"In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars"

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

-The Great Gatsby, F.Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby...one of the great American novels of all time. I have always felt it's a book best read in autumn, as the shimmering promise of summer fades away into the depths of another winter. And indeed, that is what The Great Gatsby is...a description of gilded moneyed America, its denizens dancing oblivously through the Jazz Age, liberated from the horrors and austerity of the First World War, yet knowing in their hearts that they would all shortly pay the price for their frivolous excesses.

Our current Sixth years have had the pleasure of studying the novel, beginning last year in Fifth Year. And indeed, students weren't long in recognising the relevance of the novel to modern Ireland, and the travails we face in the post Celtic Tiger era. Gatsby, on the surface a confident self made man of money, is revealed to have reinvented himself, perhaps often through somewhat nefarious means. At the end of the novel, he is exposed as a lonely hollow man, bereft of any real connections with anyone, the trappings of wealth mere baubles. It is not so hard to draw parallels with some of the stories of conspicuous consumption raked from the ashes of our late lamented Celtic Tiger here in this country.

It is timely to discuss this wonderful novel on a weekend when a glamorous slice of Americana arrives in Dublin as the city plays host to a college football game involving "Fighting Irish" Notre Dame and Navy.The book is a wonderful evocation of the concept of the "American Dream", the idea that everyone can reach his or her potential if they really want to. It was this very dream that attracted the forefathers of many "Fighting Irish" fans to American shores, to escape the deprivations of Europe. But the novel is unsparing in its critique of the flip side of this dream..Gatsby eventually dies alone, brutally. Only his father and narrator Nick Carraway bother to attend the funeral of a once venerated socialite.

Later this year Baz Luhrman will release his take on The Great Gatsby. Luhrman is no stranger to the English or Learning Support Departments here in St Mary's. Students and teachers alike have admired his works. Strictly Ballroom, the Australian rite of passage movie centred around the ruthlessness of competitive ballroom dancing  is often a component of Leaving Certificate film studies. Junior Cert students enjoy Luhrman's modern adaption of Romeo and Juliet, with Montagues and Capulets swapping machine guns for daggers.

Those of us of a certain vintage may remember Robert Redford as the eponymous Gatsby in the earlier film version. Leonardo DiCaprio does the honours in this year's offering. You can check out the trailer for this year's film here:    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1343092/

There are some excellent teaching and learning resources to help students better understand the novel.
Here are some of them:

http://www.shmoop.com/great-gatsby/

http://classiclit.about.com/od/greatgatsbythe/a/aa_greatgatsbyq_3.htm

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/gatsby/

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storyCode=6064341

For further help and resources in English pop over to the St Mary's English Department blog at http://stmarysenglish13.blogspot.ie/