Jeeves and the Wedding Bells by Sebastian Faulks, review Wodehouse was a deadeye plotter. Faulks didn't need to put such intricacy on show, since, as long as readers realise some unlikely impersonation is afoot, the characters and verbal jokes pull them along. So, in Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, the reader only discovers on page 73 exactly why the master and valet roles are reversed. It's part of a wheeze to enable a friend of Wooster's to marry the daughter of the house, and Wooster himself to capture the heart of the impoverished baronet's ward, Georgiana. Even so, plots must have limits. I don't want to spoil the ending, but it would be going too far if Faulks were, for instance, to kill or marry off Jeeves and Wooster. And here we encounter a profound difference between the world of Wodehouse and that of Faulks. Wodehouse does occasionally mention death, but it is a shock in Faulks's book to hear Bertie speak with feeling of his parents" death, echoed later by Georgiana's talking of her own parents" death. Nor can Faulks resist telling us that Jeeves's namesake, the Warwickshire cricketer, was killed on the Somme. Faulks gives Bertie some psychological depth by having him describe his experiences. So he gives details of his unwonted early morning routine - even of washing. Wodehouse's technique was to hop from scene to scene, with washing and opening of doors mostly taken on trust. For Wodehouse created a world that never was. It might be 1916 or 1966; you can hardly tell. Faulks pins his story down to 1926, with mention of the General Strike. Stylistically Faulks follows Wodehouse in using periphrasis. No one, in Wooster's narration, walks; they totter, toddle, hop, crawl, or run, with Jeeves shimmering or filtering into a room "with as little uproar as a jellyfish." Wodehouse delights too in Homeric epithets. Wooster's dress clothes are "the old soup and fish," a phrase Faulks does not employ, perhaps because it is more obscure today, when few dress for dinner of soup and fish courses. But his big trouble is with Wodehouse's comic use of literary reference. Wooster may be a bit of an idiot, but he quotes poetry, from Keats to Longfellow, that modern readers might not recognise. Faulks sticks largely to Shakespeare. He even makes Bertie unfamiliar with the title of Shelley's sonnet "Ozymandias." This is unconvincing, since it is just the sort of anthology piece he would have known. It's in Palgrave's Golden Treasury. Wodehouse liked "Ozymandias," but found reading Shelley's The Revolt of Islam "like being beaten over the head with a sandbag." If, on the scale of enjoyment, reading Jeeves and the Wedding Bells is not The Revolt of Islam, it's not, as Faulks himself would acknowledge, Wodehouse either. Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson) is available from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1515) for £14.99 + £1.35 p&p