There will be no Atonement

Feeling the winter cold, and the need to stay in more, I read The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Now this is a very famous book, and you may know it well. I read it knowing nothing about it whatsoever, as is my shameless desire when approaching all books and films. The less you know, the greater the surprise ahead.

I was surprised. On the front cover of the book, there is a drawing of an old balding man filling an expensive tailored suit. I assumed that The Great Gatsby was such a man, and that the book was going to follow the life of a terribly boring pompous old git, with some supposed nuggets of humour thrown in. I hadn’t enjoyed or seen the comedy in Anthony Burgess’ Enderby books, and - to be honest - I imagined that The Great Gatsby might be in a similar vein. A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers are truly fine books, but Enderby just annoyed me.

One should never judge a book by its cover. The Great Gatsby is actually a little gem of a book. It is little, it is easy to read and it comes with a warning that we should all heed. Don’t be drawn in by the razzle dazzle of glamorous, famous and moneyed people, and never aspire to become one of them. They are shallow, vacuous leeches that will bleed you dry, run you down and abandon you in your hour of need. Okay, it won’t be my book of the century, and it didn’t captivate me in the way that John Steinbeck does, but it was well worth the time it took to follow the words within.

Since reading the book, I have discovered that I was well and truly duped by the cover art in more ways than one. The original cover art is apparently as famous as the book itself. Fitzgerald even proclaimed that he had written the piece of art into his novel. No, the original cover art wasn’t of an old balding rich man that belies the story within. It was of two reclining nudes, each sat in the iris of a disembodied eye, and the eyes stare out at you from dark blue skies that lie above the scene of a brightly lit amusement park. I don’t know what impression I would have formed of the book before reading it with the ‘right’ cover, but I may have found myself more tempted to lunge towards its haunting embrace. The book in my possession sat unread on the shelf for a year. And if you’re wondering, the Great Gatsby was 33 years old and no mention is made of premature ageing or a receding hairline.

With an awareness that it is soon to be released in cinematic form, I quickly moved on to The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. As I type, it is snowing, but not settling, and my hands are cold. The Kite Runner reminded me that sometimes in life we can make terrible circumstantial decisions and act in a way that is morally abhorrent even to our own sweet selves. In some instances there can be no atonement. We can’t undo the past. The day that we commit a sin that will haunt us forever, is the day that we start to die a little inside.

Regretful sin doesn’t need money, glamour and fame, and I doubt that they make it any easier to live with. A life of good works won’t undo it either. You just have to learn to live with it - gnawing you apart - and hope that you can get by with it existing alongside you forever. And there lies the fate of the human that travels too far away from its own moral code.