It is nice to have someone renovating our PG Wodehouse shelf. One would go so far as to say that it is reassuring. However, when apprised of Ben Schott’s enterprise, the ugly monster of doubt quickly rears its head. We are getting more of Bertie, we say, but is it the stuff?
We are habituated only to the best and brightest, and if the new hands in the trade cannot deliver the goods, we would much rather have none of it. A firm nolle prosequi is in the order to a Jeeves novel that fails to graze Wodehousian standards of Jeeves novels.
We approach The King of Clubs therefore, with mixed feelings. On the one hand, we are, like Polyanna, glad, glad, glad, and on the other, we are apprehensive. Sickly cast of thought and all that. Anyway, coming to the nub, or the res: a true-blue Jeeves novel can be characterised by three telling factors – its language, its characters and its lack of plot. Ben Schott, dabbling courageously in Wodehouse’s world of valets and aunts, either overshoots or undershoots in these; the result is, as we feared, distinctly hybrid.
If one is looking to find Bertie and Jeeves in a thriller-cum-condiment-related-comedy, The King of Clubs is the golden ticket. However, if the aspiration was, in Schott’s own words, to follow in the “patent-leather footsteps of the great humourist in the English language”, the novel seems to fall considerably schortt.
We usually know what’s coming
One of the underrated luxuries of a Jeeves novel is that the reader, even without opening the dedications or the “More Books by PG Wodehouse” page, is comfortably confident of what exactly is going to happen in the next two hundred pages. This reader can tell you, with a knowing eye, that there will be a girl, possibly two, sometimes three, threatening to don a white dress and say “I do” to Bertie, who will devote the Wooster self to circumventing said white-dress-I-do situation.
There will be some Fink-Nottles, young Glossops or Bingo Littles who need clustering around. There will be some aunts who need sub-criminal favours which might, for example, involve the pinching of cow-creamers or cow-creamer-like objects. Jeeves will eventually scoop the young master from out the mulligatawny, and happy endings will be scattered like birdseed to all and sundry. One sublime Jeeves novel is much like the other, we feel, and each is just what the doctor ordered.
But what do we have here?
The Wodehousian reader, therefore, is not exactly gruntled to find that Ben Schott’s novel has (wait for it) a real story. The Wodehousian reader gets a headache when asked to remember people’s secret code names from 60 pages ago. We are not agog with excitement about reveals re cross-national illegal activities. If someone, we say, secretly sells ladies underwear under the name Eulalie Sœurs, or is impersonating the Brazilian explorer Major Brabazon Plank, we are interested, but anything more complex than that elicits from us only a gentle bewilderment.
It is customary, I feel, to tone down one’s understanding of action when opening a PG Wodehouse book. One derives, in a Jeeves novel, the same breathtaking excitement from following a policeman’s helmet as one usually does in watching a ticking bomb. Schott confuses these ratios. In the process of this simple arithmetic goof-up, he delivers, unfortunately, something beyond our rustic comprehension and therefore, instead of tickling us pink, only leaves us baffled, bamboozled, and bothered.
Besides, we complain that Schott does not wrap up his various threads neatly into a cheerful knot with a hymn on the goodness of the world. Is the snail on the wing enfin, we wonder, and is the lark on the thorn? To begin with, we are not at all confident that Bertie has been in some A-class soup. Until the mists begin to rise up above the Wooster eye, foretelling doom, desolation and despair, the Wodehousian reader cannot settle down and feel in the element, snug in the anticipation of a Jeevesian denouement.
We want to see the storm clouds, or alternately, wedding bells, looming in the distance in order to be adequately reassured at the end, when all’s right with the world as the poet Tennyson says. A Wodehouse novel is therapeutic. Schott misses out on the thorough simplicity and pure sunniness that is the essence of these medicinal properties, and in doing so, we feel, misses something.
Who is this Wooster?
Perhaps one still could have, when push came to shove, put up with the existence of a plot. But we cannot help feeling slightly cheated where it hurts – in the character of Bertie Wooster himself. Those who have paid a call to Captain Hastings and found in his stead Sherlock Holmes will know what I am talking about. We feel distinctly wrong-footed to see Bertie participating in coups, careless and cool, and pulling them off.
Where, we ask plaintively, is the good old immaculately clueless Bertie who is perpetually buffeted by Fate, in the form of the wrong bedroom window, the local copper on Boat Race Night or a psychopathic valet who chases him with a carving knife? Bertie Wooster is not funny because he is funny, and this difference is vital: we are shaken when, in Schott’s novel, Bertie comes back to Sir Roderick Spode with a cutting:
“I heard a rumour, Lord Sidcup, that you were trying to renounce your peerage in order to stand for Parliament as common-or-garden Mister Roderick Spode.”
Or, when he quips out loud about Florence Craye’s new play:
“I have no intention of suffering the work of Florence Craye, and am confident that any play called Flotsam will be quite capable of wrecking itself.”
Very funny, Bertie, but distinctly out of character. When Bertie is in a testing situation, we know, he usually reacts like this:
“…he spoke. ‘If only I could make up my mind!’
‘About what, Stilton?’
‘About whether to break your foul neck or not.’
I did a bit more wilting. His fingers, I noticed, were twitching, always a bad sign. ‘Oh, for the wings of a dove’ about summed up my feelings as I tried not to look at them.
‘Break my foul neck?’ I said, hoping for further information.”
Or...
“‘You want to marry me yourself, don’t you?’
I had to take another mouthful of the substance in the bottle before I could speak. One of those difficult questions to answer. ‘Oh rather,’ I said, for I was anxious to make the evening a success. ‘Of course. Who wouldn’t?’”
Bertie’s loopiness is the sine qua non to the spin and sparkle of the Jeeves novel. Schott’s Bertie, on the other hand, is far too successful, and even, on occasion, clever (gasp). This, needless to say, is fatal.
PG Wodehouse is a man who wrote some words and did so divinely. His love for the English language bounded out of every sentence that he wrote, and if Schott had a saving grace, it would be this, that he, too, is aware, at every pass, about the words that he uses. The title, of course, is illustrative.
Several passages, likewise, of The King of Clubs are enjoyable, even humorous (that’s right). If one wants a parody thriller, one might look with an indulgent eye upon the whole thing. Overall, however, if we’re talking about some solid work in the genre of Jeeves, however, Schott seems to have missed the essence or the crux, or – in more modern currency – the point.
The King of Clubs, Ben Schott, Hutchinson.
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