The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
It's always slightly difficult to come to a famous novel for the first time, when there's such a vast body of acclaim effectively saying that it's one of the best things ever written.
Fortunately for this reader, I hadn't seen any of the screen versions and knew nothing of the plot, so it was fresh as a daisy for me.
The plot itself is really quite straightforward. Narrated by Nick Carraway, it opens in the summer of 1922 as the 29-year-old moves to New York to work in finance. Living in West Egg, one of two wealthy (and fictional) seaside communities on Long Island Sound, he socialises with Daisy, a cousin, and her husband, Tom, in East Egg – which is full of the old aristocracy – before meeting his own neighbour, the prodigious party-giver Jay Gatsby.
There begins a friendship, which proves convenient when it emerges that Gatsby had a relationship with Daisy before her marriage – and wants to renew it.
F Scott Fitzgerald's novel is often portrayed as being about the Jazz Age – a phrase that the author coined. And the first half is a remarkable portrayal of that era – the brittle shallowness of it all; social chaos and experimentation following the chaos and horror of Flanders.
But this is not the book's big theme. That is the American Dream shattered – betrayed, even. The key is right at the end when Carraway is musing over the events that he has narrated. He looks around him at the beauty of the shore and considers how the first European eyes to see it (Dutch sailors) would have been filled with an awe that only the sheer size of the continent spreading out in front of them could match.
And yet they, and those who followed them, brought the same old class prejudices. The self-made (in more than one way) Gatsby is able to rise to the top of Jazz Age life – an 'alternative culture' of its day – but his fatal mistake is in trying to follow his dream and break through into the aristocracy of the day to claim Daisy for himself.
For all its glamour, the Jazz Age that has raised up Gatsby cannot withstand the old lines in the social sand.
Hypocrisy is here – not just the sexual hypocrisy of the time, so clearly pointed up by the author, but also the social hypocrisy. Hundreds may love Gatsby when he throws his parties and plies them with illicit booze, fashioned into sophisticated cocktails, but only one of his guests, the bookish "Owl-eyes", joins Carraway and the servants at Gatsby's grave.
And so in presiding over Gatsby's death, the New World becomes the old. But perhaps there is a little hope: as Carraway looks forward to the next decade of his own life, we hope that he continues to remember his own father's advice – to avoid judging people.
Fitzgerald's prose is wonderful and his dry, subtle wit shines through. Deceptively simple, but with so much to consider. Brilliant.
It's always slightly difficult to come to a famous novel for the first time, when there's such a vast body of acclaim effectively saying that it's one of the best things ever written.
Fortunately for this reader, I hadn't seen any of the screen versions and knew nothing of the plot, so it was fresh as a daisy for me.
The plot itself is really quite straightforward. Narrated by Nick Carraway, it opens in the summer of 1922 as the 29-year-old moves to New York to work in finance. Living in West Egg, one of two wealthy (and fictional) seaside communities on Long Island Sound, he socialises with Daisy, a cousin, and her husband, Tom, in East Egg – which is full of the old aristocracy – before meeting his own neighbour, the prodigious party-giver Jay Gatsby.
There begins a friendship, which proves convenient when it emerges that Gatsby had a relationship with Daisy before her marriage – and wants to renew it.
F Scott Fitzgerald's novel is often portrayed as being about the Jazz Age – a phrase that the author coined. And the first half is a remarkable portrayal of that era – the brittle shallowness of it all; social chaos and experimentation following the chaos and horror of Flanders.
But this is not the book's big theme. That is the American Dream shattered – betrayed, even. The key is right at the end when Carraway is musing over the events that he has narrated. He looks around him at the beauty of the shore and considers how the first European eyes to see it (Dutch sailors) would have been filled with an awe that only the sheer size of the continent spreading out in front of them could match.
And yet they, and those who followed them, brought the same old class prejudices. The self-made (in more than one way) Gatsby is able to rise to the top of Jazz Age life – an 'alternative culture' of its day – but his fatal mistake is in trying to follow his dream and break through into the aristocracy of the day to claim Daisy for himself.
For all its glamour, the Jazz Age that has raised up Gatsby cannot withstand the old lines in the social sand.
Hypocrisy is here – not just the sexual hypocrisy of the time, so clearly pointed up by the author, but also the social hypocrisy. Hundreds may love Gatsby when he throws his parties and plies them with illicit booze, fashioned into sophisticated cocktails, but only one of his guests, the bookish "Owl-eyes", joins Carraway and the servants at Gatsby's grave.
And so in presiding over Gatsby's death, the New World becomes the old. But perhaps there is a little hope: as Carraway looks forward to the next decade of his own life, we hope that he continues to remember his own father's advice – to avoid judging people.
Fitzgerald's prose is wonderful and his dry, subtle wit shines through. Deceptively simple, but with so much to consider. Brilliant.