Gained in Translation.

I keep rushing home to my kindle or lingering with it in cafes over empty coffee cups. Last night I even made an unplanned stop on my way home in the little bottle depository at the end of our road that has a couple of tables set up for beer-drinkers.

The reason: I am currently reading Sebastian Faulks’ Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, and it is an unalloyed delight. And the reason it’s so delightful is not merely because Sebastian Faulks so often gets it right in his ventriloquial attempts to channel the master, but also for the moments when he gets it wrong.

As Sophie Ratcliffe, editor of the inimitable PG Wodehouse: A Life in Letters pointed out in her Guardian review, these little obtrusions of Faulks’ own style provide a wonderful counterpoint to Wodehouse’s own work, one ‘which brings us just that little bit closer to understanding why Wodehouse, himself, was so out of this world.’ I’d go further than that, and extend the benisons to both authors for the way in which the act of interpretation sheds light not only on how Wodehouse made his comedy so perfect, but also for the equal reflected glow it casts onto Faulks himself, as it cuts out the silhouette of his own literary preoccupations and quirks.

Because, ultimately, the big temptation that Faulks struggles with here is that he has a conscience, both socially and morally, which shouldn’t be too surprising with a writer who, whilst having form in comic writing, is primarily known as a serious author. Thus, woven into the texture of the comedy, one keeps getting little glints of Faulks’ own preoccupations as a writer and individual. Already – and I’m only 50% through the book right now – we have had references to Marx, the suffragettes, the Great War (viz. the heroine’s parents were killed by a U-Boat), life on the other side of ‘the baize door’ (i.e. on the servants’ side of the house, complete with reference that  the family only ever see a third of the house) and Bertie Wooster’s own boyhood, including the death of a family dog; there are even specific references to his life at Oxford, including his scout.

It’s unlikely that Wodehouse would ever have allowed this much depth of characterisation or socio-political reality to creep into the changeless arcadia he created. Indeed, despite having lived through both World Wars, the latter at rather too close quarters, Wodehouse never makes a single reference to the events that shook his century down to its foundations beyond his running gag about Roderick Glossop’s inadvertently ludicrous fascist group, the Black Shorts.

Each time Faulks allows these elements to appear, the unruffled surface of the text, the ‘sort of musical comedy without music’ to which Wodehouse aspired, is troubled a little. And you can sense Faulks reigning this in, as these moments haven’t, as yet, gone beyond the incidental; they haven’t been allowed to join together into a discourse. Faulks clearly knows it’s not appropriate to the material, but it seems equally true that the peculiar geography of his imagination cannot conceive or generate fiction without these elements.

Perhaps the most revealing incidence of this that I’ve read so far is the description of Lady Hackwood, wife to Sir Henry, the master of Melbury Hall – and in whose home Bertie is currently toiling incognito as a gentleman’s gentleman for Lord Etringham, a.k.a. Jeeves. The one-line characterisation starts off with the perfectly acceptable observation that she ‘ran more to the blowsy end of things,’ but it has for a pay-off the caveat ‘her voice was a pure icicle of disappointment.’

This echoes one of Wodehouse’s most epigrammatical and oft-quoted observations, namely that ‘ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes.’ A quick Wikiquote inspection reveals that Wodehouse was no stranger to using ice as a metaphor for conveying froideur. Where Faulks’ version goes so fascinatingly off-piste is by noting that it is an ‘icicle of disappointment.’ Suddenly we are asking ourselves why Lady Hackwood is disappointed, by whom or what, and to what end. Suddenly, therefore, she is real, in a world where actions have consequences, where people are not always perfectly happy, and where, heaven forfend, people might get hurt or even die.

We are, for a moment, in Faulks’ world.

Sam Leith, also in a review for The Guardian, has noted a similar tonal digression in the following exchange, in which Jeeves accounts for a relative’s inability to play in the impending cricket match upon which so much of the plot inevitably hangs:

"'The battle of the Somme, sir. He was in C Company of the 15th Royal Warwicks. The assault on High Wood.'

"'Bad show,' said Woody.

"It was quiet for a moment; you could hear the rooks chattering in the elms and cedars."

As Sam Leith points out, that’s the voice of Faulks, not Wodehouse. But, as he also notes, you’d like to see someone try to do a more convincing or joyous job of impersonating the master.

All in all, both for the verisimilitude with which Faulks captures the prelapsarian delights of returning to Wodehouse’s universe and those moments when one spots, with a laugh of recognition, the fingerprints of the guy working the machinery, this makes for a deliriously happy reading experience. It’s Woosterland, Faulks, but not as we know it.