The open season on our literary classics is killing their spirit
On January 1, the copyright to F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby finally expired after 95 years. This is not some dusty legal matter, but something that has far wider implications for our culture. Without the watchful eye of the Fitzgerald Estate, it is now open season on this 1925 novel, which is one of the greatest in 20th-century American literature.
Already you can see those wishing to exploit this slender but affecting tale of a sybaritic millionaire on Long Island and his obsession with the beautiful, shallow and selfish Daisy, as seen through the eyes of a rather reserved narrator, Nick Carraway. Earlier this week, an animated Great Gatsby cartoon was announced. You can expect to see Ken Loach’s cinematic version, relocated to the sugar beet fields of Norfolk with a migrant worker in thrall to his enigmatic boss, any time soon, while Generation Z-ers will no doubt be wearing T-shirts with the words “Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life” emblazoned across their chests.
One of the most high-profile beneficiaries of the copyright expiry is the author Michael Farris Smith, whose prequel novel, Nick, is published in the UK today. It begins on the battlefield of France during the First World War, where Carraway, previously itching to leave his Midwest purdah, is confronted with the horrors of trench warfare. Later he returns to America and ends up fraternising with gangsters in New Orleans.
Smith is a well-respected writer with a gift for creating atmosphere, but the very idea of Nick seems to clash with Fitzgerald’s intentions. For Carraway is a cipher, a confidante to the reader, a lens through which we can see how truly ghastly but also tragic the denizens of West Egg really are. By placing him centre stage and giving him a backstory, you are essentially killing the irresistible mystery of a great literary work.
Sometimes, of course, literary estates can do more harm than good, their strictures meaning that anyone wishing to replicate their work has to do so with due reverence, or (as was the case with Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 Gatsby adaptation) with so much camp theatricality that no one could really object to a lack of fidelity to the original text.
But the wider, more serious point is that literary classics are classics for a reason. Tampering with them in prequels, sequels or alternative versions does little to edify the original. Charles Dickens’s expansive dramatis personae has led many writers to go down the path of magnifying more minor characters. For example, the Artful Dodger is a wonderful, sprightly sideline in the overarching narrative of Oliver Twist, but when I tried to read Charlton Daines’s 2017 novel Jack Dawkins, which followed the Dodger’s return to London following his exile in Australia, I was left feeling that the author was desperately trying to fill in the gaps of a story that already had closure. The power of Dickens’s writing is that he leaves you with such a strong, emotionally charged image that the thoughtful reader is better off pondering what happened to the little scamp in his enforced new life.
As always, there are honourable exceptions. PD James scored a hit with her palate-cleansing Death Comes to Pemberley, which imagines the characters of Pride and Prejudice six years later, and embroils them in a deliciously ripe whodunit. Wide Sargasso Sea, the 1966 novel by Jean Rhys, is perhaps the greatest literary riff of them all. It looks at the marriage of Mr Rochester through the eyes of his “mad” first wife, the one confined to the attic in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and richly evokes the power-play (and imbalances) between men and women in marriage.
What’s fascinating about Rhys’s work is that while its feminist response to the past is very much steeped in the ideology that was sweeping through British culture in the 1960s, it also chimes with our preoccupations in the 21st century. Indeed, both Wide Sargasso Sea and Nick are attempts to
“reclaim narratives”, that modish phrase which anyone who follows the angry mob on Twitter will recognise. Today, we live in an age in which historians and museums are obsessed with giving a voice to those from the past who have been previously silenced, while the lives of more famous historical figures are there to be questioned.
Yet while a reimagining of Mrs Rochester’s life is poignant, a proper emancipation of someone fettered by the conventions of the time, the reclamation of Nick Carraway is unnecessary. He has not been wronged in any way; his silence in Fitzgerald’s original is a smart way to enhance our understanding of the novel’s more memorable characters.
I can see why a novel such as Nick is attractive to publishers. Such work perpetuates a known brand; they are easily marketable and therefore potentially more lucrative. (And in commercial fiction, this is very much a fever, with continuations of the Bond franchise and the Sherlock Holmes stories.) Yet I can’t think of any examples from recent years that have been particularly memorable.
It seems a shame that such works abound, when original storytelling in novels is becoming less and less fashionable, and a trend for fiction rooted in historical fact is supplanting the need for innovation in terms of both literary style and content. I am sure that Nick will gain a few fans, but ultimately, I feel, they are buying into a work which is fan-fiction anyway.
by Michael Farris Smith is out now. Buy for £12.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514
Readers are being sold stories that amount to fanfiction