Book Review: Jeeves and the King of Clubs

Jeeves and the King of Clubs
Ben Schott
Humor

MIKE PHIPPS DO NOT READ THIS POST IT WILL CAUSE YOUR EYES TO BLEED PLEASE FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY PRETEND THAT YOU DID NOT SEE IT THANK YOU

Now that we've got the Surgeon General's Warning out of the way, I can say that I was pleasantly surprised by Jeeves and the King of Clubs. The author seems to have approached it in a suitably chastened spirit: "nothing can cap perfection," he notes in an afterword. Certainly it's a big improvement on Sebastian Faulks's Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, in which Wooster, B. actually ends up (God help us) engaged.

Not that Jeeves and the King of Clubs is entirely free from innovation. This is the curse of the pasticheur (as I have occasion to know). Imitate slavishly, and you end up with something that's at best dull and uninspired. Stray too far from the template, and the justified wrath of the true believers pours down upon you. In this case, Schott inserts Bertram Wooster into an actual, not-entirely-silly spy plot--one that's occasioned, not by the blundering of his chums, nor by the machinations of his family, but by what might loosely be called the real world.

It's not all that much of a plot, mind you. Nonetheless, it's a departure. Classically, Bertie is motivated by nothing more than his own desire to be a decent chap, aid his undeserving compatriots, stay out of trouble, and not get married. The plot obstacles that occur are of a social nature, no more. Placing him--however gingerly!--into a situation with politics and secret messages and consequences is . . . a little different. It not only features Bertie being almost competent at something; at one point he is right when Jeeves is wrong. Great Scott!

In matters such as this, I'm generally a purist. I liked Jeeves and the King of Clubs pretty well, all the same. There's a little tip of the hat to Lord Peter Wimsey--nicely meta, that man--and an informative section of notes, which will however confuse you if you don't know that Wodehouse's nickname was "Plum". The language is quite good (a sine qua non), and the secondary characters entirely consistent with the Wodehouseian oeuvre. It helps, too, to remember that Wodehouse himself adored detective stories. 

Put another way, Jeeves and the King of Clubs was good enough that I'd read a sequel. As pastiches go, that's high praise.