On Jeeves and the Wedding Bells
Nov. 21st, 2014 05:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danieldwilliamI have just finished reading Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, which is the homage to PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster by Sebastian Faulks. I enjoyed it very much, I thought it very good but it has left me very sad.
Wodehouse is difficult to emulate and Faulks has been very open about having to tread a fine line between inadvertent parody, missing the airy feel of the original and just regurgitating stock Wodehouse. I think he largely succeeds. Faulks is a writer of more serious works than Wodehouse and Jeeves and the Wedding Bells feels like a Jeeves and Wooster story written by Faulks. It’s a little more serious, there’s a little more at stake than in, say, Code of the Woosters. This comes through in three ways, one of which made my happy, one slightly irritated and one very, very sad.
I’m not sure you can have spoilers in a Wodehouse novel but here be spoilers. The plot of Jeeves and the Wedding Bell starts from a fairly standard Wodehouse starting point. Young love is in difficulty and friends turn to Bertie’s kind and loyal heart and Jeeves’ great brain to rescue them from the vicissitudes of fate, uncaring parents, troubling circumstances, their own obdurate pride and dashed aunts by the dozen. Add a couple of farcical sub-plots, some cricket, some gambling, a few midnight capers and set everything on wheels, push them all down a hill at once and let the implacable logic of gravity do the rest.
Two ladies from the financial embarrassed genteel house of Hackwood, Georgie and Amelia, one a close friend of Wooster’s, the other her cousin, are both engaged. Amelia, the daughter, delightedly engaged to Bertie’s best friend, Beeching. Georgiana, the orphaned niece, dutifully but reluctantly to a wealthy family acquaintance. Jeeves and Wooster must ensure both marriages go ahead and ensure the future financial viability of the Hackwood estate.
What is different to here, part of the seriousness of Faulks, is that this matters more to Bertie than just helping out a friend in need. He has fallen in love with Georgie. It troubles him greatly that in order to preserve the happiness of Beeching and Amelia he has to help the only girl he’s every really loved sacrifice herself. A usual Wodehouse plot would see Bertie accidentally engaged to both girls and wanting neither, only desiring a quick escape, a return to Berkeley Mansion, dinner at Aunt Dahlia’s and a restoring glass of the good old whisky and s. In Jeeves and the Wedding Bells he has to work hard to supress his genuine feelings for Georgie in order to help her and to meet his own quixotic standards of gentlemanly behaviour.
However, I’m happy to see Bertie finally in love.
The second, variation into seriousness is a financial constraint on Bertie. For me Wooster has always been rich. Startlingly rich. Rich enough to do anything that he wants. His vast wealth is specifically mentioned several times in Wodehouse. Wooster’s wealth is important for the plots and the themes in two ways. Firstly, in plots terms, it frees Wooster from financial and practical constraints on his action. The only limitations on his behaviour are social. He loves his friends, feels duty bound to his family and has a rigid code of personal honour. He’s also constrained by his own reputation as an unreliable lunatic, unfairly earned whilst playing the role of useful idiot in one of Jeeves schemes. Thematically, it matters because the absence of resource constraint on the protagonist gives Jeeves and Wooster it’s airy feel. The only thing that matters is whether Jeeves’ scheme will see Bertie and his friends home and dry but the consequences for Bertie, and therefore for us, are negligible in practical terms and therefore tolerably in a light comedy.
In Jeeves and the Wedding Bells Wooster seems wealthy, but not wealthy enough that Pop Hackwood would be glad of his liaison with his niece Georgiana. My impression of Wooster’s wealth is that it would put Georgie’s current fiancée in the shade absolutely and, therefore, for a financially driven marriage, make Bertie much more suitable. Wooster, I think, is rich enough that he could buy the Hackwood’s house from them and gift it to Georgiana as a wedding present and not miss the money. What stops him is that, whist there is money there are also standards.
It’s a little point, a change in a character, made necessary in order to make the plot hang better together, but one that moves the work a touch away from light and airy.
The third point is one that I’ve been chewing over since last re-reading the first Jeeves Omnibus.
To quote my own recent Facebook status about Wooster
I've just had a horrible and sobering thought.
Bertie Wooster, (played by Hugh Laurie) in his mid - twenties in the mid 20's never mentions his service during the War.
Then there is Lieutenant George (played by Hugh Laurie).
I can hear the conversation between Bertie and Aunt Agatha.
Aunt A: Why are you such a feckless, layabout Bertie?
Bertie: Well you know. I mean to say, what.
(inside his own head - because I'm still shellshocked by seeing my whole company machine - gunned at Paschendale.)
Having gotten it in to my head that Bertie Wooster is still mentally ill from the effects of his participation in the First World War I found the deeper emotional grounding of the characters in Faulk’s Jeeves and Wooster preyed on my mind. At one point Wooster calls out “Steady the Buffs” a reference to a distinguished British infantry regiment; one that might have been Wooster’s local one. There are several references to the War. Georgiana’s parents were lost on the Lusitania. My earlier thought about Wooster’s shellshock kept coming back to me up to the point where Jeeves mentions that his cousin was killed at the Somme and there is an awkward silence between Jeeves, Wooster and the rest of the present characters. Jeeves felt embarrassed to have mentioned it and more embarrassed not to have found a way to avoid mentioning the Somme in front of Wooster. I could almost feel Bertie reliving the horrifying and brutal slaughter that he’d been through in France. I just felt sad.
I really enjoyed the book. I hope one day Faulks will write another, although I think it unlikely.
Wodehouse is difficult to emulate and Faulks has been very open about having to tread a fine line between inadvertent parody, missing the airy feel of the original and just regurgitating stock Wodehouse. I think he largely succeeds. Faulks is a writer of more serious works than Wodehouse and Jeeves and the Wedding Bells feels like a Jeeves and Wooster story written by Faulks. It’s a little more serious, there’s a little more at stake than in, say, Code of the Woosters. This comes through in three ways, one of which made my happy, one slightly irritated and one very, very sad.
I’m not sure you can have spoilers in a Wodehouse novel but here be spoilers. The plot of Jeeves and the Wedding Bell starts from a fairly standard Wodehouse starting point. Young love is in difficulty and friends turn to Bertie’s kind and loyal heart and Jeeves’ great brain to rescue them from the vicissitudes of fate, uncaring parents, troubling circumstances, their own obdurate pride and dashed aunts by the dozen. Add a couple of farcical sub-plots, some cricket, some gambling, a few midnight capers and set everything on wheels, push them all down a hill at once and let the implacable logic of gravity do the rest.
Two ladies from the financial embarrassed genteel house of Hackwood, Georgie and Amelia, one a close friend of Wooster’s, the other her cousin, are both engaged. Amelia, the daughter, delightedly engaged to Bertie’s best friend, Beeching. Georgiana, the orphaned niece, dutifully but reluctantly to a wealthy family acquaintance. Jeeves and Wooster must ensure both marriages go ahead and ensure the future financial viability of the Hackwood estate.
What is different to here, part of the seriousness of Faulks, is that this matters more to Bertie than just helping out a friend in need. He has fallen in love with Georgie. It troubles him greatly that in order to preserve the happiness of Beeching and Amelia he has to help the only girl he’s every really loved sacrifice herself. A usual Wodehouse plot would see Bertie accidentally engaged to both girls and wanting neither, only desiring a quick escape, a return to Berkeley Mansion, dinner at Aunt Dahlia’s and a restoring glass of the good old whisky and s. In Jeeves and the Wedding Bells he has to work hard to supress his genuine feelings for Georgie in order to help her and to meet his own quixotic standards of gentlemanly behaviour.
However, I’m happy to see Bertie finally in love.
The second, variation into seriousness is a financial constraint on Bertie. For me Wooster has always been rich. Startlingly rich. Rich enough to do anything that he wants. His vast wealth is specifically mentioned several times in Wodehouse. Wooster’s wealth is important for the plots and the themes in two ways. Firstly, in plots terms, it frees Wooster from financial and practical constraints on his action. The only limitations on his behaviour are social. He loves his friends, feels duty bound to his family and has a rigid code of personal honour. He’s also constrained by his own reputation as an unreliable lunatic, unfairly earned whilst playing the role of useful idiot in one of Jeeves schemes. Thematically, it matters because the absence of resource constraint on the protagonist gives Jeeves and Wooster it’s airy feel. The only thing that matters is whether Jeeves’ scheme will see Bertie and his friends home and dry but the consequences for Bertie, and therefore for us, are negligible in practical terms and therefore tolerably in a light comedy.
In Jeeves and the Wedding Bells Wooster seems wealthy, but not wealthy enough that Pop Hackwood would be glad of his liaison with his niece Georgiana. My impression of Wooster’s wealth is that it would put Georgie’s current fiancée in the shade absolutely and, therefore, for a financially driven marriage, make Bertie much more suitable. Wooster, I think, is rich enough that he could buy the Hackwood’s house from them and gift it to Georgiana as a wedding present and not miss the money. What stops him is that, whist there is money there are also standards.
It’s a little point, a change in a character, made necessary in order to make the plot hang better together, but one that moves the work a touch away from light and airy.
The third point is one that I’ve been chewing over since last re-reading the first Jeeves Omnibus.
To quote my own recent Facebook status about Wooster
I've just had a horrible and sobering thought.
Bertie Wooster, (played by Hugh Laurie) in his mid - twenties in the mid 20's never mentions his service during the War.
Then there is Lieutenant George (played by Hugh Laurie).
I can hear the conversation between Bertie and Aunt Agatha.
Aunt A: Why are you such a feckless, layabout Bertie?
Bertie: Well you know. I mean to say, what.
(inside his own head - because I'm still shellshocked by seeing my whole company machine - gunned at Paschendale.)
Having gotten it in to my head that Bertie Wooster is still mentally ill from the effects of his participation in the First World War I found the deeper emotional grounding of the characters in Faulk’s Jeeves and Wooster preyed on my mind. At one point Wooster calls out “Steady the Buffs” a reference to a distinguished British infantry regiment; one that might have been Wooster’s local one. There are several references to the War. Georgiana’s parents were lost on the Lusitania. My earlier thought about Wooster’s shellshock kept coming back to me up to the point where Jeeves mentions that his cousin was killed at the Somme and there is an awkward silence between Jeeves, Wooster and the rest of the present characters. Jeeves felt embarrassed to have mentioned it and more embarrassed not to have found a way to avoid mentioning the Somme in front of Wooster. I could almost feel Bertie reliving the horrifying and brutal slaughter that he’d been through in France. I just felt sad.
I really enjoyed the book. I hope one day Faulks will write another, although I think it unlikely.
