so I’m not qualified to comment on how this tribute to Wodehouse stacks up in the general scheme of things. But in terms of plot at the very least, Faulks proves just as capable as the icon to whom he’s paying homage. This is no mean feat, given that the general plots of Jeeves and Wooster are, despite the frothy prose involved, of a complexity that would make a Russian chess grandmaster want to go have a lie-down and possibly one of Jeeves’ patented pick-me-ups.

This is a good thing. To mimic Wodehouse, even in the form of a tribute, is a brave move for any writer, and Faulks’ attempt is not only brave, it’s (largely) successful. Jeeves and the Wedding Bells isn’t going to bring new fans to the Wodehouse table: it’s more a special zonker from the Drones Club than one of Anatole’s famous meals. It will, however, be a bracing pick-me-up for existing members of the Wodehouse cult, even if its conclusion runs famously against the grain of every ending Bertie Wooster has ever experienced.

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Jeeves and the Wedding Bells

(NOVEL)

By Sebastian Faulks

Hutchinson, UK

ISBN 978-0091954048

272pp.