Vikram Chandra?s Sacred Games is already being hailed as a masterpiece, and there is some talk that there could be a sequel featuring world-weary Mumbai police officer Sartaj Singh. As a reader who deeply enjoyed reading the book-to the extent that this was only the second 900-page novel in my life that I never wanted to come to an end ? I am a bit worried about this piece of news/ rumour. Yes, I know that Sacred Games itself is technically a sequel, since Sartaj first appeared in a novella in Chandra?s Love and Longing in Bombay, but I am still worried.
Sequels are written primarily for one or more of three reasons. One, the author falls in love with the lead character and wants to see where he take him or her next. Two, there is strong public demand for the character to be brought back. And three, the publisher wants to cash in on the first book?s success and convinces the author (or in a few cases, another author, if the original writer is dead) to have another go at it.
All of us as children either read Robert Louis Stevenson?s Kidnapped, or studied a chapter from it in our English textbook. Stevenson followed it up with Catriona, where David Balfour is slightly older and falls in love. But very few today have heard of it and even fewer have attempted to read it. The huge success of Erich Segal?s Love Story ? and I am sure pressure from the publisher-spawned Oliver?s Story, where Oliver Barrett IV, still grieving over Jenny, meets a woman who he begins to believe can replace her in his life. In the end, she turns out to be not such a nice person after all, and the book ends with Oliver deciding that his millionaire father isn?t really a bad guy. Thus contradicting the fundamental issues of class and wealth divide that drive the Love Story narrative. Quite a waste of paper.
Thomas Harris created Hannibal Lecter as a minor character in Red Dragon, and resurrected him as a central one in The Silence of the Lambs. The phenomenal success of the film left him no option but to write a sequel featuring both Lecter and Clarice Starling. In the first two novels, Harris had never shown any sympathy for Lecter, who was portrayed as a monster who famously tells Starling that there was no point in analysing his mind, there were no childhood traumas that caused him to be warped, he was knowingly and consciously the way he was. But with Anthony Hopkins having turned Lecter into a cultural icon, Harris clearly got a bit fond of the flesh-eating doctor. So in Hannibal, Lecter is the hero, and is even given a childhood trauma to justify his odd culinary behaviour (the Nazis ate his sister). The book ends with Lecter living the high life with Starling, who succumbs to his charms. Which completely demolished one of the primary reasons for the success of Lambs: Starling?s inner strength and dignity, portrayed wonderfully on screen by Jodie Foster. When Foster read Hannibal?s ending, she refused to be part of the film project, saying that this was not the Starling she knew. The producers agreed to change the ending, but the suspicious Foster still opted out.
So writers, like overindulgent parents, can actually get too fond of their characters for their own good. But the principal reason for most sequels not living up to their promise, I think, is that when the author wrote the first novel, he was, well, just writing that novel, and not thinking of creating a body of work centered around a few people. He created the first novel as a work complete in itself. So it?s not surprising that the sequel often suffers from all the flaws of a forced flight of imagination. In other words, the sequel was simply not necessary.
Of course, writers have the unquestionable right to do sequels. It is their creative decision, and all of them know the risks involved. But publishers? greed? That?s a different story altogether. Mario Puzo never wrote a sequel to The Godfather (though he did write the screenplay for the film Godfather II, a searing sequel that sneers at all my arguments here; and Michael Corleone appears briefly in his novel The Sicilian). In 2004, Random House published The Godfather Returns by Mike Winegardner. This has been followed this year by The Godfather?s Revenge, which apparently has Michael Corleone plotting the assassination of a Kennedy-esque president. Why can?t we leave a good thing alone?
But Random House was only following the example of Warner Books, who, in the late 1980s, commissioned Alexandra Ripley to write Scarlett, a sequel to Gone With The Wind. Scarlett appeared in 1991, and rode public curiosity to become a runaway bestseller. The novel ends with Scarlett O?Hara winning Rhett Butler back (so, frankly, my dear, he did after all give a damn). But the book is forgotten now, and only merited a TV mini series with no major stars.
So I fear for Sartaj. I do want him to appear again in my life, yet I fear. If Vikram Chandra does write a sequel, I will wait for it eagerly, just as much as I had waited for Hannibal. Dr Lecter let me down, and I hope Sartaj wouldn?t.