Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition
In Competition No. 2573 you were invited to submit the synopsis of a sequel-that-was-never-written to a well-known novel.
Sequels to books and films have a poor reputation, the assumption being that, with the odd exception (The Godfather: Part II, for example), they will almost certainly fall short of the original. I learned this lesson early having looked forward with rabid excitement to Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, which failed to live up to its predecessor.
You were all on sparkling form this week. In John O’Byrne’s follow-up to Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield’s repressed incestuous desire finds its true expression and he marries Phoebe, but lives unhappily ever after. Josh Ekroy resurrects Jude Fawley’s son only to subject him to an even more miserable life than his dad’s (his five children drown themselves ‘coz we woz off our heads on acid’). And in Mike Morrison’s sequel to Emma, our heroine abandons Mr Knightley and takes off with Harriet Martin to live à deux in a Surrey village.
Honourable mentions to Derek Morgan, D.A. Prince, G.M. Davis, and Gerard Benson. The winners are printed below and get £25 each. Brian Murdoch bags the bonus fiver.
Frodo’s Last Ride: vol. IV of Lord of the Rings
After many centuries in the Grey Havens, Frodo becomes bored with composing epics in High Elven, a spurious language invented by a slightly dippy Oxford don and understood, presumably, only by elves. Hijacking a banana-boat, he sails to Middle Earth, accompanied by Gandalf (now styled ‘the Technicolored’) and Legolas, who is tired of being the only gay elf in town and has arranged to meet his lost love, Gimli the dwarf, at the Prancing Pony. Back in the Shire, little time has passed, and Frodo hears how, at Mount Doom, the great ring had landed on a small ledge, followed by an only slightly charred Gollum, who had reclaimed it and escaped. Frodo and the gang travel through strange lands, including a mysterious horizontal forest (since the Ents have now found the Entwives), and this time Frodo has no compunction about killing Gollum, keeping the ring, and dominating the world.
Brian Murdoch
Cynical donkey Benjamin narrates Orwell’s Manimal Farm. Napoleon, destroying the trappings of Animalism which his human friends disparage as crude, utilises the wealth of the farm to acquire the trappings of Capitalism. Buying the local village football team, he at first compels the animals to attend matches but soon finds all bar Benjamin becoming fans so fanatical they’re willing to waive their meagre rations for tickets. The pigs teach the sheep to swear, notionally so they can assist the dogs in their bullying, but really just because they think it a laugh. Religion is reintroduced, with Boxer as deity, though Benjamin notices there is more fasting than feasting on the calendar. Democracy is tried at human insistence but fails when no one — including the candidates — can tell which candidate stands for what. When reading lessons are discontinued to make way for Literacy Hour, Benjamin abandons all hope of an audience.
Adrian Fry
We Need to Talk About Jane
First come flashbacks — of dark guilty secrets Jane’s memory had erased or distorted: the ‘little kindnesses’ to Helen Burns and her Lowood schoolmates, laid to peace with gentle pillow or ministering of arsenic trioxide, masked by symptoms of cholera. Then Mrs Reed, Mrs Rochester, Jane’s rich uncle, now finally poor dumb Pilot, all murdered. Jane is questioned by police investigating the fire, but then Jane, as Mr Brocklehurst had warned before his untimely ‘accident’, is a consummate liar. However, the pressure begins to tell. The questioning, persistent flashbacks, the jealousy engineered by Grace Poole’s Iago-like manipulations, finally tip Jane towards the abyss. She becomes increasingly erratic, disorientated, with violent outbursts. Grace presents Rochester with the truth about his wife’s past and a stark choice: the gallows, or… Sadly it is agreed that Jane be consigned to the attic. Grace takes custody of the keys, with a calm, reassuring smile.
David Silverman
Thirty years after the publication of For Whom The Bell Tolls, Ernesto Jordan, the fruit of his parents’ earth-moving love affair during the Spanish Civil War, runs a dental practice in Gopher Hole, Indiana. The traumatic knowledge that a bloody conflict cost his father’s life before his birth has convinced him that the virile, combative ideal masks a death wish. But as the nation divides over Vietnam, blacks rise in revolt and feminism stalks the land, he finds that golf, television and quiet respectability are no longer an option. Flying to Vietnam as a special correspondent, he meets Grace Dyke, hardcore feminist. To his disgust, he is lured into her bed; then Grace, under pressure, confesses to being a Communist agent. Even more disgusted, Ernesto dumps her and takes to drink. Two years later he has a disgusting urge to vote for Nixon but courageously dies fighting it.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Marquis of the Flies
Now 65, Ralph, a web designer, returns to the island to stay in one of its five-star hotels, where he bumps into Jack, a merchant banker down on his luck. They exchange stories about their pension funds. On a whim, they travel into the jungle to retrace their footsteps, and pray at Piggy’s grave. Disturbing sounds are heard. They watch, appalled, as ten or 11 people, split into two camps, are forced to fight for food and water, and are subjected to punishments such as eating live animals, and being buried up to the neck in poisonous quicksand. Finding the conch, they blow it in an effort to summon help, and prevent a repetition of the cruelties witnessed in their youth. Unhappily, they are captured, and brought before two pygmies, who tease them mercilessly, and film them. They are reprieved only when viewers phone in and vote them both out.
Bill Greenwell
The Death and Discoveries of Tristram Shandy, Gent.
‘I had always been interested to discover whether death was a —–, : or a .’ From the first sentence of its opening chapter (entitled ‘Finis’) to its concluding Preface, Sterne’s sequel, described as a ‘sort of autothanatography’, follows Tristram to and fro — and sometimes along — the bourn from which no traveller has previously returned. On this side we hear Dr Strabismus proclaim the astonishing success of his cure just as Tristram expires; on the other, we meet many who have gone before, including Uncle Toby ‘marvellously re-groined’. Frequent digressions — St George and St Francis debating the treatment of dragons, an experiment on the effects of inhaling the odour of sanctity, the proceedings of the Council for the Allotment of Hosts for Transmigratory Souls — punctuate a narrative which ends, or at least stops, ‘in that here and now, that is neither now nor here but nowhere’.
W.J. Webster
No. 2576: Promises, promises
You are invited to submit New Year’s resolutions of well-known figures past and present (150 words maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2576’ by 18 December or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.
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