(Penguin, £5.99)

reviewed by David Sexton

"The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled," said Evelyn Waugh. "All those who know them long to return."

There we find the immortals, Lord Emsworth and his dearest love, the Empress of Blandings; the indefatigable Gally Threepwood and the stately butler, Beach. There all goes wrong and then comes right. There, there is no sorrow. Sunset at Blandings is a poignant finale to the Blandings novels. The first of them, Something Fresh, had appeared in 1915. Wodehouse was working on this one when he died, 60 years later, in 1975, at the age of 93. He had typed out 16 chapters, but the novel is not finished and it ends in mid-flow, as Lady Florence announces to Galahad that she is banning his protege, young Jeff Bennison, from the Castle, where he has come in pursuit of her step-daughter, under the guise of painting a portrait of the Empress of Blandings.

Sunset at Blandings is thus just a fragment, unpolished. Yet it's full of wonderful Wodehouse moments. There's Sergeant EB Murchison of Scotland Yard, "who gave the impression of having been carved out of some durable kind of wood by a sculptor who had received his tuition from an inefficient tutor".

There's Lord Emsworth's greeting to his younger brother, Galahad, with whom he has lived all his life, but has not seen for several days.

"As Gally approached, he peered at him with a puzzled look on his face, as if he knew he had seen him somewhere but could not think where. With an effort, he identified him and gave him a brotherly nod. 'Ah, Galahad.'

'Ah to you, Clarence, with knobs on.'

"You're here, eh?'

'Yes, right here.'

'Someone told me you had gone to London.'

'I've come back.'

'Come back. I see. Come back, you mean. Yes, quite.'

This is the work of an undiminished master.

Sunset at Blandings was first published in 1977 with an extensive editorial apparatus by Richard Usborne. This revised Penguin, however, holds a new treat. Norman Murphy, the author of In Search of Blandings, contributes a pair of afterwords identifying the real Blandings - and the real Empress of Blandings. "We know what the Empress looks like, the way her ears droop, the noise she makes when she eats, the rustle as she moves through the straw of her sty. Wodehouse would never dream of writing that from his imagination. There had to be a real pig somewhere."

There was, at Hunstanton Hall in Norfolk, where Wodehouse often stayed in the Twenties. And, wonderful to say, there is a surviving photograph of her. It's printed here with the unambiguous caption, "The Empress of Blandings". Never before has tracing the "real life" original of a fictional character seemed so worthwhile.

[Click here for a complete telling of the search for the Empress.]