The Cursed Sequel

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I've been writing about Singapore today, and for some reason, it brought to mind a book one of my secondary school friends once gave me to read: Scarlett, by Alexandra Ripley, which is the sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind. Now. Gone With The Wind is not the first book on the list of "needs a sequel". In fact, I will daringly suggest it won't make the list at all. (Gasp!) There are just so many worthier candidates: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, to name one. The Empire Strikes Back, aka SW Episode V, is another. Notice the similarities between the examples I have mentioned. Uh huh... think about it... yeah - you got it right: they were created with sequels in mind.

Doh.

Now you can give me any amount of cribbage, but man, the story is told. The interesting part is finished, or else the book wouldn't have ended. The characters have changed as much as they realistically can, and now they're done. "I wanna know what happens neeeeext.." you wail through your OCD-afflicted pot-haze. Quit being such a baby. (And next time, read Tolkein.) "But... but... it's so open-ended" - yes, it was open-ended. Open-ENDED. Finito. You understando?

There's just no way you can tack on an ending to a well-told story, which is what GWTW is (and how!). Writing a sequel means you tack on a new beginning, and then a new middle and a new end. How presumtuous can you get?

OK. So this project was doomed from the start. But apparently, that ain't enough for these guys, so they go and hand the sequel contract over to someone other than the author of the original. The project now goes into self-destruct.

No, really. Try it. Get a contract to write the official seventh HP book and if you are not JK Rowling, you will find that finished pages begin to shrivel up and smoke, and your computer eats the last sentence even as you type this one. And people, when your writing begins to speak to you in such unmistakable tones, you could try listening.

Alexandra Ripley did not listen. Oh no. Dauntless as any heroine in her own bodice-rippers, she persevered, deaf to the anguished cries of the ink that dripped from her nib, and finished the sequel to Gone With The Wind.

Is it any surprise at all that it turned out the way it did?

To her credit, Ripley was smart enough to know she couldn't possibly live up to the original characters or the locale, so she starts off by ditching everyone and everything she can. Mammy's dead when Scarlett gets to Tara. Ashley stays behind in Atlanta, never to be seen again in the book after a brief suicide attempt. Scarlett sells Tara (!!!!!) to Suellen, and quite unforgivably throws in Wade and Ella as freebies never to be seen again, and rushes off to Charleston. Whole new place, whole new set of characters - except for Rhett Butler of course. And then Ripley finds a way to make him disappear, too - Scarlett ships off to Ireland to meet her family on the O'Hara side. Nice tactic. We end up spending the whole damn book with people and places never mentioned in GWTW.

Even that might have been forgivable, if Ripley didn't fail spectacularly in capturing even the one character she keeps - Scarlett. This new person we see is like a bad caricature of the movie Scarlett: she says "fiddle-dee-dee" and "God's nightgown" twice every page. She morphs not just herself, but all the people around her so that she has men falling over themselves to vie for her attentions - even though now she's a thrice-married old woman by their standards. In the original, nobody but Rhett (and maybe Ashley) even looked twice at Scarlett after her first husband died.

So Scarlett goes to Ireland, impresses the pants off everyone, has Rhett's baby, collects men's hearts, blah blah blah. It's just another of Ripley's usual romance novels - nothing wrong with it, except that it's so forgettable. The travesty is that Ripley was allowed to use Scarlett and Rhett's names for her fake, cookie-cutter characters.

And you know what happens in the end? The whole village where Scarlett lives is burning down or something, and Rhett comes to save her and her daughter, who's actually his kid but he doesn't know it yet. That's right. He saves Scarlett O'Hara, who is at that moment a damsel in distress.

And then he hands her the line, "You belong with me, darlin'." Scarlett demurely surrenders to his embrace. They decide to take their daughter and roam the world, living happily ever after.

Tara is forgotten. As are Scarlett's two other children.

Ah, God, poke my eyes out, please.

Tags:

• books