Alexandra Petri is not happy at the Sebastian Faulks written authorised Jeeves & Woster sequel:
If you want to read a story about Bertie and Jeeves where people deal with World War I and everything changes, go to the Indeed, Sir fanfiction archive where there is plenty of that, much of it better written. If you want to read a story about a young Wodehouse male who falls in love and gets into scrapes, read the “Indiscretions Of Archie.”
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By the eighth page I was emitting a stricken woofle like a bulldog that has been denied cake. There had been the introduction of a girl with “chocolate eyes” and a kind heart who is far more beautiful than anyone Bertie Wooster has ever dated. Anyone who has read fanfiction will note the tell-tale sign of a Mary Sue, but I thought, surely not. Not in a first outing.
Course, anybody with any sense who isn’t paid to read this book, would have dropped it at “the new Sebastian Faulks Jeeves and Wooster novel” because from that you can predict with a saddening certainty that it will be a cloying pastiche that may, at best, get some of the surface elements right, written by a smug, sad wanker far too pleased with his own writing talents to recognise how mediocre they are.
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