“Featuring huge names from literature, comedy and beyond — including Roddy Doyle, Frank Skinner and Alan Titchmarsh — Jeeves Again, is the new anthology that reimagines Jeeves and Wooster through fresh eyes,” burbled the press release. “Jeeves Again is the statement publication for this 50th anniversary year, showcasing Wodehouse’s enduring legacy as a much-beloved and perennially relevant British Literary icon.” (Punctuation and capitalization all sic.)

“Featuring huge names from literature, comedy and beyond…” I marveled. “And beyond!” I exclaimed. “Statement publication?” I thought. The only statement that this makes, as far as I can see, is that we imagine that what made Wodehouse work was the Jeeves ‘n’ Wooster brand, and the reason that Alan Titchmarsh isn’t P.G. Wodehouse is that he hasn’t been allowed to write the characters — rather than the fact that nobody before or since has written comic prose like that, and the reason they haven’t is because it’s bloody hard.

Would we, on Mozart’s birthday, invite a cash-in tribute album where someone who used to be on EastEnders produced a piece for the harpsichord? I wondered aloud. “No, we would not,” I said to myself. “Jesus bicycling Christ,” I muttered. What a shitshow. So. I am in an awkward position. Many of the contributors to this book are people I admire. One or two I count as friends. I therefore say this, as Dame Edna would have put it, in a loving way: this is one of those projects that should have been strangled in its cot.

Some of the more acute of these writers have picked up on Wodehouse’s stylistic tics — the definite article where a possessive is expected, or the surprising verb of motion (“I trickled home”; we “biffed off”) — and the less acute have contented themselves with sprinkling the text with epithets such as “spiffing” and “dashed”, or populating the scene with “chaps” and “blighters”. We get, across these stories, a good number of aunts, hangover cures, bathetic classical allusions, over-elaborate metaphors and unsuitable fiancées. Wodehouse isn’t, to thwart the cliche, inimitable; but what makes him sublime is.

To be fair — and I detest being fair like sin, but critical self-respect demands it — this collection isn’t all bad. Nearly half the authors are in the “more acute” camp. Frank Skinner, John Finnemore, Andrew Hunter-Murray and Jasper Fforde just about get away with it, and sometimes even sparkle. Dominic Sandbrook cleverly dodges the challenge of the prose by presenting a series of spoof historical documents about the later career of Roderick Spode; Roddy Doyle yoinks the Jeeves-and-Wooster set up into his Irish comfort-zone (“Ah Jaysis, Jeeves”) with some elan. The rest are pretty much duds.

But it’s the principle underlying the whole project with which I take issue. It is very much of our time, and it is deeply misbegotten. It betrays the sort of thinking that sees the works of great authors — specifically, their characters and worlds — as intellectual property, aka what the suits call “eye-pee” (that stings!) to be infinitely exploited. That, as Bertie would put it, is where they make their bloomer. It isn’t the presence of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie and Jeeves that makes Wodehouse Wodehouse: it’s the fact that sentence by sentence P.G. Wodehouse was among the finest half-dozen writers of comic prose in the 20th century. Nobody else could do what he did.

Yes, Jean Rhys set Wide Sargasso Sea in what would now probably get called “the Bronteverse”: but she was doing her own, very different thing. She wasn’t the contributor to a project lashed up by the Charlotte Brontë estate to squeeze a bit more dough out of the wind-lashed moor genre. Nobody would create a franchise extension of Lolita — “from the world of Vladimir Nabokov!” — by asking a collection of that book’s admirers to produce some new stories featuring Humbert and Lo, with cameos from that adorable rascal Clare Quilty. Without Nabokov’s prose, the world of Lolita is nothing, and without Wodehouse’s prose, Jeeves and Wooster are nothing.

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A common mistake — betrayed in the fact that nobody sane would think of doing this with Nabokov — is to assume that because something is popular fiction, or genre fiction, or comic fiction, the prose doesn’t matter. Sometimes, it doesn’t: Harlan Coben and Dan Brown are very limited stylists, but their thrillers work excellently. But often, it does. As witness, for instance, the disappointing results of Lee Child passing the Jack Reacher franchise to his brother. Lee Child makes what Lee Child does look easy, but it very much is not. And when it comes to comic fiction, even more than the literary type, prose is everything. Comic fiction is super difficult, and Wodehouse’s is at the absolute pinnacle of what has been achieved there.

Corporate interests will tend to see everything that makes money as reducible to IP: because, right enough, that is how the biggest entertainment products of our time do work. The special sauce of the Marvel, DC and Star Wars universes *is* the IP in the characters and worldbuilding. They’ve always been the products of diverse hands — many thousands of journeyman writers and artists, some sublimely talented and some much less so, have worked on comics, novels, films and whatnot based on these properties since the middle of the last century. Fans, and I include myself among them, will tend to read an X-Men comic very happily because we can be pretty sure at some point Wolvie will call someone “bub” and pop his claws (“snikt!”), or a ninja will show up, and this will tickle a small childish part of our soul in an agreeable way.

But to see all art in this way is corrosively reductive. It is to miss that special quality that differentiates art from IP. It is to see artists as “content creators” and art itself as fungible property, all the more monetizable when a franchise is taken over by celebrities with existing fanbases. It is to say, a couple of steps down the line, for that matter: “AI can do that for us.” It’s the school of thought that says “perfect for fans of…” Well. I’ll tell you what’s perfect for fans of P.G. Wodehouse: P.G. fucking Wodehouse.

The reader who looks to fiction for a critique of something or other will find no critique here of anything at all. If there is a glimmer of hope when Mike’s pal Psmith reveals himself a monocle-wearing eccentric and declares himself a socialist, the glimmer will fade once it emerges that his socialism doesn’t extend beyond addressing everyone as “Comrade”, and his eccentricity is not a sign of alienation from the middle-class world he happily inhabits. Psmith and his creator find many things about that world ridiculous — but not contemptible.

The sort of reader I have in mind is most likely Left-wing in their politics, suspicious of anything that mocks a social world not as way of, but as a substitute for, changing it. But the demand for seriousness once came from conservatives worried about the essential frivolity of novels — books that didn’t instruct their readers in manners or morals. It was that view to which Jane Austen was responding in the much-quoted passage of Northanger Abbey where she defends novels as the works “in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed.”

Few writers have seemed to care so little about importance as Wodehouse. His endless linguistic ingenuity made admirers of Left-wing authors such as George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens — the effortless succession of wild similes, the clever deconstruction of weary clichés. That and the mad but intricate plots. But what seems absurd is the idea that anyone might be drawn to Wodehouse for his themes, or what you might call his “ethic”.

In fact, it isn’t absurd at all; it seems so because we only count “serious” themes as real, and conflate having an ethic with being didactic. Yet why shouldn’t a comic view of the world be less insightful than a tragic or an angry one? “If you take life fairly easily”, Wodehouse once remarked to an interviewer, “then you take a humorous view of things. It’s probably because you were born that way”.

His words here recall the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan: “Nature always does contrive / That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative!’ There’s a misplaced debate among Wodehouse’s champions and detractors about exactly where he fits on the political spectrum. Liberal, say readers who see his jokes at the expense of his upper-class characters as satire. Conservative, say readers who notice that he, “in creating such characters as Hildebrand Spencer Poyns de Burgh John Hanneyside Coombe-Crombie, 12th Earl of Dreever… is not really attacking the social hierarchy”.

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Those last words are from George Orwell’s essay, “In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse”. He was writing just after the war, when the uproar about Wodehouse’s idiotic (but well-intentioned) broadcasts on German radio in 1941 were fresh in public memory: Wodehouse was in need of a robust defence. But Orwell, a political man through and through, could not avoid, even when defending Wodehouse’s lack of political nous, adopting a reductive view of the man’s writing. “Wodehouse’s real sin”, he wrote, “has been to present the English upper classes as much nicer people than they are”.

In Orwell’s worldview, whole classes — as distinct from the individuals who comprise them — might have their niceness appraised. Wodehouse, by contrast, sees his characters as individuals — paradoxically so, given how many of them were stereotypes. He once described his approach to his later fiction as “making the thing a sort of musical comedy without music, and ignoring real life altogether”. But the very earliest boarding school novels, animated though they are by a basically comic spirit, are not yet the farces for which he became famous.

Few other stories published in the same magazines that published Wodehouse’s juvenilia stand up today. The clichés are too numerous, the plots entirely interchangeable. But Wodehouse’s early novels hold up surprisingly well. In an age when public schoolboys seem to divided themselves into sentimental nostalgists on the one hand and angry rebels on the other, Wodehouse distinguished himself by the matter-of-fact tone in which he wrote of boys’ attitudes to their schools:

“The average public schoolboy likes his school… He is sorry to leave and he likes going back at the end of the holidays, but as for any passionate, deep-seated love of the place, he would think it rather bad form than otherwise.”

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One can’t doubt that the experience of boarding — involuntary separation from family, the casual brutality of masters and other schoolboys — must have left many boys with scars they carried into adulthood. There is no shortage of memoirs by men who survived the ordeal. But Wodehouse speaks for what must have been the silent majority: men for whom boarding school had its challenges but was not conspicuously more traumatising than any other place they might have spent their childhood and adolescence.

His protagonist, Mike, is a representative of that untraumatised majority. He is a straightforward teenage boy, interested above all in sport. Transplanted midway through the book from a school with fine cricketing traditions, Wrykyn, he finds himself at Sedleigh, a place with an undistinguished sporting tradition. “Mike’s outlook on life,” Wodehouse tell us, “was that of a cricketer, pure and simple. What had Sedleigh ever done? What were they ever likely to do? Whom did they play? What Old Sedleighan had ever done anything in cricket?”

But at Sedleigh, he finds himself set against another character, Adair, to whom “Sedleigh was almost a religion … a public school among public schools, a lump of radium.” (In this we see the beginnings of the grown-up Wodehouse’s talent for the entirely original analogy.) Adair wants Mike to play for the school side; Mike prefers to play for a village team. Like countless schoolboy antagonists, they fight. A little while later, their reconciliation is dramatised in a simple exchange when someone describes Adair as “not a bad cove”, and Mike replies, simply: “He’s all right.”

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There is no mawkish sentiment, but equally, no affectations of adult toughness. The boys have their feelings, but they are the feelings one can imagine real boys having in that time and place. They sort out their problems between themselves and learn to live with other. Each boy has his place in the little world of the school. The book’s most celebrated odd-couple pairing of Mike and a much more flamboyantly eccentric character than Adair: Psmith. He is, of course, “really” a Smith, but informs the bemused Mike when he first meets him: “If you ever have occasion to write to me, would you mind sticking a P at the beginning of my name? P-s-m-i-t-h. See? There are too many Smiths.”

Part of what’s so funny about Psmith is that the silliness of how he spells his name is only apparent in writing. It was Wodehouse’s first really good joke and foretold the many glorious jokes to come — Jeeves and Wooster, Lord Emsworth and his enormous pig. It also encapsulates the wholesomeness that distinguishes him from other comic writers — whose comedy begins in anger and vengefulness. Saki, like Wodehouse, had scary aunts, but took pleasure when they were killed by a vicious ferret. Roald Dahl’s nasty grown-ups are set up for some horrible and ingenious punishment. If political-minded readers are disappointed that Wodehouse doesn’t care more for justice, they might remind themselves that he cared even less for revenge: most of us have a hard time telling the desire for fairness apart from the desire to get even.

We live in a world anxious again to divide people into goodies and baddies, their views into liberal and conservative. Wodehouse was unusual in seeing that it is enough to divide them into “all right” and “bad coves” — in other words, those we like and those we could learn to live with. If that didn’t make him sound like a more solemn figure than in fact he was, you might even call that the deep insight behind his comedy. The message — if that’s not too pompous a thing to ascribe to Wodehouse — is: it takes all sorts to make a world. The right word for the author’s ethic — such as it was — is not “liberalism”, which is the label for a political philosophy; the imputation of any such thing would indeed have made him seriously ill. What he possessed was a rarer, more precious thing: the virtue of liberality.

Wodehouse’s world is one in which the monocled dandy can be friends with the school jock. (A great lover of American English, he would not have protested the Americanism.) And both can live, eventually if not right off the bat, in harmony with the idealist and the prig. Is that an ethical ideal? Not, perhaps, in a sense that Orwell would have recognised. But that only tells us that some people have too narrow a view of the ethical. Whatever those words — ethical, political — mean, they must have something to do with living together with other people. The desire to transform other people so that they live up to our own ideal is at the root of so much political violence. The idea, especially at Christmas, of a writer who doesn’t want to change you — or anyone or anything — is all the more attractive, for just that reason.