Resurrecting Jeeves and Wooster

I posted a few weeks ago about a ‘new’ Agatha Christie novel, featuring Hercule Poirot, which is to be written by somebody else. I was not enthusiastic about the idea, to put it mildly.

Here’s another writer, at The Telegraph in the UK, who shares my view. The article mentions the new Christie, but is primarily focused on similar desecrations new books carrying on the characters created by Ian Fleming and P. G. Wodehouse. I’m not a James Bond fan anyway, but I can assure you that I will not read the upcoming Jeeves and Wooster crapfest, to be written by some guy named Sebastian Faulks. The closing paragraphs express my feelings well:

Faulks admits that Wodehouse is inimitable, which rather leaves one to wonder what the point of his exercise is. I suppose it seemed like a piece of fun when first suggested, but as the grim day of reckoning – that is, publication – looms, it seems akin to an act of vanity and, indeed, hubris. 

No one, surely, will purchase Faulks’s vanity project because they expect to be entertained by it. On the contrary, many readers will want to be annoyed by it. I am confident Faulks’s novel is knowing and loving, but it’s unlikely to be anything more than that. Perhaps his next project will be to write a tragedy in blank verse. It could even be set in Denmark. 

These resurrections provide a passable entertainment for a rainy winter’s afternoon. But why settle for the imitation when the pleasures of the real thing are so much more nourishing? The test of any of these impertinences is whether they bear re-reading. Almost none do so. They are matters of commerce, not literature. 

Perhaps it is appropriate that Bond is considered as a brand to be exploited for maximum commercial gain. Fleming’s own obsession with brands and status was suitably vulgar itself. Treating Wodehouse in a comparable fashion, however, seems rather different. Even vaguely sacrilegious. Wodehouse exists in an Elysian genre of his own. He is, more than almost any other author, incomparable. 

Stepping into the ring with Wodehouse (or Tolstoy) can only end one way, and the comparison cannot possibly be to Faulks’s advantage. His new book is brave. That is to say: it is an act of lunatic folly.