Sequel rights and wrongs: why some stories should be allowed to end
While Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 film of Call Me By Your Name ended with lovers Elio and Oliver parting ways on the phone, André Aciman’s novel showed us what happened next. Throughout the book, the torment of erotic obsession builds slowly, with Elio experiencing all the agonies and ecstasies of a first serious crush as he worries over Oliver. Then Aciman shows us their futures, beyond their fateful shared summer in Italy: their separate adult lives are full of marriage and children, with only lingering memories of the time they spent together years before.
I first read the final chapters of Call Me By Your Name through my fingers, completely torn between wanting and not wanting to know what happened next. But ultimately, Aciman’s ending underlines that youth and its pleasures are temporary, that just as the summer, with its heat and ripening fruit, must end, so too must the affair. That it does so makes the novel what it is: poignant and bittersweet.
Then, this week Aciman revealed he is writing a sequel. As much as I loved his 2007 novel, I don’t know if I want to read of Oliver and Elio’s years without each other. It seems a shame to take a work that is a masterclass in nostalgia and repackage it as the first instalment of an ongoing story. Letting the reader glimpse adults who have never forgotten one another at the end of the first book perfectly captures the sense of life passing, special people left lingering in the heart ever after.
Some sequels are great: The Lord of the Rings came after The Hobbit, and Philip Pullman’s series of His Dark Materials prequels, now telling Lyra’s backstory, serve as a kind of sequel by returning readers to the fantasy world. But even the biggest fans can feel betrayed by sequels; JK Rowling’s vast post-Potter output has, at this point, become a sort of meme, with even the most enthusiastic readers left frustrated by the stream of new additions and amendments. And while Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman hit the shelves to great fanfare, more than 50 years after To Kill a Mockingbird, the general mood among those who read it is that it was best described as an early draft.
But sometimes a book demands a follow-up. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, as a dissection of authoritarian attitudes to women’s freedom, has never felt more relevant in the era of Trump, as women’s rights are under threat of being rolled back around the world. When Atwood confirmed she was writing a sequel last week, I joined in the rejoicing. I’m keen to see how revisiting the dystopia of Gilead might mirror the real world today.
A sequel to Call Me By Your Name – both cinematic and literary – will likely sell well on the decade-old book’s new wave of popularity. I imagine Aciman will brilliantly bring the adult Eliot to life; I don’t doubt his abilities at all. But a bigger part of me wants to keep that summer closed off and perfect. The story was made more beautiful because of its transience, and all the more painful because Elio never knows if Oliver remembers that summer as he does. I don’t want to know the answer to that question. My answer is perhaps best worded by Aciman himself: “We had the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.”