The book is about British humorist P.G. Wodehouse’s most famous creations, upper-class twit Bertie Wooster and his valet, Jeeves. Wodehouse, by the way, is probably my favourite author of all time. To say that my expectations whenever I read a new Wodehouse book are sky-high would be to grossly overestimate the sky. But Sebastian Faulks, although doubtless a very fine man in many respects, is not P.G. Wodehouse. This can’t be helped; some people are, some people aren’t. I knew when I checked this book out of the library that Faulks’ take on the characters would likely fall short of the master’s. Fortunately, Faulks also knew this, and wisely wrote the book as an homage rather than a sequel.
The plot is vintage Wodehouse: a friend of Bertie’s (Peregrine “Woody” Beeching, said to be his closest of childhood chums) is having fiancée troubles, and so Bertie, valet in tow, sets off to save the nuptials and the day. This time, Jeeves gets stuck impersonating a wealthy lord known as Etringham, with Bertie playing the roll of the gentleman’s personal gentleman! Throw in an intimidating aunt and you have a simple recipe for the most quintessential Wodehouse novel ever written by a man not named Wodehouse.
If you’ve read the originals, you probably remember that Bertie is a man who gets into and out of engagements the way James Bond does elaborate executions. Sebastian Faulks, in one of his departures from the classics, decided to introduce nature’s bachelor to a girl named Georgiana Meadowes. She’s smart, beautiful, kind, works at a publishing company, and blatantly attracted to Bertie. Part of me was afraid this sort of thing would happen. Sure, Psmith can get a girlfriend. Freddie Threepwood, too. But something about Bertie having a real girlfriend just felt so wrong, like Romeo going back to Rosaline, or Don Quixote actually slaying a giant disguised as a windmill.
But just because Wodehouse would not does not mean Faulks may not, so I’ll try to judge the romance fairly. Granted, Georgiana is not a compelling character so much as a bunch of appealing traits glued together. There are a few references to her abysmal driving, but they're infrequent, have no impact on the story, and aren't even that funny, which makes me think that they were added just to make her seem more three-dimensional. I don’t want people to think that I’m against career-women who are smart, kind, and pretty. I believe that career-women who are smart, kind and pretty can and often are a great addition to literature as well as to the real world. But the most interesting characters have more going for them than being career-oriented, smart, kind, and pretty. A career-man who is smart, kind, and handsome would not be particularly interesting without something else to define him, either. Georgiana (like most of the original characters in this book, I may as well add) feels flat.
I will say one thing about this romance, though, and that is that Faulks really sold me on the idea that a girl like Georgiana could love a man like Bertie. A more cynical author might suggest that she could lust after the wallet, but never love the man. Mentally negligible as he (Bertie--not Faulks) may be, he is still is a gentleman to his marrow. Open to any page in any of his book, and odds are good that you’ll see him putting himself through the ringer for a chum. Georgiana also believes that Bertie possesses hidden intellectual depths, and considering he's a maddeningly articulate Oxford graduate, she just might be right.
Of course, when one sits down to read a Jeeves and Wooster story, the question is always “Is it funny?” and never "But will it melt my heart?" The answer here to the former is yes. Maybe not as funny as Wodehouse himself, but complaining about that would be like scowling at the Who because they’re not the Beatles. After all, Wodehouse’s gift for language, characterization, and plot are almost unmatched in the history of English Literature, and certainly unparalleled in the realm of comic literature. Nevertheless, I laughed at this book, and often. What I love most about Wodehouse’s writing style is the way he seamlessly combines the high-brow, the formal, and the colloquial in one sentence, and Faulks is adept at that (for example: “Between them they were about as welcoming as Goneril and Regan on being told that old Pop Lear had just booked in for a month with full retinue”). The language is probably as close to Wodehouse as one can reasonably be expected to come without actually transforming into Wodehouse. The plotting, unfortunately, falls further below the mark. It's certainly competent, and has its share of twists and turns which feel like they came right out of a classic Jeeves story. But Wodehouse didn't just write in his share of twists and turns--he turned his stories into a labyrinth of deceptions and misunderstandings, and they were all the stronger for it. Faulks only writes in what I would call a standard dose, and even then, without giving anything away, I felt that some of them fall apart a little too soon. This is a good comic novel, but I'd be reluctant to call it a great one.
This is why the more serious elements are necessary. If it’s impossible for Faulks--or any other writer--to create a worthy continuation to the Jeeves cannon, then it’s better to create a supplement. This book takes Bertie and his audience out of the comfort zone. Issues like the emotional implications of Bertie's self-depreciating jokes or the fact that his idealized Britain was almost destroyed in World War II are touched upon, albeit only for a page or two. I can't really fault Faulks, who is simply writing about things that almost certainly existed in Wodehouse’s world, but were never mentioned. Some people actually preferred this book to the originals because of the more serious, pensive tone. Admittedly, I did not, but I don’t think I would have preferred a non-Wodehouse straightforward comedy to a Wodehouse one anyway. The question is whether Faulks’ hypothetical pure-comedy book would have been better than this one. I doubt it.
Someone who has never read Wodehouse before can theoretically read Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, but they would not enjoy it as much as the old hands. This book is about laughing with old friends. Maybe they’re a bit different, a bit less fun and a bit more mature, but they’re still your friends, with whom you have shared precious memories that will last a lifetime.
