If only I had read The Great Gatsby as a child!

This is what I thought, after re-reading Fitzgerald’s classic, when I recalled what Alberto Manguel wrote about his relationship with Alice (of the Wonderland adventures). He first tumbled down the rabbit hole as a child, which meant that when he re-read her tales later in life, he could resist the imposition of other people’s interpretations. None of them, he writes, “have become, in any deep sense, my own”:

“The readings of others influence, of course, my personal reading, offer new points of view or colour certain passages, but mostly they are like the comments of the Gnat who keeps naggingly whispering in Alice’s ear, ‘You might make a joke on that.’”
(Into the Looking-Glass Wood, Alberto Manguel)

Although I was a prolific reader as a child, my literary aspirations remained latent until my late teens — there was no Gatsby for me until I turned twenty. By then, I’d read more pages of commentary on The Great Gatsby than there are pages in the novel itself, and I was unable to meet with the book as if meeting with a stranger. Instead, I’d absorbed all the gossip and rumours about it, like Elizabeth Bennett bringing the baggage of Mr Darcy’s ill-repute to their relationship.

Many readers I’ve spoken with came to The Great Gatsby because a teacher forced it on them, and I first picked up Gatsby not in the organic way we choose most books — out of some incalculable combination of serendipity, whim, half-remembered recommendations from a friend, personal taste, and who knows what else — but because I knew it was classic. In the bookshop of my mind, Gatsby was shelved on a bookcase of Books You Ought To Read Whether You Want To Or Not.1

Before I even cracked the spine on my handsome Penguin hardback copy of Fitzgerald’s novel, I knew (so I thought) all about that green light Gatsby can’t get enough of. What I actually knew about was the seemingly infinite number of ideas about that green light, about what it represents and means, what it tells us about so many things not directly addressed on the pages of the book: capitalism, greed, envy, the American Dream, fading youth, romantic fidelity, sexual frustration...

When I first opened Gatsby, the book itself was a green light — something obscured by the multitude of theories about it. The Gnat kept whispering in my ear that some people think this is really about that, or she says this thing because Fitzgerald believed that thing. I couldn’t hear the words of the novel over the din of interpretation. When I closed Gatsby after that first read, I realised it had been mis-shelved in the bookshop of my mind, and it actually belonged on the shelf of Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them Too.

Finally, after more than a decade since my first and only reading of Gatsby, the novel moved again in my imaginary bookshop. It belonged in the section for Books Read Long Ago Which Now It’s Time To Reread. So, I returned to it.

Reader, I fell in love.

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Instead of accepting that The Great Gatsby is a classic because everyone else says so, I discovered for myself why everyone says it’s a classic. It was like the difference between a mere description of a flavour and finally putting the food on your own tongue. And it tasted wonderful.

One of the corrections made to my terrible first reading of the novel was realising how much I’d overlooked or forgotten, joys to discover with my freshly opened eyes. I’d forgotten how catty the narrator, Nick Carraway, can be, and how often he sounds to my ear like Truman Capote sniping the unfortunate fools in his way with his ironic, withering derision. For example:

• Having told us that he tends to reserve judgment, Nick immediately says that “the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions”. (Keep your secrets to yourself, or at least be original about them.)

• On hearing that the brutish jock Tom Buchanan has become evangelical about a book and that he’s cheating on his wife, Nick says that “the fact [Tom] ‘had some woman in New York’ was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book”. (Just try to hear that without picturing him taking a self-satisfied sip of a cocktail on delivery of this devastating critique.)

• When Daisy asks Nick if she’s been missed back in her hometown, he says drily, “The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all night along the north shore.” Ouch.

One of the only two lines I remembered from the book — remembered because they’re the only two lines anybody quotes — was: “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”2 What I’d forgotten was that it’s uttered not by our narrator, but by Jordan Baker, one of the many superficial people who toss out utterances they might stand by only in the moment and will likely forget or refute in the next.

I remembered Gatsby as more noble, as a figure of tragedy. It was bracing to learn that he is, in fact, a figure of farce. He takes himself ever so seriously, “trying to forget something very sad that had happened to [him] long ago”. Being a young man when I first met Jay Gatsby, I thought his devotion to a fling from his youth was terribly romantic; today, his obsession strikes me as ridiculous. These characters are so spoiled by their own shallowness that Gatsby’s opulent rendering of a dream in the attempt to relive the past (“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”) is all the depth any of them can muster.

This superficiality permeates Gatsby, and I kept noticing how cosmetic change acts as a wallpaper over failures to meaningfully grow. Twice we read that a new season brings with it the chance to start over and be a different person. There’s the line I mentioned above, where Jordan Baker suggests they can have a do-over in the fall. Earlier in the book, Nick waxes lyrical about the coming of spring, “with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees”, which gives him the “familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer”.

Note his familiarity with this feeling. How many times before has he believed he can start over? More to the point, notice how the idea of a new season bringing change is repeated in Gatsby — the phrases differ, the season in question changes, but it’s the same idea underneath. This is how it is with change in The Great Gatsby. Things might look or sound different, but at bottom it all stays the same. Change is just a face-lift that alters the appearance only, not the person beneath.

Gatsby sells himself as an exemplar of that great American notion that a man can reinvent himself, that he can manifest his own destiny. But has he changed in any meaningful sense? He’s wealthy now and wears nice clothes, but he’s still lonely, he’s still without Daisy, he’s still moping after what he lost before he had the cars and extravagant parties. He engineers his outward transformations only to relive what he once had. His reinvention is merely an attempted return to how things used to be.

I also noticed how things we’d have hoped were historical relics are still relevant today — that as much as we think we’ve culturally evolved over a century, we remain remarkably the same. I’m thinking here of Tom’s anxiety over migrants wiping out the “white race” in the West. The book that’s exercised Tom’s feeble mind claims that “if we don’t look out the white race will be ... utterly submerged”. What is this if not the Great Replacement Theory so beloved by certain sections of the modern right-wing? (I couldn’t help but picture Tom as a brawny Tucker Carlson.)

Nick makes a cutting aside about Tom that stands without modification as an indictment of a prominent type of disaffected “bro” stomping around the digital world today:

“Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.”

Andrew Tate, Fitzgerald’s looking at you.

Fitzgerald might have had doubts about humanity’s capacity to change (or was it only his own generation he questioned?) but there’s no doubt that the details of our own lives can alter, and that we can subsequently grow. That’s precisely what happened with my relationship to The Great Gatsby. I was a poor reader unduly influenced by the commentaries of others; now, I’m a somewhat better reader able to know my own mind regarding classic novels.

So, I’ll beat on, my readerly boat against the current of modern trends, returning ceaselessly to the great books of the past.

I can’t wait to discover what else I missed.

Welcome to Double Take, the semi-regular series in which I re-evaluate books and films that I first encountered long ago.

Today, we’re going back to a film I saw when it was first released in cinemas in 2019. I know I thought quite highly of The Farewell, though if you’d asked me why, I’d have struggled to give you a decent answer. The film had an effect on me I couldn’t account for, especially given my tepid response to the proficient yet cold directorial style.

Well, I’ve revisited the film and I have thoughts. And feelings. A lot of them.

Is a beautiful lie preferable to an ugly truth?

Imagine a machine that can give you exactly the life you desire. You plug yourself into the machine and live out, in your mind, every pleasurable experience you could think to programme into the technology, absent any negative consequences that would result from such hedonism in real life. Philosopher Robert Nozick surveyed people to find out if they would get into the machine and live out the rest of their life in this way. But the question I want to put to you is this:

Would you put someone else in the machine without their knowing?

This is, in essence, the question at the heart of 2019’s The Farewell, Lulu Wang’s dazzling and destabilising story — inspired by her own life — about the lie a whole family tells one of its members to protect her from a painful reality, cocooned in ignorant bliss.

In the film, Chinese-American Billi has a close relationship with her grandmother, Nai Nai. This bond is maintained across continents with the kind of “white lies” families use to keep sanity intact and bloodshed to a minimum, such as “I love what you’re wearing” and “I don’t hate your singing”. The truth, we and Billi discover, is that Nai Nai has terminal lung cancer and doesn’t know. Her sister received the diagnosis from the doctor and pretends there’s no illness, so that Nai Nai can enjoy her remaining months. The family agree to act as if they are visiting Nai Nai in China for a wedding.

But Billi isn’t supposed to be a part of this tragic farce. Her family aren’t convinced she has what it takes to suppress her rampant emotions and maintain the lie. They fear that, rather than being discovered hiding behind the curtain, she’ll leap out willingly to confess that there is no Emerald City and that her family are fakes. This inability to deceive is seen as a failure of maturity, though I suspect many Western audiences will see it as an admirable commitment to truth. The Farewell, however, isn’t going to let us have it so easy.

The first time I saw The Farewell, in my local indie cinema in 2019, I wasn’t able to cogently express — to myself — what I thought of the film. As I watched it, some portion of my mind was running background software to calculate whether I liked the film or not. Every actor gives a performance that is impossible to look away from, with a restraint you wouldn’t expect from such an emotionally charged story. The dialogue is honest and direct, and it captures so much with so little, expressing universals in the cadences and rhythms of the way this particular family speaks. I bristled with admiration (for the writing) and empathy (for Billi) during this brief exchange:

LU JIAN:        How many wontons you want?
BILLI:             Five.
LU JIAN:        Five? That’s not enough.
BILLI:             Make a dozen then.
LU JIAN:        [A pause] Ten’s good.

Anyone can recognise the unspoken familial sniping here: too few and something’s wrong with you, too many and you’re greedy.

Against this, my mental software was calculating another set of data, which included the fact that I felt oceans apart from the film and its characters. Even as I enjoyed the acting, appreciated the honesty of the interactions, and was impressed by the dialogue, I felt like I was being held at arm’s length from it all. I was close enough to see beauty but distanced enough to feel cold to it.

This seemed to have something to do with the straight-jacket control Wang has over the camera. We’re rarely shown any scene in anything other than a medium-wide shot, so that everyone feels within touching distance and yet a little too far away. Characters are frequently surrounded by the pressing bodies of others and yet remain somehow separate — most memorably when Billi learns that her Nai Nai is dying, and she faces the camera while her father keeps his back to us.

The camera almost never moves, presenting scenes baldly, as if to say, “Here it is, the objective account of what’s going on.” We stand still, watching without moving, witnessing without tracking shots, zooms, or camera pans and tilts. Every shot is beautifully blocked and framed, but also (I mistakenly thought at the time) a little lifeless. It was like listening to an impressive guitar solo: the technical proficiency is impressive at an intellectual level, but the heart is left untouched. Like a footballer playing keepie uppie — a nifty trick but not winning the game — there seemed to be something of a showcase quality to the film.

But something unexpected happened at the end of the film.

There’s an emotionally (and literally) moving shot looking out through the back window of Billi’s departing taxi, watching her Nai Nai shrink into the distance as she stands in place, waving her final goodbye. Despite having felt cold to the film up to this point, I began sobbing. In spite of the detachment with which I’d watched the rest of the film, its ending had broken through. Until I re-watched the film, I couldn’t quite account for this. Going back to it, I saw how utterly wrong I’d been about The Farewell.

I realised that the feeling of being distant from the film’s characters, held at an emotional remove from what I was watching, is how Wang allows us to identify with Billi. She’s forced to restrain herself in order to maintain the big lie, and I experienced the anaconda squeeze of this constriction, desperately hoping for the camera to spin or swoop, or for a character to have a big, dramatic moment full of tears and honest declarations. I was desperate for some sense of relief from this containment, which is perfect because however uncomfortable it is, it’s also a remarkable act of empathy with Billi.

The few places in which we finally get something like relief from this constraint are brief and earned. The first time in the film that I noticed real in-camera movement was about halfway through, during a debate over dinner about the relative merits of China and America. During this literal round-table discussion, the plates rotate slowly around the table as the conversation picks up steam. It’s a tiny detail, but one so meaningful after almost an hour of feeling as if your shoes are glued to the spot. Had the camera merely cut back and forth between speakers, we would have felt as if we were witnessing a more formal debate, and we might have been led to believe that one side could win. With the merry-go-round of plates in the foreground, however, we understand that this is one of those tedious familial arguments that will go round and round for as long as this family gets together for shared dinners.

This circularity is brought back later when the family play a drinking game at the cousin’s wedding (in reality, a pre-emptive funeral). The family sit around a table, and the camera whips between them as they take their turns to drink. The groom, losing the game, takes shot after shot, becoming ever drunker. The camera whips around more frenetically, until it spins into a whirlwind blur. The characters are showing each other that they’re at ease, playing a game and having fun. The camera is telling us they are unstable and the lie is in danger (like them) of being unwound.

Seemingly every part of this film is communicating something of what the characters cannot say to each other. Even the placement of music is artfully deliberate, used in a way to reveal rather than sonically illustrate. The composer, Alex Weston, said in an interview that with The Farewell he rejected the ordinary use of music, in which “there’s 10 seconds of silence as we switch locations so let’s put a score in”. Here, where there is music, it’s the “primary audio focus”, and it’s “trying to bring something out of the characters that they can’t say themselves”.

In the end, it’s precisely what isn’t said and what stands in its place that so breaks the heart. In the shot I mentioned earlier, in which Nai Nai waves goodbye to Billie — and to us — as Billi leaves in a taxi, the camera is looking backwards through the rear window, bouncing gently as the car rolls up the road, offering a natural dolly-out shot. We retreat from the shrinking figure of the waving grandmother, feeling our hearts swell, wanting to burst, tears rising — and then we have one of the most understated dramatic climaxes in cinema:

Nai Nai’s waving hand drops to cover her mouth. She is suppressing her own sob, a sadness we knew nothing of until that exact moment.

That’s it. A hand moving to a mouth. It broke me, and it cut through the analytical part of my mind that was waiting for a calculation to give a definite answer about what kind of movie this is, and whether it’s Great Cinema or not, and whether I liked it or not. The Farewell doesn’t want you to love it or hate it any more than it intends to be a Chinese film or an American film, a comedy or a drama, or any other clearly defined category. The film is challenging its viewer, daring us to sit with the discomfort of real empathy for the duration of its runtime.

I don’t think The Farewell is intended to answer its own central question about telling someone a lie to shelter them from the truth. The film raises it only to show us something much deeper — how difficult it is to grapple with such a question. We see through our certainties, perhaps only temporarily, but enough to allow us a glimpse of a greater truth: that no matter how alien the choices of others might be, no matter how wrongheaded in their conception or deleterious in their results, we’re all striving towards the same goal of making things better. And: no matter how poor we are at it, no matter how much we fail, we all want to connect with others.

Maybe I asked you the wrong question at the top of this. Maybe it’s not about whether you’d deceive a loved one to make them happy. Maybe the better question is this: do you think someone else who tells a beautiful lie to soothe sorrow is a moral monster for doing so?

Again, I don’t believe the answer is to be found in The Farewell. But what can be discovered is that, while a person’s choice may turn out to be right or wrong, the person can be separated from the lie they tell. Everyone in Billi’s family deeply loves and cares for Nai Nai. The decision to lie or tell her the truth ultimately comes out of that love. If it could be convincingly shown that lying harms or wrongs Nai Nai in some way, those who lie would immediately tell the truth, just as Billi comes to believe that lying might be best for her Nai Nai and so joins the deception.

The same truth holds for those who don’t support all the causes you support, or don’t vote for the political party you vote for, or don’t attend the same religious gatherings of which you are a member. With the exception of extremists and psychopaths, almost no one intends to make the world worse. We’re all trying to do our best, and some of us are misguided about the optimal ways to do our best. But people are not as easy as actions to categorise as Good or Evil.

The Farewell is Cartesian in its conviction that the only way to know anything is through radical scepticism about what we think we know. The movie isn’t interested in moralising, or pedagogy, or taking sides in a cultural battle between the individual and the collective, East and West, or right and wrong. The Farewell is a challenge; it’s an exploration; it’s a thought-experiment full of heart. Most of all, it’s a question:

What drives people to do the things we do for our closest and dearest?

Here, The Farewell offers an answer at last: Love.

Welcome back to the The Double Take, a semi-regular series in which I re-evaluate books and films that I first encountered long ago.

Today, a film that’s gloriously singular, and unafraid of taking really, really big swings. Not all of its parts are perfect, but it adds up to something disarmingly sincere.

When Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain came out in 2006, I was nineteen and stuck in an adolescent phase of film criticism that spends all of its energy on “working out” movies, as if they’re mathematical puzzles to be solved. I watched The Fountain several times trying to grasp the presumed objective foundation to its genre-bending story. I eventually rationalised my way towards this articulation of what’s going on in the film:

Hugh Jackman is Tommy, a neuroscientist working on a cure for brain tumours because his wife (Rachel Weisz as Izzi) is dying of one. Meanwhile, she’s writing a novel about a Spanish conquistador called Tomás (played by Jackman) searching for the Tree of Life so that he and Queen Isabella (played by Weisz) can live forever. Except this isn’t a fiction, because neuroscientist Tommy has a compound from a tree in Guatemala that might cure death. But Izzi dies, so once he has perfected and imbibed the cure, he ends up living through the death of humanity. Now, the last man alive, he drifts through space in a transparent bubble towards a dying star...

Because of the complex patterning of the narrative, it took me a while to knit this summary together, and while it made a certain kind of sense, it was fractured by inconsistencies. It also left me little to return to the film for — which is the key failure of this limited way of watching cinema. So I didn’t watch The Fountain again for more than a decade.

It wasn’t only that I felt I’d “worked out” the plot. I’d also moved away from the religious and spiritual stuff that The Fountain makes so central. At that point in my early twenties, I was suffused with the trendy cynicism of my generation, apparently (though not actually) disabused of my illusions about meaning, spirituality, and all the other kinds of fuzzy nonsense that The Fountain revels in. The path that had led me to that place of near-nihilism went back to my beginning.

When I was nine and my family moved across the world, we’d been told that God wanted us in England, and that all would be well because He had willed it. I grew up a little and learned something of family politics: it was no coincidence that “God” wanted us to emigrate to the country (and specific town) in which my mother’s relatives lived. I grew up some more and stopped believing in God. There was no meaning behind our move and its hardships after all, or there were only a few reasons and none of them good, which still felt like meaninglessness.

In my twenties, the uprooted sapling that I was began putting down new roots. I met the woman who eventually became my wife. Over the course of our relationship, I stopped viewing the series of events that was my life — leaving Canada, losing friends, the break-up of my family — as leading to meaninglessness; instead, they led to my meeting her. What had been a mess of confusion, pubescent hormones, and heartbreak was viewed now as fragments of the path towards the most meaningful relationship of my life. I knew we weren’t supposed to believe in meta-narratives anymore, yet I couldn’t help but see things that happened to me as chapters in the story of my life.

This narrative alchemy that turns the rough stone of events into the gold of life-stories is what Nietzsche argued made Greek tragedy an invaluable art-form. He claimed that spectators to staged tragedies looked into the abyss of meaningless existence and affirmed it, thereby affirming their own lives. It’s in reframing the tragic as an aesthetic performance that we can overcome its meaninglessness. Modernism and postmodernism have spent the last hundred years sacrificing artifice to “better” portray reality, and have ended up simply jettisoning art from its artwork. A slavish adherence to a bald kind of realism drains the mythic and metaphoric qualities from our stories, and metaphor is where meaning can be found.

Coming back to The Fountain in this later stage of life, I notice how all of these ideas about the transformative nature of art, and especially tragedy, are woven into the very fabric of the film. In the first draft of Izzi’s conquistador novel, her hero is killed by the guardian of the Tree of Life, who shoves a dagger into the coloniser’s gut. I’ve always taken this moment — cut off abruptly as it is — to be the point at which Izzi left off writing, having died before she could complete the manuscript. She’d spent her final days begging Tommy to “finish it”, assuring him, “You can. You will.”

Eventually, Tommy takes up the pen, and what he writes is his own epiphanic revelation: he doesn’t want to make the conquistador’s mistakes, which are Tommy’s own mistakes in different forms. Here is one of the incalculable miracles of tragedy that Nietzsche saw as indispensable to understanding life itself, which is that art makes participants of its viewers. Narrative demands that we interact emotionally and critically, rather than as passive observers. No lesson is so well learned as one that is experienced, lived.

In Tommy’s ending to the novel, the conquistador overcomes the guardian and approaches the Tree of Life with awe, before lunging at it with his dagger to greedily procure its life-giving ambrosia. As he gorges himself, he’s healed of old wounds and tastes a hint of the promised immortality. However, he falls to the ground in agony as flowers erupt out of him, feeding on his dying body to sustain their growth. Life necessitates death, this story reveals, and the closest we can come to immortality is in the life that follows our own lives, which depends on the efforts we make before we die.

The novel as finished by Tommy provides a lesson in negative; it’s the kind of story that shows us how not to live. In the end of the film, it’s this confrontation with the full truth of his condition — presented in the aesthetic spectacle of tragedy — that leads Tommy to finally embrace his mortality and see that there’s a certain wonder to the life cycle. “Death,” the film tells us, “is the road to awe.” And the truth is that, despite having seen this film a bunch of times before, and in spite of my prior cold rationality, The Fountain still made my lip tremble and caused a lump in the throat when Tommy finally accepts his end, having resisted human nature and its finitude for so long, and he does so with a smile on his face, even a laugh of relief, as he says, “I’m going to die.”

What The Fountain does so well can be understood in the dynamic between its two leads. We have Izzi and Tommy, the artist and the scientist. They represent what Nietzsche called the Dionysian and the Apollonian, and which I call Chaos and Order. The constant shifting of balance between these two opposing forces is seen throughout history and in each of our lives: we succumb to passions that rule us, or we close ourselves off to emotion; our freedom becomes a shapeless, meaningless hedonism, or our desire for control leads to the suppression of chaos under the despot’s boot. Nietzsche was convinced that great art is where Chaos achieves harmony with Order. It’s in literature, plays, music, operas, cinema, and all great works that these two forces interact productively to reveal what neither alone can show us.

In The Fountain, it’s only when the scientist takes up the role of artist, when the two poles become a unified whole, that meaning is finally found. In the film’s sci-fi sections, the film fully manifests that sense of meaning. Here, with Spaceman Tommy drifting alone through space, the sci-fi fantasy is transfigured into a kind of divine comedy: we see a man so obsessed with living forever that he ends up as the last man alive. He maintains his own existence by tearing apart the world around, feeding himself on pieces of a dying tree, until he’s finally able to accept death — and in that moment, he becomes whole. At a certain point, both extremes of the Dionysian and the Apollonian run out of road; escapism has limited potential, and (as we are discovering with increasing urgency) the pure reason of post-myth, anti-fantasy “realism” fails to speak of and speak to our deepest humanity.

Tommy the spaceman, the rationalist-in-extremis, floats through meaningless space in a self-constructed bubble. Tomás the conquistador rampages across the word in thrall to primal emotion, destroying all in his way and consumed by the cause. Tommy’s ultimate enlightenment comes as audience to a grand narrative, a work of literature (which is presented to us as a piece of cinema). He makes sense of his situation — as we make sense of the movie’s themes — by having it dramatised for him. The story makes sense of what had previously been meaningless.

I only came to read all of this out of The Fountain because I finally stopped puzzling over the objective existence of the spaceman and the explorer, realising that it doesn’t matter if the three Tommy characters are literally reincarnations of one person or actually one man who never died. I gave up on wondering what the “facts” of the story really are. What really matters is its meaning.

Further reading:

• The Fountain, dir. Darren Aronofsky (2006)

• The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche (1872)

Welcome to the The Double Take, a semi-regular series in which I re-evaluate books and films that I first encountered long ago.

It’s the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jaws, and Spielberg’s adaptation remains one of my favourite films of all time, so I wanted to take another look at the novel that started it all, which I first read as a child.

Is there much going on beneath the surface of this thriller, or does it stay safe in the shallows?

“I had no interest in writing a one-note horror story.” This is Peter Benchley in the introduction to his most famous novel, Jaws. Despite this, horror is where Jaws originated, in the prepubescent mind of the author who, as a child fishing with his father, would “see the dorsal and tail fins of sharks crisscrossing the oil-calm surface” of the ocean, a sight that “spoke of the unknown and the mysterious, of invisible danger and mindless savagery”. It’s in that mindless savagery that the horror emerges, the product of fear and the unknown.

Horror is also what made me, as a young boy, fly recklessly and breathlessly through the novel, unable to look away. I picked it up out of curiosity in a library, and the opening pages so disturbed me that, on re-reading those pages today, I feel the same cold finger trail up my spine and send shivers through the synapses holding memories and phobias together. I vividly remember the opening scene, in which a young woman swimming in the ocean at night thinks she’s snagged her foot on some seaweed. Reaching down into the inky blackness, she cannot find her foot. “Her groping fingers had found a nub of bone and tattered flesh.” The shark had struck, and I was captivated.

Like all life-long readers, I read many books that thoughtless grown-ups often snatched away, deeming me too young for what they contained. Thankfully, no one robbed me of the chance to continue reading Jaws. I devoured it in a single sitting. I remember how disturbed I was by a particular detail, and I remember exactly what that detail was: a young boy is paddling in the sea when — wham! — the shark ploughs into him from below, gulping most of the boy down in one bite, except:

“The boy’s legs were severed at the hips, and they sank, spinning slowly, to the bottom.”

I never got over that image of the child’s legs cartwheeling through the water, spiralling dark clouds of blood behind them, before settling on the ocean floor.

What I had forgotten was all the other stuff Benchley is up to with his novel, the stuff he put in to prevent his book from being a “one-note horror story”. There’s a sub-plot about an extra-marital affair (which grinds the few gears of plot to a total stop halfway through the book), a sub-sub-plot about the mafia and corruption of local government, and a lot of interiority that constantly reminds us that our protagonist is a dick. (That’s a fancy lit-crit term for you.) I wish I could remember what I made of all that stuff as a child. I must have skimmed it until the next shark sighting.

If my dismissive tone didn’t give it away, I’ll make it clear: on my recent re-read of Jaws, I grew quickly and extremely impatient with the stuff Benchley obviously intended to elevate his book. And it seems to me that the author had a similarly conflicted view of those elements. In his introduction, Benchley tells a nice little anecdote about how Fidel Castro reportedly thought Jaws “was a marvelous metaphor about the corruption of capitalism”. Some critics “described it as an allegory about Watergate”, while others saw it as “a classic story of male bonding”. And Benchley describes these rather pedestrian readings of his book as “delightfully overboard”.

If those interpretations are overboard then what, I have to wonder, would be an “appropriate” interpretation? And didn’t he write, just a few paragraphs earlier, that he wanted to tell a story with multiple notes, with layers? As I see it, Benchley is revealing that his intent was for Jaws to sit comfortably in between a schlocky beach-read and so-called “literary fiction”. The result is a novel that’s thoroughly middlebrow, the kind of middlebrow Punch magazine once claimed “consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff that they ought to like”. In Jaws, we get an otherwise galloping story that evokes primal emotions, weighed down with meandering, lifeless attempts at something that appears — though isn’t — intellectually meaty.

In a letter intended for the New Statesman magazine, though never posted, Virginia Woolf defined “highbrow” as a person “of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea”. Let’s put aside the ugly connotation of breeding, which reminds me, incidentally, of an unusually brilliant line in Jaws about the upper-class summer visitors of Amity: “Privilege had been bred into them with genetic certainty.” What matters here is that Benchley is not galloping after any one idea; he’s gesturing broadly at the suggestion of ideas too far in the distance to bother moving towards.

For instance: I’d intended to write this essay around the idea of scapegoats, and how in Jaws blame is cast onto the outsider, whether it’s the shark, or the summer visitors, or the interloping Matt Hooper. There’s a paragraph where Hooper chastises Brody for the folly of “trying to get retribution against a fish”. Brody’s response is that “the fish was an enemy”, its death was demanded by the people of Amity, and Brody himself needs it dead, “for the death of the fish would be a catharsis for him”. Later, Brody’s wife sees that he believes “killing the shark will make everything all right again”.

Unfortunately, what I’ve written above is all there is to say on the subject. The book just doesn’t offer enough material to chew on. There’s a gauze-thin layer of class commentary that begins to flesh out how the shark endangers the town beyond eating people, but that’s usurped by a ridiculous and inconsequential storyline about the mayor being in debt to the mafia. And there’s some racial undertones in the novel that a smarter writer could have played with to highlight the in-group/out-group mentality of small towns, or to comment on the recent civil rights movement. Instead, it reveals (at best) a blind spot in the writer or (at worst) an ugly bigotry. Benchley’s aspiration towards the highbrow is revealed as mere affectation.

Elsewhere on the brow spectrum, there are two kinds of middlebrow. There’s the kind exemplified by the books of Michael Crichton, which switch between storyteller and didactic modes while never integrating one with the other. Crichton is particularly prone to this, veering from page-turning plots to plot-stalling lectures about science and technology. Then there’s the kind of middlebrow that is typified by Jonathan Franzen (much as I’m sure he’d hate my saying so) or the films of Bong Joon-ho, in which the two modes are intricately braided, so the ideas move the story forwards while the story and its characters flesh out the ideas.

Jaws is the former kind of middlebrow. Benchley doesn’t seem to have written the stuff about marriage and class and community because he was deeply interested in those ideas, but because he feared that without them, his novel would be seen as “lesser”, as a “one-note horror story”. This isn’t the reason to write about such subjects; it reads like the author is feeding us the sensible cruciferous vegetables of theme and social commentary, when we just want the dessert of a gripping story.

The irony is that, in his effort to avoid seeming “lowbrow”, he gave up the opportunity to be the best kind of lowbrow. In her letter on the subject, Woolf defines (and actually defends) the lowbrow person as someone “of thoroughbred vitality who rides his body in pursuit of a living at a gallop across life”. The lowbrow novel is fundamentally concerned with the primal, the visceral, the exciting. And what achieves this better than a classic page-turner? The value of a lowbrow novel is specific and fleeting, but there is value. That breathless lurch through a well-choreographed plot while convalescing during an illness or avoiding profundity on a hot beach — that kind of escapism meaningfully colours in the edges of the Good Life.

If Jaws is to fulfil the role of the page-turner on a future reading, I’ll have to skip Part Two of the novel, which squanders its pages on half-baked interpersonal drama. If I want an examination of class or marital fidelity, there are countless other novels that take those topics seriously. And — I made it this far without mentioning Spielberg’s adaptation — if I want an adventure story about three men hunting a shark, the film serves it up so much better.

Still, the one thing I’ll always have and that my re-reading hasn’t nullified in Jaws is the joyful horror I felt as a young boy reading it for the first time. I guess that’s the latest lesson I’ll take away from this re-reading series: the value of a thing is sometimes found in what it once meant to you, long ago.

Further Reading:

• Jaws, Peter Benchley (1974)

• Letter to the editor of the New Statesman, Virginia Woolf (written 1932; posthumously published 1942)

Welcome to the The Double Take, a semi-regular series in which I re-evaluate books and films that I first encountered long ago.

This year is the 30th anniversary of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, a novel that opens itself up to multiple interpretations. Reading it reveals something new or newly relevant to the man I’ve become each time I open it up. But I hadn’t read it in a few years when this anniversary came around, so I decided now is the time.

I found I had a lot to say about this incredible book. So much that I didn’t want to cram it all into one long essay, so this week is an entry in The Double Take series, and in a fortnight, there will be an essay on one of the more controversial aspects of the novel.

Virginia Woolf once announced, “On or about December 1910 human nature changed.” Few shifts in human history can be located with such specificity, though many are more plausible than this modernist credo. 9/11 and the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press make more credible claims on history than Woolf’s hyperbolic pronouncement. In any case, the when of seismic cultural shifts is less interesting than the question of what was rearranged in the tectonic rumblings of society’s fundaments. Such analysis is often left to those of a conservative disposition; progressives are usually too busy jumping up and down in an effort to make the world tremble and shift again. Given the tendency for people to age out of forward-marching progressivism and into backward-glancing traditionalism, those most concerned with the past tend to be, à la Dante, “midway upon the journey of life”.

Not so for Jeffrey Eugenides, who was 33 on the publication of his debut novel, The Virgin Suicides. At that age, he’d have only been glancing over the trench of youth at the no-man’s-land we all cross in mid-life — yet his novel is suffused with the poignant agony of a past just out of reach. The Virgin Suicides does more than simply lionise the golden age of the American ideal, it interrogates the very gold-tinted lens through which we view our yesterdays. Such clarity ought to be brought to any retrospective look at the novel itself, and now that The Virgin Suicides has reached its thirtieth anniversary, it seems like a good time to look back on the book — at what it’s meant to countless readers, myself among them, since its publication.

When I first read The Virgin Suicides, in my early twenties, I was captivated by the world in which the story takes place. It reminded me so much of the world of my upbringing. The novel is set in a suburb in Michigan in the 1970s, but, somehow, it could be the small city where I grew up in British Columbia, Canada, in the late eighties and nineties.

The Virgin Suicides tells the story of one summer in which the Lisbon girls, five sisters in their early to late teens, all commit suicide. What I remember most from my first reading of the novel — what somehow stuck with me as profoundly as the virginal self-slaughter — is a tree. The elm tree in the Lisbon yard, and the elm trees that populate their suburb. I decided to re-read The Virgin Suicides to understand why I was so affected by them. I discovered that the story of the Lisbon girls, the boys who idealise them, and the community that raises them, can be tracked through the misfortune of the trees.

In the midst of the opening scene, in which paramedics attend to Cecelia’s failed suicide, we read about the once “stately” elm trees being sprayed with insecticide to save them from “the fungus spread by Dutch elm beetles”. We are told right here at the start that this effort won’t work — the trees will be cut down, just as the the girls’ lives will be cut short. Their deaths are foretold on page one, as if ineludible fate has something to do with it. Just like our present selves looking back on what was, the novel begins at the end.

In her diary, Cecelia fixates on the demise of their elm tree, suggesting itself an explanation for her eventual death: environmental despair. Of course, the novel doesn’t allow us any easy answers, and other factors complicate this picture of eco-nihilism. What the elm tree stands for (in its stand and then fall) is a question: does her despair come from the loss of the world she’s nostalgic for, or does her despair lead her to notice and focus on such things? This then suggests itself as a question for the reader: does the belief that things were better yesterday motivate us to improve the present moment, or does the glorification of the past only make us bitter about today?

One of my favourite passages in The Virgin Suicides comes when the fathers join together to rake the leaves of those ill-fated elm trees from their yards, to collectively burn the waste of another season:

“In those days before universal pollution we were allowed to burn our leaves, and at night, in one of those last rituals of our disintegrating tribe, every father came down to the street to ignite his family’s pile.”

Unlike those other patriarchs, Mr. Lisbon usually rakes his leaves alone, and when offered a sip from the flask of his neighbour, he demurs, “Thanks no, thanks no.” Though he “would light his pile like the rest of the fathers”, his “anxiety over the fire’s getting out of control would diminish his pleasure”. In this we see a hint that the parental death grip he exerts over his children, born out of a fixation on their safety, might preclude the pleasure of watching them grow up. Throughout the novel, we see the unhealthy ways this provokes rebellion, fourteen-year-old Lux’s sexual encounters with adult men being perhaps the most disturbing. Hypothesis number two for the deaths of his daughters presents itself: helicopter parenting.

The year of the suicides, the leaves strewn across the Lisbon yard go unraked, and when the bonfires are lit and “every house leaped forward, blazing orange”, the Lisbon house remains “dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past [the neighbours’] smoke and flames”. The Lisbon family is unable to maintain “those last rituals” of the community. When Mr Lisbon discovers the retainer of a neighbourhood boy in the house, he knows it is his “parental and neighbourly duty” to return it because “acts like these – simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving – held life together”. But since his daughter’s death, he can no longer bring himself to perform such duties, so he flushes the retainer down the toilet. His failure will become everyone’s failure eventually, when the last of the trees is cut down. “Without trees, there were no leaves to rake, no piles of leaves to burn” – and thereby no community rituals to hold things together.

The Virgin Suicides can be read as a testament to a time long gone, one of shared duties and values, in which rituals were observed and responsibilities were as important as rights. The novel marks the dying moments of this way of life, as well as the semi-heroic yet doomed efforts of some to preserve it: the reliable housewife of whom it could be said, “It was Tuesday and she smelled of furniture polish”; the Parks Department struggling to save the elm trees; the fathers who join forces to uproot the awful fence on which Cecelia died. Those fathers fail in their task, but at least it can be said, as it is in one of the novel’s most memorable lines:

“It was the greatest show of common effort we could remember in our neighbourhood ... and for a moment our century was noble again.”

With the thirtieth anniversary of The Virgin Suicides, we are further away now from when readers first cracked its spine than Eugenides was from its period setting when he wrote it. In defiance of that passing time, The Virgin Suicides remains as relevant as any contemporary novel hopes to be. In it I read a eulogy for the sense of community that has dissipated with the loss of shared rituals; I read a lamentation for the broken relationship between humanity and nature; I’m even made to think of many young people unlikely to ever own a house with a lawn to rake, on which to burn piles of leaves with neighbours. This is just one of many instances in the novel where the past, present, and potential future overlap, and I’m sure I’ll find many more when I next read it.

Having finished this re-reading, I go back and re-read again the final pages. I notice something that I overlooked on my prior readings: there is a moment, after the Parks Department has cut down all the elm trees, in which our collective narrator describes the denuded neighbourhood as “an overexposed photograph”. The light allowed in by the absence of the elms reveals “how truly unimaginative our suburb was, everything laid out on a grid whose bland uniformity the trees had hidden”. A secret is laid bare in this revelation: the past was not golden but just as rusted and rough-edged as today. The past was no better and no worse, it was just yesterday’s present. Just like that, I know that when I come to read The Virgin Suicides again, it will hold something new for me to find, a new way of reading the novel.

A few things remain stable, however, in my various re-readings of The Virgin Suicides. In the dog days of my own youth and approaching mid-life, I read it and take a place among its amorphous gang of observers. Their indeterminacy in the face of an uncertain future is my own uncertainty about where I go next — where we go next as a society. I share with them the sensation that where we stand culturally is made of quicksand. Their confusion about the present moment reverberates through the generations to our own today, as we (and they) seek something stable to hold onto. And their questioning of what exactly happened, and who caused it, and what it all means doesn’t end with the deaths of the Lisbon girls, or even with the last page of the novel; those questions, in the abstract, must be asked of every generation hoping to understand how it got to where it is.

Further Reading:

• The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides (1993)

Welcome to the The Double Take, a semi-regular series in which I re-evaluate books and films that I first encountered long ago. Sometimes it will be something I loved and wonder whether it stands up today; sometimes it will be something I loathed and feel deserves a second chance. Today, a movie that’s “action-heavy and psychology-light”.

When I was growing up, it was a well-established tradition for families to have a weekly movie night. I hear that some clans still cling to this tradition, but it’s diminishing enough that sociologists rarely encounter it in the wild anymore. Such rituals depend on coaxing the eyes of younger family members up from their phones to share in the film, a fight perhaps many parents are tired of having with their kids. Still, I find it hard to believe that a good movie isn’t exciting enough to challenge the phone for their attention. I was lucky enough to have a dad who knew how to pick some scorchers: our family movie nights introduced me to Back to the Future and The Matrix.

From the mists of memory, I recall that on one of those evenings in 1999, my dad brought home a movie called The 13^thWarrior. I’d never heard of it (the film went so far over its budget in production that most of its marketing budget got axed) but I was sold the instant I read on its cover, “From the author of Jurassic Park and the director of Die Hard.” Seeing the title of a film I wasn’t yet allowed to watch and the title of my favourite book excited me more than the parental guidance sticker warning of bloody violence.

Just as Jurassic Park a few years earlier turned my thoughts exclusively to prehistoric predators, The 13^th Warrior made me wish I was on a longship destined for Nordic lands, where I would live and die by my sword. I rented it on VHS so many times I practically owned it, until the day I bought myself a shiny new DVD copy. I’ve always loved those making-of featurettes that reveal how filmmakers blew up the White House or made people fly, so I was thrilled to discover that Eaters of the Dead (the book the movie was adapted from) had its own making-of featurette, a “Note on the Novel” on the last pages. Here, I learned that my new favourite movie went back through its Hollywood production and this slim novella to a single orienting question: Is Beowulf boring?

The answer depends on who you ask. Michael Crichton had a friend who once gave a lecture titled “Bores of Literature”, in which he argued that the Old English poem was too dull for modern audiences. An indignant Crichton made a bet with his friend – he would retell the saga of Beowulf’s great battles in a way that would appeal to a modern reader. Crichton made a number of changes to the original story, most notably turning Beowulf the 6^th century hero into Buliwyf, 10^thCentury Viking chief. The biggest departure, however, was denuding the story’s fantastical elements of their magic. Crichton turned the monster Grendel and his mother into mere mortals, and he reduced the mighty dragon to a line of men carrying flaming torches. As a result, I’d say that Crichton lost his bet.

The novella, published as Eaters of the Dead, is as dull as rust. Crichton obviously believed that verisimilitude is more interesting than fantasy is exciting. This tenet of faith is disproven by his own flat narrative. Crichton’s slavish adherence to a belief that the incredible should always be explicable means not only that there be no dragons here, but also that the story loses its mythic – and therefore its universal – quality. Critics of the time were similarly unimpressed, and Eaters of the Dead might have passed into oblivion while the tale of Beowulf survived.

But more than a decade later, in 1999, the book was made into a movie by John McTiernan, best known for Die Hard and The Hunt for the Red October. The movie – retitled The 13^th Warrior – is a ridiculous, adrenalised, action-heavy and psychology-light adventure that proves the very thing Crichton’s book failed to demonstrate: that the story of Beowulf is fun.

“Fun” is a keyword for The 13^th Warrior, which trims all narrative fat to leave a lean 100 minutes of set-piece violence, unexpected comedy, and great use of practical effects and impressive stunts. The story is tight: twelve Vikings and an Arabic traveller, played by the infinitely charismatic Antonio Banderas, travel to a village far in the north to battle an ancient evil. This gives us clear stakes and external conflict, but it’s in the internal conflict that the movie really shines. Banderas’ Ibn Fadlan is no warrior, nor is he masculine in the mead drinking, sword swinging, built-like-a-mountain way that these Vikings are. This, then, is the story of an outsider attempting to earn a place among others while proving himself to himself.

Ibn spends the movie’s runtime attempting to prove himself to the Vikings, who are exemplars of the “brute force” approach to a challenge. Buliwyf, for instance, does not become chieftain thanks to a democratic vote or some display of oratory skill; he kills the only opposition to his claim on leadership. Ibn, meanwhile, is not a man so made that he can win these contests of strength. He is effete and affected, so he must adapt to the ways of a warrior. Gearing up for battle, a Norseman tosses a massive sword to Ibn, who says, “I cannot lift this.” The Norseman replies, with a smile and a shrug, “Grow stronger!” A little unsympathetic, maybe, but true in its simplicity and useful its directive towards a stoic outlook. If you have a problem, search within for the answer; grow strong enough to lift the sword.

Except then our unlikely hero shows us – and his Norse comrades – a different way to confront the problem of the heavy sword. He takes it to a metal worker and has him reshape the blade into something lighter, curved and refined where it had been bulky and straight. This is not the weapon of the hulking Norsemen, but it’s one that works for Ibn. And his proclivity for thinking, rather than smashing, through a problem manifests in other scenes where he brings his brain to bear on their brawn. When the warriors are cornered and seemingly about to die, they hear thunder and one of them says, grinning, “It gets worse – now it’s going to rain!” A funny moment, and a fine example of heroic stoicism, but while the others laugh, Ibn is calculating a route to safety based on that sound of thunder.

While the bawdy, brawling Vikings were entertaining, it was the thoughtful, sensitive Ibn with whom I most empathised. As a twelve-year-old coming to The 13^th Warrior, I already knew enough to know I was not the “popular type”. I hated sports, and teams, and team sports most of all. I preferred to imagine friends out of the books I retreated into. The skills that I had – reading, thinking, empathising – and the things I aspired to – being a great writer and daydreaming for a living – were not highly valued on the housing estates in which I grew up. This was a lonely way for a kid to be, and I wanted friends, though I wouldn’t lie about who I was to make them. That’s why The 13^th Warrior spoke to the nerdy kid I was: I identified with Ibn, who finds a place for his intellect among the warriors.

A big part of what made me feel so isolated as a kid was the fact that I’d been made to leave my home country of Canada at a young age. It felt like a sort of homecoming to watch The 13^th Warrior, which was shot on location not only in Canada, not just in the same province I’d grown up in (British Columbia), but just a little north of where my grandparents lived on Vancouver Island. Watching the movie today invoked the nostalgia of a land I left long ago, as well as the nostalgia of a piece of cinema that once defined my tastes and interests. Watching the movie today also made clear how my tastes and interests have changed. So much of what I missed about the movie as a kid I noticed now as a grown-up, and a lot of it is just plain stupid.

In our cast of Vikings, we have an Englishman, two Scots, a Czech-Canadian, and several Americans, none of whom bother with even a hint of a Scandinavian accent, creating a dialectical stew that makes no geographic or historical sense. There are subplots that wave for attention only to immediately give up and wander away. Ibn teaches Buliwyf how to write a sentence in the dirt, and the movie signals that this will come to something later. It’s never brought up again. Then there are indiscreet glances shared between Buliwyf and the king’s daughter, longing stares that imply a romance… but it remains, in every sense, unconsummated.

All of this is undoubtedly related to the movie’s turbulent production. After McTiernan’s version of the film went down poorly with test audiences, Michael Crichton was brought in to reshoot key scenes. I suspect this also accounts for the jarring tonal shifts that occur throughout the movie. At times, The 13^th Warrior is clearly positioning itself as a historical epic in the mode of Gladiator or Braveheart. Then, erupting out of nowhere and just as quickly subsiding, we get moments of pure B-movie cheese, such as Ibn proving himself as a rider by making his horse leap over one of the Vikings (which looks even more ridiculous than it sounds).

Because of the movie’s own uncertainty about itself, each viewer must decide how to view it. You can criticise its many failures, in which case I don’t recommend wasting your time with The 13^th Warrior. Or you can lean into its inherent, dated silliness and have a good time. During my recent re-evaluation, one particular scene made me see the choice I had. As Ibn (who does not speak the Viking’s language) travels with his new cohort, he listens to them banter until he begins to understand what they’re saying. One of them asks, “Where did you learn our language?” and Ibn replies, “I listened!” Though ridiculous, this stylistic choice makes sense. You can’t be reading subtitles when every scene after this will be filled with sword swinging and majestic settings. Forget logic and realism in The 13^th Warrior; stay for the blood, guts, and chuckles.

The same principle holds for the protagonists and their lack of characterisation. In the script, each Viking is given an epithet after their name: we have Buliwyf the Leader, Skeld the Superstitious, Hyglak the Quarrelsome, and these single-word descriptions go as far as the movie does in exploring who they are. There is a mythic quality to this that makes them seem more like archetypes, and if that seems too high-minded for you in a movie like this, then consider their thinness as one way that McTiernan makes room to stuff the film with action. We know who to root for and who to root against (the bad-guys also lack any motivation, but they eat people, so we know not to like them). To ask for more is to miss the point.

Here’s the question I was faced with coming out of my re-watch of this movie: is it enough? Is it enough to be excited, thrilled by the spectacle, in spite of my intellectual objections to the filmmaking? In the first edition of this series, I re-read Jurassic Park and concluded that it was a silly and entertaining piece of lowbrow fiction that was worth holding onto, given how important it was to me as a kid and how it still connects me to youthful joy. But surely there’s a limit. It’s endearing to know that an adult still holds onto a childhood memento for nostalgia’s sake; it’s indicative of some stunted development to discover they keep a room full of teddies and toys. If I have to choose between Jurassic Park and The 13^th Warrior – and I think I should – I’ll stick with the book.

What of the argument that there is inherent value in anything that can inspire awe and wonder, which so often emerge from the kind of excitement provoked by movies like The 13^th Warrior? Roger Ebert put it best in his review of 1999’s The Mummy:

“There is a little immaturity stuck away in the crannies of even the most judicious of us, and we should treasure it.”

Granted, but do the books and films that allow us to treasure that immaturity have to be infantile? Do they have to be as poorly put together as The 13^th Warrior? Surely it’s much better to turn to films like Into the Spider-Verse or Jaws, which tap into joy and excitement without sacrificing craft or asking the audience to dumb themselves down for two hours. So, I look back fondly on the relationship I had as a young teen with The 13^th Warrior, and I move on. To paraphrase the apostle: when I was a child, I watched movies like a child; now I’ve grown up, it’s time to put away childish things.

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Further reading:

• The 13^th Warrior, written by William Wisher Jr. & Warren Lewis; dir. by John McTiernan (1999)

• Eaters of the Dead, Michael Crichton (1976)

• The Mummy, Roger Ebert, in rogerebert.com (orig. 1999)

Further reading:

• The 13^th Warrior, written by William Wisher Jr. & Warren Lewis; dir. by John McTiernan (1999)

• Eaters of the Dead, Michael Crichton (1976)

• The Mummy, Roger Ebert, in rogerebert.com (orig. 1999)

Welcome to a brand new, semi-regular series, The Double Take. I’ll be re-reading and re-watching books and films that I first encountered long ago. Sometimes it will be something I loved and want to know if it stands up today, sometimes it will be something I loathed and feel deserves a second chance.

In this first edition, I’m looking at a novel that held an important place in my childhood and wondering what my adult-self makes of it.

NB: This is an extended version of an essay published on the Substack Apocrypha (formerly The Books That Made Us).

In the mid-nineties, everyone was mad for the Mesozoic. A wave of dino-mania had begun a decade earlier, Michael Crichton had written two novels about genetically engineered dinosaurs, and one of the most famous directors of all time had turned them into films. However, I knew nothing about any of this yet, nor did I know I was about to discover the book that would dominate my adolescent reading.

Back then, I was ten years old, and I’d been forced to pack up a few toys and clothes to make the journey with my family halfway across the planet. We moved from the mountainous, fully seasonal west coast of Canada to England, a country with two seasons: raining, and raining less. I left my whole life behind, saying goodbye to beloved family members and all my friends. Almost as soon as we arrived in this foreign land, my parents divorced. I felt stranded, powerless, alone. Like many kids in such a way, the local library became a safe haven. Its rows of alphabetised books made sense amidst the apparent senselessness of life, and the books themselves offered meaningful plots and tidy endings. In a book, I could escape the chaos of the real world.

The book I escaped into more times than any other, by a factor of an easy hundred, was Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. I can’t remember the first time I read it, probably because once I’d found it on that library shelf, I read and re-read it so often that it felt like it had always been part of my life. No doubt the global phenomenon of Spielberg’s film adaptation made me reach for the book that first time, but it was the story that had me coming back to it over and over again.

The novel’s plot is well known to anyone over the age of ten – the genetically engineered creatures in a dinosaur theme park escape their cages and terrorise the island ­– but its genesis is less well known. As the nineties began, author Michael Crichton was expecting his first child and, as he told one interviewer, “I found that I couldn’t walk past a toy store without buying a stuffed toy.” All well and paternal, but he noticed that he was buying an absurd number of dinosaur teddies. His wife couldn’t understand the sudden mania, reminding him that they were having a daughter. Crichton insisted that girls liked dinosaurs too, but eventually he had to concede that he was obsessed with the prehistoric animals.

His interest went back to the start of the eighties, when he’d written a screenplay about a genetically modified dinosaur. He couldn’t make the script work, so he set it aside. Every year, his mind went back to the screenplay, and every year, he resisted picking it up because he didn’t want to be “seen as part of a trend”:

“But the next year there was still a dinosaur mania and the year after that it was still going strong, so I finally realised that it was always going to be here.”

So, husband and wife went through their own gestational periods, hers literal and his literary, and the first draft of Jurassic Park (this time a novel) was finished after his daughter was born. The conceit of genetically engineered dinosaurs remained from the screenplay, but the novel introduced a central theme: humanity’s efforts to dominate nature. Jurassic Park explores how control is often an illusion intended to soothe us of the pain caused by life’s chaos. While the park’s owner is convinced he can sublimate nature to his whims, Ian Malcolm – rock star mathematician and advocate of chaos theory – argues that “the island will quickly proceed to behave in unpredictable fashion”.

Protected from some of the buffeting of life’s stormy seas by a lifeboat made of books such as Jurassic Park, I was soon drawn to the idea of writing my own stories. No doubt I thought I could write a sense of meaning and order onto the complexities of life. I wanted to control something, anything, as I suffered the tribulations of puberty and the trial of my parents’ divorce while simultaneously adjusting to being a stranger in a strange land.

Jurassic Park showed me the kind of book I might want to write. In the year after first reading it, I wrote countless copy-cat versions of Crichton’s novel. I littered my own renditions with sentences lifted from the original text, phrases that appealed to my incipient sensibilities as a writer. I was an amateur mimicking an expert to work out how it’s done. Crichton’s novel also made me want to be a palaeontologist. Like Bruce Wayne and Batman, I thought I would dig up bones by day and write novels by night.

Except – like a palaeontologist of the mind, I’ve suddenly unearthed an earlier memory. I am climbing over a chain link fence, and as I attempt to hop down the other side, my shoelace gets tangled in the wire. I flip over and dangle upside down for a brief eternity, before the lace snaps and I land on my back. An ambulance is called, and as it races me to the hospital, a kindly paramedic asks what I want to be when I grow up. Probably concussed and always eager to impress adults, I announce, “I’m going to be a landscape architect.” I have no idea where it comes from; I don’t even know what it means; I’m probably parroting something I’d heard before and thought sounded grand.

Looking back on that scene now, I have no doubt that the words “landscape architect” came out of my mouth because I thought they sounded impressive. I’m just as sure that my pride at being able to recite obscure facts about palaeontology was about feeling bigger and more capable than I was. I felt the same about my ability to sculpt a story out of language. In year seven, my English teacher would point to me when a student asked for the spelling of a word and say, “Ask the human dictionary.” I loved that. It made me feel just as precocious, just as special, to have read at that young age a book that was officially taxonomized as “for adults”.

There might be more to it than just feeling clever for one’s age. In Jurassic Park, fossil hunter Alan Grant has a theory about why young children learn the phonetically-contorted names of dinosaurs – it is “a way of exerting power over the giants” that symbolise their parents. Grant believes that dinosaurs “personified the uncontrollable force of looming authority”, and if kids can name them, they can tame them. Of course, the grown-up experts in the novel know far more about dinosaurs, but that knowledge can’t save them from the predations of carnivores who don’t care how smart these humans are. There are limits to what we can control.

Jurassic Park was the first adult book I ever read, a fact that will forever give it a special place in my reading life. Actually, why the qualifier? What’s important in my reading life is important to my life, full stop. That’s why I eventually felt I had to re-read it as an adult, even while knowing it probably wouldn’t live up to my adult standards for great literature. I’m so glad I came back to it.

Returning to Jurassic Park after an absence of almost two decades, I feel as though I’ve resumed a friendship after a lengthy pause, and I feel like no time has passed at all, and I am overcome with a sort of giddy joy to have rediscovered a thing I’d almost forgotten I once had. Re-reading Jurassic Park in my thirties turned out to be a reunion with a joyous, absurd kind of fun that I’d mostly outgrown but was pleased to discover I still had a taste for.

Let me start with all the caveats. Jurassic Park is not a well-written book and Michael Crichton was not a literary writer, if by that we mean interested in language or thematic nuance. If I were in a complimentary mood, I might describe Crichton’s prose as workmanlike. These are technically sentences, but everything is filtered through his no-frills, emotionally unambiguous writing, which would not be out of place in a book for young readers. I was a little deflated to discover that reading Jurassic Park at a young age maybe had less to do with my being precocious and more to do with the book being relatively unsophisticated.

There’s an old Hollywood maxim that only bad books make great films, and Jurassic Park is evidence of this. One of the smartest improvements Steven Spielberg’s film made on the source material was giving the lead character, Alan Grant, an actual character arc. In the film, we see him go from gruffly resisting the idea of having kids, while tormenting an unfortunate child at his dig site, to forming a makeshift family with the two children he guides to safety through the disaster-stricken park. In the book, Grant begins the story liking children and ends it still liking children.

Characters in Jurassic Park are not complex people but mere vehicles for ideas and the mechanisms by which those ideas can be debated on the page. This is made most obvious during the multiple occasions when the story comes to such a sudden stop it could send its characters hurtling through a windscreen, then idles for several pages while Ian Malcolm, or John Hammond, or Malcolm again, or Henry Wu, or Malcolm one more time delivers a speech about the hubris of science or the drive to invent.

That said, some of those big ideas in the novel are fascinating and hold up today. The most central idea in Jurassic Park is the value of science and how it intersects with commerce. This relationship between entertainment and progress is how we end up with the dinosaur theme park in which the novel is set. Having come up with the idea of cloning a dinosaur, a question naturally arose: “Who’s going to pay for it?” Crichton said:

“The cost would most certainly be phenomenal – and what is it really worth to Stanford University to have a dinosaur? [...] I think if dinosaurs ever are cloned, it will be done by somebody for entertainment. [...] The fact that these dinosaurs are made for a park, it seemed to me, emphasized rather nicely the idea that all this amazing technology is being used for essentially commercial and frivolous purposes.”

While re-reading Jurassic Park, I kept thinking about the technology that influences most of our daily lives. Futurists at the dawn of the internet may have dreamed of democratised access to knowledge, an online populace of autodidacts becoming well informed real-world citizens. What we got instead was fail videos and cat memes, trolls and comic book forums, blogs about Marvel movies and recycled content passing as journalism. As Malcolm puts it in Jurassic Park, “In the information society, no one thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.” Now, that really was prescient.

Jurassic Park is a book that I have a deep attachment to, one that supplies me with a reliable fount of fun every time I read it, even in spite of the fact that I can’t defend the aesthetic or literary merits of the book. Crichton’s prose is uninspired, the book is populated by single attributes in human form, and their character arcs have all the curve of a straight line. And yet...

I still take refuge in the simplicity of Jurassic Park and the familiarity of Crichton’s voice. I revel in how the novel taps into a universal fascination with dinosaurs, catalysed in my younger self by this very book and renewed by it in later years. I love the digressions into paleontological disputes of the nineties that have since been resolved and anxieties about technologies (such as CD-ROM) that have since become obsolete. It’s reassuring to be reminded that life – as Malcolm argues in the book – is unpredictable.

It’s also good to be reminded that just as concerns about the printing press, monster movies, or fax machines once mattered then faded away, some of our present concerns will also vanish in time. If I could speak to my childhood self, I’d tell him that much of what he’s worried about (our parents’ divorce, living in a new country, struggling to make friends) will vanish in time. Life will be chaotic because, as Jurassic Park shows, life is chaos. I would remind him that the message of his favourite book is that the attempt to control everything is doomed to failure. Resist the urge to be in control, and avoid the hubris of Dr Wu, head scientist at Jurassic Park, who says of the dinosaurs:

“These animals are genetically engineered to be unable to survive in the real world. They can only live here in Jurassic Park. They are not free at all. They are essentially our prisoners.”

Be more like Malcolm, who gives a wry smile and says (to be quoted by readers and fans of the film until the end of time): “Life will find a way.”

Further reading:

• Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton (1991)

• The Making of Jurassic Park, Don Shay & Jody Duncan (1993)

• What Happened to the Future? Founders Fund manifesto, which you can read here.