Not for the first time in his life, Bertie Wooster is confused. He and his faithful manservant Jeeves have just woken up – or, more accurately, thawed out – after being cryogenically frozen for 100 years. It’s 2025. Together, they stumble out into what was once familiar environs but which is familiar no longer. They come across something called a “Wellness Centre”, and then a “Vape Heaven”.
Jeeves, always more quick to adapt to any given situation, encourages his employer to take a breath. “I fear you are not altogether grasping our predicament,” he says.
So begins “The Icebreaker”, a story by the comedian Frank Skinner, and the opening salvo of Jeeves Again, a multi-voiced tribute to a literary great – PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster – that gathers together a dozen authors with little in common save an appreciation for a thoroughly British kind of humour, and who, between them, attempt to revive J&W for the modern era.
And so if, by Skinner’s reckoning, Wooster struggles somewhat in today’s world, then, well, it was ever thus, no?
The impact idle rich man Bertie Wooster and his uber competent valet Jeeves have had on our culture can hardly be overstated. More than a century since they first emerged in print, they remain a reliable reference point. What is Downton Abbey’s Carson if not an able facsimile of his starchy forebear? And who else was the Hugh Grant of Four Weddings if not a very particular kind of hapless Englishman in need of a firm hand? Wodehouse’s light comic touch lived on in the works of Douglas Adams, Sue Townsend and Helen Fielding, while Stephen Fry has called him “the finest and funniest writer”, and also his favourite.
PG Wodehouse, who died in 1975, wrote more than 90 books, 40 plays and 200 short stories. J&W alone account for 35 of the latter, alongside 11 full-length novels (Photo: F Roy Kemp/BIPs/Getty)
Born in Guildford in 1881, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was the third son of a British judge. An early school report described him as “a most impractical boy” who had “distorted ideas about wit and humour”. But the report concluded, as readers later would about his most famous creation, “one is obliged to like him in spite of his vagaries”.
Initially, Wodehouse dipped his toe in banking before switching to journalism and, later, to fiction. He would write more than 90 books, 40 plays and 200 short stories. J&W alone account for 35 of the latter, alongside 11 full-length novels. They’d prove his most enduringly popular characters, Wooster the ne’er do well son of minor British nobility whose ready access to a trust fund meant that he never had to lift a finger, and his “gentleman’s gentleman”, a butler so efficient and all-knowing that an early version of the internet’s search engine faculty would be named after him (Ask Jeeves).
It says much of Wodehouse’s writerly skills that his hero continues to appeal today because, let’s face it, by modern sensibilities the man is awful: an errant toff enjoying a hideously entitled lifestyle. Of course, Wodehouse was always wise to this, and sketched him sympathetically. We felt “obliged to like him” not in spite of those “vagaries” but because of them. He was hopeless, and hapless. Only the ongoing assistance of Jeeves kept him afloat.
Nevertheless, we’re in the 21st century now. Times change, and Wooster must, too. Jeeves Again permits these 12 writers to bring him up towards the present day, blinking into its bright light, and often furrowing his brow.
Skinner’s opening gambit is droll, and funny. If ultimately his story doesn’t go very far, then you are reminded that neither, always, did Wodehouse’s. They witness a young woman being mugged of a small rectangular thing they learn is called a “mobile phone”, and then set off in hot pursuit. A newspaper vendor comes to their aid.
Alan Titchmarsh’s effort, “Jeeves and Wooster II”, is far more deferential to the original, so much so that he approaches his story as if introducing readers to Wooster for the very first time. “I am aware that post-war unmarried men of my generation have almost without exception put their aristocratic noses to the proverbial grindstone with some alacrity and foregone the luxurious lives that once pertained,” he expectorates. “[But] it is important, I would argue, to work out the precise nature of one’s own talents before careening willy-nilly into the workplace.”
In Andrew Hunter Murray’s “Drive On, Jeeves”, the butler is reimagined as a smart car within whose modern technology Wooster adapts himself surprisingly easily. “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried these self-driving things,” he enthuses, “but they are extraordinary.”
The funniest inclusion is Roddy Doyle’s “Ah Jaysus, Jeeves”. An Irishman by the name of Bertie McDevitt has won the EuroMillions lottery, and promptly employs someone to help educate him in this rarefied altitude. The butler does this largely via fancy aphorisms. “Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety,” he tells McDevitt. “Coldplay?” McDevitt wonders. “Shakespeare,” Jeeves corrects. Later, when the butler offers up another – “Through chaos as it swirls, it’s us against the world” – McDevitt responds hopefully: “Yeats?”. Jeeves: “Coldplay.”
More than one story enquires as to the true nature of the relationship between these two men. In the Wodehouse books, Wooster is routinely paraded before likely willing brides, but none quite take. Why? In Deborah Frances-White’s “Mixed Doubles”, her Wooster admits that he isn’t the marrying kind, and would much rather explore his proclivities at the kind of parties where “the chaps could be whatever sort of chap they were”.
Frank Skinner has contributed a Jeeves and Wooster story to the new book (Photo: Alan Chapman/Dave Benett/Getty )
Elsewhere, the historian Dominic Sandbrook’s “The Age of Spode” imagines Roderick Spode – a familiar of Wooster but very much not a friend (and very much a fascist) – in his later years as a key cog in the UK government of the 1970s, cosying up to the celebrities of the day (John and Yoko), and impressing visiting American businessman. “[Roderick] is a very smart guy, a fantastic businessman,” the Donald Trump in the story says of Spode.
If some of the other stories merely ape the source material by employing the familiar Wooster exclamations of “bally!” and “deuced!”, alongside repeated references to Jeeves’s miraculous morning-after remedies that help quell his employer’s raging hangover, then others are more imaginative, and consequently more satisfying. Scarlett Curtis’s “On Becoming Aunt Agatha” is especially beguiling. Here, Curtis (daughter of film-maker Richard) shifts the focus onto Wooster’s domineering relative, towards whom he is forever expected to kowtow.
“I was born to be an aunt,” Agatha writes, in her own voice at last. She explains that her young charge’s incessant immaturity is carefully maintained to mask a tragic backstory. “The untimely death of Bertie’s parents was devastating, and by all accounts too serious to write about in the same set of passages that contain a description of an amateur production of Boadicea in the village hall.” In this sly way, Curtis adds dimension to an ostensibly frivolous character, and gives belated flesh to his bones.
“If someone were to write a book about the goings-on of my nephew Bertie,” Aunt Agatha says, “it might lighten the gloom for anyone who, like me, has ever experienced a dark night of the soul.”
Jeeves Again could have worked simply to send you back to the original – and the best – but it boasts its own merits, too. It is, almost all of it, jolly good fun. Wodehouse, dead now 50 years, is likely not spinning in his grave.
‘Jeeves Again: Twelve New Stories from the World of PG Wodehouse’ (Hutchinson Heinemann, £22) is out now
