Great expectations as Gatsby comes back into the spotlight

Hailed as “the most remarkable achievement in theatre this decade” by the New York Times, it shows how a group of New York office workers become spellbound by the lyrical prose, after one of them finds the book in the back of a drawer and begins to read it aloud. His co-workers slowly transform into the characters in the story, telling its tale of reckless exuberance and new wealth set a few years after the First World War.

While many in the country suffer economically, the bright young things in their summer beach houses enjoy wealth, privilege, comfort and extravagance. But, lest we think this hedonism is being celebrated, their antics are observed by down-to earth narrator Nick Carraway, an honest and non-judgmental man from the Midwest who serves as the (sometimes unreliable and certainly flawed) moral compass of the story.

Successive polls of editors, writers and scholars have voted The Great Gatsby the greatest American novel of the 20th-century – although fans of Harper Lee, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jack Kerouac might have something to say about that. It was bound to happen therefore that once the novel’s term of copyright ended (as it did in January) there would be a deluge of Gatsby.

Gatz, will be part of the London International Festival of Theatre and an “immersive” version is also hitting the London stage, as is a musical. A 3D feature film of The Great Gatsby will be released later in the year, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan as Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, and Leeds-based Northern Ballet will stage the world premiere of their adaptation in January 2013.

The Great Gatsby received mostly positive reviews on publication, but not the rapturous applause that had greeted Fitzgerald’s previous novels.

When the writer died in 1940, his star had fallen and the New York Times obituary cited the novel as proof that he had never reached his full potential. And yet readers began to flock back to the book and by the early 1960s Gatsby was firmly established as one of the American greats. The current fresh wave of interest can’t be attributed solely to the end of copyright in the novel, says Denis Flannery, senior lecturer in American and English literature at Leeds University.

The power of its storytelling, its style and its themes still speak strongly to readers today.

“It is a book that has had resonance for every era,” says Dr Flannery. “During its last big wave of success, in the early 1970s (when the Robert Redford and Mia Farrow film was made), it was a period of political fragility and international disenchantment, after the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. The beautiful, golden young things in the novel appear at first glance to have this sheen of invulnerability but underneath that is a deep core of vulnerability. Not even bucket loads of cash and connections can save you from disaster and tragedy.

“The Great Gatsby came along in the aftermath of two great apocalyptic events – the Great War and the flu epidemics that killed more people than the war had done. The novel reflects this in how Jay Gatsby wants to freeze time, keeping disaster at bay. He wants to ignore history and stop the future from happening in case things get worse.”

The story holds obvious parallels with the world today, says Dr Flannery.

“There is a similar fragility, uncertainty and fear prevalent now. We know capitalism has failed, but we’re somehow rolling on without any clear view of where we’re going, and economic concerns are matched by eco-fragility – we can see the damage being done to our environment on a grand scale – so the future would be worse than today rather than better.”

Unlike many novels which dazzle us in youth but don’t sustain the close scrutiny of adulthood and more mature critical faculties, The Great Gatsby does bear revisiting again and again, says Dr Flannery.

“I remember reading Gatsby for the first time and being swept up in its beautiful, flowing prose, and the paradise he creates with a serpent in the middle of it. I read it very quickly. It’s a book to read hungrily, like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Gatsby as a character and the book as a whole perfectly foreshadow and prefigure the Great Depression that was to come. Our everyday realities have changed today, but our fundamental concerns are the same.”

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