.: The Red Brick – Dubai College's Student Newspaper :.

An ‘enduring classic’…’The great American novel’…’number 7 on The Telegraph’s ’’Books To Read Before You Die’’ list’… These are just some of the phrases used to describe F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 renowned novel The Great Gatsby. It has been well established over the decades as one of the greats of the 20^th century and by no means forgotten as it has been studied and analyzed by countless critics and students alike all across the globe. In the past few years, however, the 86-year old tale has been dragged back into the spotlight and become more than one of those books that everyone means to read as various modern writers, filmmakers and even video game artists put their spin on the 20s classic.

Perhaps the best publicised is the up and coming film adaptation and remake of the Academy Award winning 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, which began filming on the 5^th of September in Australia. The film, in typical Hollywood Blockbuster fashion, has a budget of $126 million and boasts a cast of big stars such as Carrie Mulligan, Toby Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby himself.

American fashion designer Ralph Lauren was also rumoured to be linked to the project as his spring/summer ‘Roaring Twenties’-inspired line, featuring flapper dresses much like the ones worn at Gatsby’s legendary parties in the novel, was released earlier this month. With household names like these attached to the Baz Luhrmann-directed film, and such a bug budget, this latest adaptation has already began to generate a buzz in the film industry and promises big bucks at the box office, but will the sheer amount of money being spent and the blatantly Hollywood-esque nature of the film enable Luhrmann to accurately portray the lavish and decadent lifestyle that Fitzgerald observed in his novel or will the end result be a ridiculous contradiction to his overriding criticism of the irresponsibility of the wealthy?

As always, hardcore fans of the original prose have their reservations about the ability of certain actors to play some of their most beloved characters of all time and have no doubt found many flaws in the adaptation already, but Baz Lurhmann’s suggestion that the film will very likely be shown in 3D has even the most indifferent of readers raising their eyebrows in disbelief. The Great Gatsby is a novel that explores the social climate of America in a decade that was chaotically confusing and alienating for many and when a large section of society abandoned their morals and began to live life materialistically and carelessly for the first time in their lives. In other words, it is by no means the epic and adventure-filled tale one would expect to view through tinted plastic cinema glasses. The idea that a story which poignantly examines the power of illusion and what it is to be human is on par with 3D blockbusters like Thor or Avatar is bewildering and completely absurd.

Equally unlikely and bemusing was the release of The Great Gatsby Video Game last year. Produced by Big Fish Games, and available to download online, the PC-operated game invites the player to ‘Join Nick Carraway’ and ‘explore the mansions of Long Island’, ‘Attend extravagant parties’, ‘dance the Charleston with a happy couple harboring scintillating secrets’ and ‘Sip bootleg gin with a mysterious millionaire desperate to bring the passions of the past into the present’. The genre of The Great Gatsby Video Game is simply and accurately described as ‘Hidden Object’. The main characters are introduced at the beginning and the player moves through the narrative, uncovering new information as each ‘Hidden Object’ challenge is completed. Extra points can also be won by finding various hidden letters in each scene that sum up the themes present in the novel- for example, ‘gossip’.  While the few reviews on the game from technology experts dismiss it as boring and out of date, by completing the game, the player gets a good sense of the overall plot and characters in the novel in a way that could prove very useful for teachers attempting to keep students of the book interested.

The most risky of recent extensions to Fitzgerald’s classic novel, however, was the release of a sequel, June of this year, detailing the life of Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s daughter Pamela as she moves through the 20^th century, experiencing up close many of the major events of the different eras. The novel, entitled Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter, is described as ‘an acute, hilarious and moving vision of the 20th century’ but just how appropriate is it that a novel spanning the majority of a century and several continents is the follow-up to a novel spanning one summer and confined to a small section of America? And surely author Tom Carson’s decision to have Pamela’s parents Tom and Daisy meet their ends by way of Polo accidents and suicide, respectively, answers questions that fans of the original novel did not ask? While in its own right, Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter may be an excellent and epic tale, the link to The Great Gatsby is unnecessary to the plot and comes off as an attempt to lure people into reading the book out of curiosity.

It is unclear whether these various adaptations and extensions of The Great Gatsby will be ultimately successful with the modern world. What is apparent is the newfound significance Fitzgerald’s magnus opus, which criticizes the decadent lives of the wealthy and irresponsible just preceding the Great Depression, has now, since the economic downturn of the past few years.  Today, readers of The Great Gatsby today have a better understanding of the underlying wisdom of the novel than they have had for decades, proving that it is a timeless tale and one which will always be relevant to society.

Today I’m five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I’m changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero

In many ways, Jack is a typical five-year-old: he likes to read books, play games with his Ma and watch TV but not too much as it ‘rots our brains’. Yet Jack is different in a big way… he has lived his entire life in a single room sharing the entire space – just 11 by 11 feet – with his single mother and an unnerving night-time visitor known as Old Nick. The reader knows only what Jack knows, since the novel is strongly planted in the narrative restrictions; thus, the drama is immediate as is the reader’s sense of disorientation over why these characters are confined in this place. The main objects in Room are capitalised – Rug, Bed, Wall – which not only serves to highlight their importance to the narrator but also indicates the way that to Jack, they are named beings. In a world where the only other companion is Ma, Bed is his friend as much as anything else. Through this personification, Jack is able to relate to his world, defining the only world that he knows.

Jack’s days were ‘filled with thousands of things to do’ as for him, life was good purely because he knows nothing else; empty egg shells become a snake when threaded together, toilet rolls become a maze and Physical Education is sometimes Track which goes around Bed from Wardrobe to Lamp. However, for Ma, life is filled with the knowledge of what she is missing outside the room before her captivity. Room presents two different perspectives, two different ways of looking at life. Room is the only world that Jack knows; but for Ma, it is a prison in which she has tried to craft a normal life for her son. Room focuses on the relationship between mother and child; the way in which she manages to create a magical childhood for him engenders sympathy in the reader and makes the novel a compelling read.

‘You must feel an almost pathological need-understandably- to stand guard between your son and the world’ says the puffy-hair woman. ‘Yeah, it’s called being a mother’ says Ma 

Emma Donoghue has not been so crass as to make light of their plight; in fact, at times, it is almost impossible not to turn away in horror. When Old Nick comes into the room at night, Ma makes Jack hide in the wardrobe where he hides ‘till he makes that gaspy sound and stops’. Ma even has days where she is ‘gone’ to blank-eyed depression. However, Donoghue explores the indomitability of the human spirit, balancing the grotesque with the uplifting making even the most vile of circumstances something absorbing, truthful and beautiful.

Room is a book about the smallest of worlds, and the biggest. Small ones (such as couples, families, workplaces) have their pleasures as well as their irritations; big ones (cities, nations, the Internet) both attract and alienate. Some days we all feel trapped in our particular life circumstances, and other days we find there is more freedom inside their limits, and room inside our heads, than we ever knew.

(Emma Donoghue)

 Inspired by the likes of Elizabeth Fritzl and Jaycee Dugard – both of whom were held for many years by captors by whom they bore children – Donoghue has explained that to frame the story through a mother’s eyes ‘would be too obviously sad’. Therefore, told entirely in the language of a child, Room is the celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between a parent and a child. Despite its profoundly disturbing premise, Room is rife with moments of hope and beauty combined with the determination to live even in the most desolate of circumstances.