Books too good for film

Alan Glynn argues that, in the lead-up to the new 3D Baz Luhrmann production of F. Scott Fitzgerald's wonderful The Great Gatsby, the American classic constitutes a perfect example of books which should never have been adapted for film. The characters are too perfectly described, Glynn writes convincingly, that any screen portrayal simply fails to live up to the Fitzgerald's prose and, ultimately, the character seems significantly diminished.

When you're young, Gatsby's desperate pursuit of Daisy might break your heart. When you're older, the fragility of Gatsby's reinvented self might crack your soul. Whenever you do read it, though, you'll never be in any doubt that you're reading something extraordinary. If the book is tugging at your heart, you'll find the language lush and iridescent, and the imagery sensuous, with its calibrated system of blues and yellows, of eyes and water, of honey and straw. If it's chipping at your soul, you'll find the language weighted and resonant, and the imagery quite simply unforgettable, with its poetic elevation of the quotidian to the level of the profoundly philosophical.

In fact, with the elaborate but unstrained imagery of the Valley of the Ashes and the eyes of Dr TJ Eckleburg, Fitzgerald pretty much did what Joyce did in 'Ulysses' and Eliot in 'The Waste Land'. By pitching an all-seeing God against an all-pervading advertising billboard, he looks back in sadness to an imagined lost world, but also looks forward in anxiety to a burgeoning new one.