Opinion What happens next

Time and again such books enter into a competition with the original they are bound to lose. So why does anyone continue to try? Partly because there are a few contradictions proving the general rule. Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,for instance,which seizes on two minor characters in Hamlet,and uses them as a pair of spectacles through which we look differently at the main action of the play.

A similar kind of ingenuity — although less flashily done — appears in Wide Sargasso Sea,in which Jean Rhys imagines the life of the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre. In the novel’s luscious yet brilliantly well-organised prose,the “mad woman in the attic” is given a background,a life,a love and a tragedy that make it impossible for anyone who’s read it to think in the same way again about her husband. Rhys actually manages to enrich a book commonly agreed to be a masterpiece before she went anywhere near it.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Wide Sargasso Sea provide their own rich rewards — but they also teach a lesson,and anyone interested in sequeling or prequeling would be well advised to learn it: Don’t tread too hard on the heels of the original. Take the original text as a stable thing — and have serious fun with it. Put like this,the whole business starts to look less like a form of literary piggybacking,and more like a sort of playfulness. Maybe,indeed,a sort of playfulness that is especially dynamic and relevant in our current age.

Of course people wrote sequels back in the day. The instinct to make money a second time round,with a book that follows a roughly similar format to its predecessor,is as old as the hills. So is the human instinct to hanker after the truth about the “what happened next?” in a story line. But now this urge feels more like a reflection of the spirit of the age than a matter of one-offs popping up here and there.

This is true not just in books but generally,throughout the arts. Think of the visual arts,and the kind of referencing and quotation we find in the modernists (Picasso),then practised upon the modernists with even more vigour by their successors (Hockney on Picasso). Think of the movies,and the reworking of old titles from within the same culture (too numerous to mention),or lifted from others (Asian into American,for example). When we look at the bigger picture,and place all these different kinds of mash-ups side by side in our mind’s eye,it seems likely that something fundamental is happening. Something that amounts to a big question about the authenticity of a stable text. Can such a thing be said to exist anymore? Academics have had their doubts for years,announcing the death of the author,the impossibility of narrative omniscience and whatnot. Now general readers,whose own routine practice (thanks to the online world) is at once more interactive and more volatile,are getting in on the act.

The best sequels do not intend to “finish” whatever stories they tackle because they think they are somehow incomplete. They are instead based on the assumption that no story is ever finished — and present themselves as a chunk of life,not as complete and rounded histories.

The writer is a former poet laureate of Britain. His most recent novel is ‘Silver’,a sequel to ‘Treasure Island’

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