The greatness of gatsby

Over the past two decades, I've read the book at least once a year. I'm about to have my own first novel published and noticed, on a final re-reading, with a shiver of fear and adoration, that I've unconsciously echoed Gatsby a little in my own writing – a stolen description of a voice here, a filched image of a landscape there. I'll surely have a quote from it read at my funeral.

The Great Gatsby grips you and doesn't let go. After a slow commercial start – the original 1926 print run only sold 20,000 copies – Fitzgerald's masterpiece has captured generation after generation of young men and women. Nearly 90 years on, literary contemporaries of Fitzgerald who eclipsed him in his lifetime have faded far from our hearts. Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Dos Passos – we know their names, that they are important, we still study them at university, but do we love them? From the great modernist works of the Lost Generation – the broken young who came of age during the First World War – perhaps only the novels of Ernest Hemingway and the poetry of TS Eliot live on in the way Fitzgerald's Gatsby does today.

The Great Gatsby – which is about to come to our cinema screens in one fittingly great garish 3D lump of a film from the king of kitsch, Baz Luhrmann – is a simple and timeless love story. That's why it works. Gatsby started life a poor hick kid with a dream of a good and great life – a life he saw as defined by wealth. As a young teenage soldier on home leave during the First World War, he meets and falls in love with Daisy Fay – a golden girl, the closest thing America would have to an aristocrat. The impoverished Gatsby knows he can never have the girl unless his pockets are lined with gold. Fitzgerald almost tells the whole story in the epigraph to the novel – which comes in the shape of a short poem written by Thomas Park D'Invilliers, a Fitzgerald alter ego:

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her,

if you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

till she cry, "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,

I must have you".

What man hasn't wanted to wear the gold hat to win the girl of his dreams? Certainly Fitzgerald did – and the novel draws on the painful, class-riven courtship he had with his crazy and cursed muse, Zelda, who later became his wife. Gatsby seeks out the gold hat through bootlegging; Fitzgerald through writing. Gatsby runs with the gangster who fixed the infamous World Series of 1919 – loosely based on the real-life crimes of the notorious hoodlum Arnold Rothstein – and becomes fabulously wealthy. His parties rival the bacchanals of ancient Rome. In fact, Fitzgerald toyed with naming the book Trimalchio In West Egg – a nod to a character in the Satyricon by Roman writer Petronius, a gauche nouveau-riche who hosted parties infamous for their blatant consumption. West Egg is, of course, the fictional home of Gatsby – and a parallel to the golden coast of Long Island where the real-life rich and famous of the Jazz Age founded their endless playground.

Gatsby only acquires his colossal wealth in order to gain access to the world of Daisy, now married to the vile patrician boor Tom Buchanan, and bring back to life the lost past of that teenage summer when he fell in love and felt alive and real. He momentarily does win the girl – the girl with the voice that is "full of money" – but Daisy and Tom live in a closed, powerful, in-bred world that will never give an upstart like Gatsby an entree, and they close their doors against him. He loses her and as his dream perishes, so, inevitably, does Gatsby.

Tom and Daisy spread death in their wakes – death always by the car, that great tanking symbol of power, wealth and modernity – and those who die are either poor or born poor. Then Tom and Daisy move on, blind to the world below them. As the old song goes, which Fitzgerald quotes: "One thing's sure and nothing's surer, the rich get rich, and the poor get - children." In the end, Gatsby dies alone and unmourned, except for his friend, narrator Nick Carraway. In the ephemeral Jazz Age, death doesn't matter; no-one could care less. One of the book's most painful moments comes in the shape of the only words spoken at Gatsby's grave: "The poor son of a bitch." That is the Jazz Age eulogy.

Fitzgerald was no seer – he wrote doggedly as a man of his time and generation; but The Great Gatsby still holds a mirror up to today's world of empty celebrity, inherited

wealth, ostentation, selfishness and stupidity. The 1920s was an era of flappers and Rockefellers; of bloody ruthless capitalism; of new technology tearing up old certainties;, when the bank was king and the corrupt and criminal prospered; when the weak and poor were mere commodities, and survival in the urban jungle was only for the fittest. It was a time when nation and youth were sick with war and inequality, when ideology gave way to hedonism because there was no point in trying to fight what you could never beat.

Sound familiar? Do I need to list the sins of the Libor men, the ghostly, deadening glow of the iPhone, the shame of the food bank, the endless idiocracy of reality TV, the death of participatory politics, the bloodstain of Iraq and Afghanistan? Let's live now, we say, because tomorrow is already lost.

Fitzgerald could be writing today. As the novel opens, Nick Carraway says he'll go into the bond business because "everyone is in bonds". It's what people, then and now, aspired to do: make money out of thin air to spend on things they do not need. When Nick and Daisy and Tom and Gatsby drive from their sheltered bubble of wealth to the great city of New York, they pass through the "ash-heaps" – the homes of the ordinary classes, people who don't matter and never will. The ash heaps is a land where people move like ghosts among dust, where the only thing that passes for a god is the faded drawing of a set of eyes from an advertisement for an optician. God as a commercial. Rich people drink until they are sick, dance because there is nothing else to do; poor people stare at pictures in movie magazines and dream of being the stars they see before them. They ache with the pointless, witless drudgery of being alive, while the wealthy ask each other: "What shall we do today, tomorrow and for the rest of our lives?" The rich consume and laugh and die, the poor work and cry and die.

The Great Gatsby is, in the true Aristotelian and Shakespearean sense, a tragedy: a great man destroyed by a fatal flaw that both makes him and breaks him. The novel speaks of the real horror that lies at the heart of the human condition – the aching wasteland inside our souls, the void that we try to fill with friends, family - anything to keep us sane because we know that there is nothing, nothing at all but us on a spinning ball of rock in the middle of black, empty space.

It also speaks of the beauty at the heart of the human condition – the dreaming, overarching belief that makes poor, two-legged creatures like us rise above other animals because we long for a world of perfection, love and honesty with oneself. Gatsby, Fitzgerald said, believed in the "platonic conception of himself" – he dreamed of being a better man, the best man. The perfect man. Don't we all. And of course, Gatsby failed. That's what being a human means. The dream passed like dust – albeit golden, glamourous dust – through his fingers, and he died for it.

Gatsby builds his towering Xanadu across the bay from Daisy's house. Every night, he looks across the darkened water and reaches out his arms to the green light that shines from her dock. We all have a green light – the secret yearning that makes us hope, dream, live. Perhaps your green light is prosaic; something to do with work. Perhaps it's profound: something to do with your children, your lover, your family. Perhaps it is more arcane and mysterious. I know what my green light is and I still believe in it. I have to.

In the novel, though, the green light is more than just Daisy. In fact, Daisy is more than just Daisy. The light and Daisy are America, that great dream of a nation founded by the Celts and Anglo-Saxons of these islands; a nation we are still tied to, with which we still share a central nervous system, no matter how much we would like to think otherwise. America was the dream of hopeful Europeans – and that dream will live on in the shape of people like Gatsby for as long as America exists. That the dream is in fact a nightmare, that no dream by its very definition can ever be real, that is the real tragedy for eternally optimistic humankind.

Can Baz Luhrmann recreate that painful beauty on screen? I hope so, but I doubt it. I found his Romeo And Juliet to be gorgeous, but with no soul. F Scott Fitzgerald's characters are like that too, but the novel is not. The Great Gatsby is full of hopeful human empathy and bitter understanding.

Matching its emotional depth would challenge any filmmaker. After Gatsby's death, Fitzgerald, in the voice of Nick Carraway, gives what must be the most profound and philosophical, yet heart-rending ending to any novel. Nick – the messenger, the intermediary, the guide – stands as the moral heart of this amoral story. A cousin of Daisy and lover to one of the many empty, beautiful women in the novel, he rejects their world. A man from the mid-west, he decides to leave the gaudy, phoney east coast and return home. "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy," Nick tells us, "they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness." Nick rejects Gatsby's world, but he does not reject Gatsby. He admires what we all admire in Gatsby – his power to dream, his will to create himself as a work of art in the eyes of the world. If Daisy is America, Gatsby is the original American – the original dreamer.

Nick, with Gatsby only just cold in his grave, looks out over the headlands of the continent's east coast, before he returns to his mid-western obscurity, leaving the Jazz Age behind, and sees with the eyes of the first Europeans who set foot on this soil: "I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes – a fresh green breast of the new world." This is the land that "once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams".

Then Nick thinks of "Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock". The dream was already behind him, though, "somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night". Whatever it was that Gatsby, the original American, needed to feed his soul, it was long dead – if it ever truly existed. Perhaps it died when those Dutch sailors first looked on America – a dream that faded in the moment it was born.

And so Fitzgerald takes us to his last paragraph – an ending that doesn't redeem Gatsby or Nick, or Daisy or Tom – but does redeem humankind – you and I – because we dream and love, and we die when the dreaming and loving is over.

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further - And one fine morning –

'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past'."

Neil Mackay is the Sunday Herald's news editor. His debut novel All The Little Guns Went Bang, Bang, Bang is published on June 17 (£8.99 from Freight Publishing). The novel tells the story of Pearse Furlong and May-Belle Mullholland, two highly intelligent 11-year-olds from dysfunctional families growing up in Northern Ireland in the midst of The Troubles, who go on a terrifying spree of robbery, arson and murder. It is a love story, a black comedy and a brutal social satire. Poet and novelist John Burnside, winner of the TS Elliot Prize and Foward Prize, describes the book as a "powerful, dark novel that is both compelling and necessary".

Carey Mulligan stars as Daisy and Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby in Baz Luhrmann's much-heralded film version of The Great Gatsby, which opens in UK cinemas this week