8:06PM GMT 08 Mar 2013
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Were there such a medal as the Literary Victoria Cross, awarded to writers who show valour far beyond the call of duty in the face of the enemy, Sebastian Faulks would be nipping to Moss Bros this morning for the tails and topper preparatory to an appointment at the Palace.
Faulks has taken the single most courageous decision the world of letters has ever known, and the enemy is on the march. Dissident writers in the Soviet Union who risked their freedom and lives clearly deserve the admiration of history. Compared with the brutality that awaits the author of Birdsong for agreeing to write a Jeeves and Wooster novel at the behest of the PG Wodehouse estate, however, 17 years on the cabbage and maggot soup diet in Siberia’s least well-appointed salt mine shrinks into the equivalent of a minor train delay on a branch line near Truro.
One literary critic has already described Faulks as hubristic, and an avalanche of outrage awaits as countless Wodehouse addicts metaphorically flash him one of those Aunt Agatha glares that can open an oyster at a dozen paces. If not today, the space above this column may before long host one or two angry thoughts on the matter, and any of you whose missives appear on this page should take satisfaction from that. “Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers,” as Plum himself once observed. “Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.”
There never was a more self-deprecating natural born genius than Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, whose appreciation of his own oeuvre lay in direct inverse proportion to the rapture enjoyed by its readers. He would probably be flattered that so gifted a novelist is to publish Jeeves and The Wedding Bells in November, though if he was peeved he would be infinitely too polite to let on.
Others will be less constrained by courtesy over what, given the godly status accorded him by right-thinking people, will strike them as outright sacrilege. There might be less resistance if Faulks, thinking better of the project, decided instead to pastiche the King James Bible in the style of Irvine Welsh.
One understands the distress. It was one thing for Faulks to write a James Bond novel. No one ever described Ian Fleming, for all his story-telling gifts, as the most influential novelist in the language, as Auberon Waugh and others said of Wodehouse. Faulks himself refers to him as “inimitable”, though that barely hints at the peerlessness of Wodehouse’s limitless capacity for intricate plotting, vibrant characterisation and, above all, producing vast quantities of the most elegant, exquisite and consistently hilarious English prose.
One understands why many will be less than gruntled at the news. On reading it, to thieve from the master again, I examined my mind. It boggled. But on reflection I think that this is a good thing.
Back in the Seventies, when my early adolescent self fell insanely in love with Psmith, Ukridge, Mr Mulliner, The Oldest Member, Blandings Castle and especially Jeeves and Wooster, his Edwardian phraseology, sensibilities and the distant world he romanticises were faintly familiar from contact with elderly relatives, and even from Brian Johnston wittering wonderfully away on Test Match Special like a superannuated Wooster.
Today, Wodehouse is literally a closed book to the young. Book sales are heart-rendingly minute, presumably because his magically self-contained universe is
off-puttingly remote to those who cannot imagine this country in the hands of a bunch of public schoolboys whose idea of ultimate merriment is throwing bread rolls at one another in a private dining club.
Once anyone of taste so much as dips into a novel, they will instantly be hooked. The difficult bit is getting them to open a book in the first place, and if as popular and well regarded a contemporary writer as Faulks can break that ice for those to whom Wodehouse’s escapist innocence seems irrelevant in the comedic era of Frankie Boyle, perhaps the flame will be reignited.
Reinterpreting wildly adored fictional characters is a colossal challenge, but it can be done. Admittedly on telly rather than in print, Steven Moffat has managed it astoundingly well with Sherlock Holmes, transplanting him into the Baker Street of today while cleaving absolutely to the spirit of Conan Doyle and the core of the character. Whether Faulks can come close to replicating that miraculous reinvention we will learn in the autumn, but he should be congratulated for having the guts to have a crack.
The influence of Wodehouse on our popular culture cannot be exaggerated. At the more recognisable end of the Wodehousian spectrum, you hear echoes in the plummy tones of Stephen Fry. “Without Wodehouse, I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today – whatever that may be,” wrote the definitive television Jeeves. But he is equally audible in the Deptford brogue of the glorious Danny Baker on Radio 5 Live football shows. “It changed my life finding Wodehouse,” as Baker put it, “and gave me the language and a licence to be ludicrous. Someone who was the smartest man around and chose to write the dumbest books around – that was the key that unlocked the door.”
“Dumbest” is hardly a superlative to please every Wodehouse fan, yet the point is sound. Everybody deserves access to arguably the greatest, and surely the most joyous, English prose stylist of all time. If Sebastian Faulks is the locksmith who opens that door to a new generation, regardless of his own efforts, he will have earned more than that Literary VC.