Do books and movies make strange bedfellows? It's a good moment to reflect on the question, to escape into the cool dark of the cinema and watch two literary novels unfold, the very same week, on the big screen. The reviews are mixed, but the movie theatres are filling up and book sales are soaring. Eighty-two years separate the publication of The Great Gatsby and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, but will they eventually be remembered in Baz Luhrmann and Mira Nair's screen adaptations?
On the evidence of the long, tortuous publishing and screen history of F Scott Fitzgerald's classic, the answer would be an unequivocal "No"; in the case of Mohsin Hamid's controversial post-9/11 monologue as a movie, you could dissemble and say: "Maybe".
When Fitzgerald's tight, enigmatic story of Gatsby's doomed love for Daisy Buchanan set against a backdrop of crime and capitalist greed came out in 1925, sales were so tepid that it drove the young author deeper into drink and despair; he was dead at the age of 44. The stock market boom of the 1920s was followed by the Wall Street bust of 1929 and the Great Depression. The Great Gatsby would have perished in obscurity were it not for discerning critics who exhumed it after Fitzgerald's death, hailing it as an exegesis of the tawdry shallowness of the American Dream. American soldiers in the trenches of World War II devoured it as a heartbreaking Jazz Age fable of lost love. A pillar of both academic and trade publishing since (it continues to sell half a million copies a year), there have been so many adaptations of The Great Gatsby that even the American Film Institute can't locate early screen versions.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is also a cautionary tale of Wall Street's arrogance amplified by the War on Terror following the World Trade Centre attacks. The transformative effect this has on a smart, ambitious Pakistani hedge fund manager in New York is told in a singular narrative voice. Watching the images in a hotel room in Manila, he finds himself smiling: "Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased." Mohsin Hamid's sinewy early 21st-century prose is light years away from Fitzgerald's showy aphoristic style: "And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy."
The power of the two novels, their mystique, is in their brevity - both are about 200 pages long - but what is unsaid, left to the reader's imagination, is possibly what attracts film makers to them. In a recent illustrated volume on the book-of-the-film (The Reluctant Fundamentalist: From Book to Film, Penguin, Rs 499), Mira Nair and her cohorts describe their five-year effort to make "a human thriller, an unflinching dialogue about identity and perception and issues around the divided self in the era of globalisation". Finding money was not the least of their troubles; few financiers in the West were willing to touch it. Finally, it was the Qatar government, via the Doha Film Institute, that came to the rescue.
Mira Nair's brave film is a compelling drama but it chops and changes, adds and pads to the novel, appending back stories, characters and a third act to emphasise a politically volatile Pakistan. This was done with the active co-operation of the author, a writer at the height of his powers and currently the toast of lit fests and film fests around the world. But it also meanders in its stress on "ideological bookkeeping" - of economic versus religious fundamentalism.
Baz Luhrmann's epic of the Roaring Twenties is a story drowning in spectacle. "He's less a film maker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste," scoffs David Denby in The New Yorker. The 3-D imagery is so unconvincing you come out with the smell of Leonardo DiCaprio's bronze pancake in your nostrils. Yet both film makers do what novelists cannot: adding memorably inventive sound tracks by the rapper Jay-Z and qawwali musicians.
If you find the films unsettling or unsatisfactory, there is help at hand. Go back to the books to see what the writers intended.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
