Jeeves and the Wedding Bells - Sebastian Faulks' homage to Wodehouse

I'm rather sceptical of literary 'homage' as a genre. The idea of entrusting well-known (and in this case extremely well-loved) characters to the sometimes less than safe keeping of an established contemporary author can produce the very stuff of nightmares for devotees of the original. True, there have been some notable successes - Anthony Horowitz's House of Silk being a delightful case in point. In Wedding Bells, Faulks has assembled the usual suspects and teamed them with a cast of Wodehousesque supporting characters - Sir and Lady Hackwood are a good case in point - and given use a Wooster outing that packs a fair few laughs. However, there are a couple of jarring notes: Wodehouse's Wooster and friends inhabited a parallel universe, where the realities of life in the 20s and 30s were mercifully absent. This was an England devoid of the loss and horror of World War One. But Faulks allows the brutal world to intrude - a key character has lost both parents in the Lusitania sinking, Jeeves refers to a distant relative dying on the Somme. I enjoyed the tale, but my Wooster is a balm to the senses and a lovable upper-class fop who can mix with the rude mechanicals at the bar in the village hall as well as with his elders but no-betters at the Hall, albeit with the need for a 'sharpener' before the ordeal starts. A good diverting read, but I could have done without the all-too-real world intrusions.