It’s sometimes said that all war movies, whatever their stance, end up being propaganda for war. In The Kellerby Code, a version of the argument is made about PG Wodehouse. “Propaganda for poshos,” one character says briskly when she sees the protagonist reading The Code of the Woosters. “Every book set in an English country house is an advert for a system that fucks everyone apart from the chinny cunts who live in them.”
Jonny Sweet’s debut novel, then, is very conscious of the tradition in which it stands. It’s a lurid black-comedy-cum-thriller about social climbing and murder in which Brideshead Revisited and Wodehouse are frequently and nudgingly referenced, and further back in the mix are The Great Gatsby, a dab of Patricia Highsmith and a lick of the Martin Amis of Dead Babies. Coming in the afterwash of Saltburn, it’s very on trend. Call it Brideshead gothic, perhaps.
Its protagonist Edward Jevons is a lower-middle-class young man besotted with his upper-class university friends Robert and Stanza. The former is handsome, charming, selfish and entitled – and is undergoing a turbocharged launch as a theatre director. The latter is similarly magnetic, ostentatiously bohemian, the only daughter of a rackety alcoholic father and heiress to Kellerby, the country pile of the title. Edward – servile, self-hating, crawling with rage, infatuated with the trappings of aristocracy – is hopelessly in love with Stanza, and remains in the orbit of this golden pair by endlessly running errands for them. He discovers that they call him “Jeeves” behind his back.
The balance of this exploitative, triangular sort-of-friendship tips when he discovers that Stanza and Robert are sleeping together. Humiliation is piled on humiliation: Robert has long been the recipient of Edward’s drunken confidences about his love for Stanza. Meanwhile Edward has a darkish secret in his past. So, it turns out, does Robert – and when it starts to threaten his present happiness, he enlists Edward to help make it go away. The reader knows, and deep down Edward knows, that he’s being used and will be discarded. Here is Gatsby’s “vast carelessness” in spades.
The novel lurches from comedy of manners to grand guignol. The former is excellently handled: “Edward approached Terry from such a distance that his first concern was at what point over the next four metres he should extend his hand to begin his greeting. He had a tendency to approach persons of a similar status to Terry with an arm outstretched for what felt like 20 seconds, a pedestrian jouster, humiliating himself even before anyone knew who he was.”
The latter, as is only proper, is absolutely trowelled on. In the opening pages we encounter half a human jaw in a field: “Only one tooth remained, top-heavy with silver alloy, and still tasting dirt.”
Wodehouse famously agonised over his plots – which are the least important part of the books – and turned out his sentence-by-sentence brilliance as easily as a spider making silk. It’s the other way round with Jonny Sweet. At sentence level, The Kellerby Code is effortful and often overwrought. When Robert eats a crisp, we get “its purple and white striations evoking a cross-section of a limb. He plunged it heedlessly into the hummus, spading out a large and vexing gobbet.” The metaphor police may want a word, too, about “Robert was an iceberg moving inexorably through them all, carving landscapes out of their obedient souls.”
But the tension in the plot (hectic, increasingly violent) and the tension in Edward’s mind (almost ceaselessly on the verge of gibbering collapse; he starts to receive instructions from the shadow of a lamp-post he calls “Plum”) are admirably handled. And the feverish writing style does have the effect of deepening the claustrophobic atmosphere of Edward’s sweaty thoughts. This is a portrait of a mind under unbearable pressure, and Sweet has a fine ear for the jovial inanities with which Edward cloaks his rage and fear. He has a fine ear too for the pretentiousness and the casual cruelty of the trustafarian circles in which Robert and Stanza move and to which Edward aspires. There’s a particular poignancy in the way that part of the plot turns on Edward buying himself a signet ring (which, as properly posh people know, isn’t a properly posh thing to do). Poor Edward. Even as he plunges into the dark, you find yourself feeling for him.
• The Kellerby Code by Jonny Sweet is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
