Detective Constable Endeavour Morse (the phenomenally underrated Shaun Evans) follows the swelling strains of beat music towards an open door; he opens it. Inside, he finds a gramophone, the tall walls of a stately drawing room, and a flurry of voile drapes. Two women dance, glittering in their carefree decadence, drinks in hand, gossiping, as time slows down and clasps one woman in the fist of slow motion. Her eyes meet Morse’s – we’re seeing this from his P.O.V. – and she smiles; and for a moment, it seems wholly possible that this is the most glamorous, most beautiful, most desirable woman in the whole wide world.
The viewer – at least, the viewer who’s taken A-Level English, or seen any Baz Luhrmann movies of late – may start to feel a little niggle at this point. The niggle of… recollection?
She flirts provocatively with our taciturn hero, who’s receptive, if a little taken aback. Introduces her friend. Informs us that she is called Kay, that her friend is a famous tennis star. Enter deja vu. Perhaps we’ve seen this before; maybe we know this story already? Conversation turns to her unknown neighbour, whom Morse mentions by name.
“Bixby?” says Kay, stunned. “What Bixby?”
“‘Gatsby? What Gatsby?'”
From there, I assumed that would be the end of the allusions; or that we might take a swift tour through the entry-level book lists of aspiring undergrads, accommodating snippets of 1984 and Wuthering Heights. I presumed it was meant to be a cheeky screenwriter’s nod to the bookshelves of seventeen-year-olds who draft up their personal statements and send them to the Oxford Admissions people, hoping that a flash of F. Scott Fitzgerald, like Orwell and Brontë, demonstrates a discerning student’s eye.
But no – forget the odd flourish of extra-textual knowledge: Endeavour, Series 3, episode 1 is actually a full-out exercise in adaptation, with the bejewelled wildness of 1920s New York transposed into 1960s Oxford. The Great Gatsby is injected into the world of Mary Quant-clad upper class yuppies, who inhabit impossibly huge stately manors on the banks of the Cherwell; and our young detective, still trying to shake off the psychological damage wrought by the wrongful incarceration which formed the coda of series 2’s finale, is thrust somewhat awkwardly into the role of a latter-day Nick Carraway. Morse circumnavigates the listless lives of the upper set he once attended university with, observing the pitfalls of what happens when romance and social background collide on the surface of good old Oxford class boundaries.
It’s all there: dialogue is warped, scenes are shoehorned, characters are mapped onto characters, and the parties glimmer with the familiar vapidness of rich kids at play. There’s a Daisy, a Jordan, a Tom… and, of course, there’s the icon himself – “Bixby”, who has adopted the affectation of calling everybody “old man” (which anyone who’s ever encountered an actual posh person will tell you they just don’t do).
It’s a strange phenomenon, as adaptations go; for Endeavour takes Gatsby then expands the possibilities of the novel’s famous plot. After all, in this episode Gatsby/Bixby “dies” halfway through. From thereon in we shift in content, and the narrative takes on a guise which, when it unravels at the end, suspiciously resembles Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige. One presumes the correspondences are sheer coincidence, as while it seems likely that the Gatsby nod was supposed to be obvious to anyone who knows the story, it would be a strange writer indeed who thought The Prestige was just as well known. Still, it’s the placement of Oxford’s most famous fictional detective within the redressed parameters of one of the world’s most famous tragedies which creates the episode’s strange vortex of appropriation.
In some places you cringe – especially when, possibly in the interests of avoiding plagiarism claims, screenwriter Russell Lewis modifies dialogue from the novel into simpler, less poetic English. The problem is that Morse is already much more sophisticated a personality than Nick Carraway has ever been; his proclamations about the past and about Bixby being the “best of them” echo Nick’s lines from the book in drabber prose than Fitzgerald’s, but the naivety just doesn’t quite suit the silver tongue of Evans’s tainted genius. They wouldn’t have suited him even if the screenplay quoted the novel word by glorious word.
Otherwise, in some places, it’s actually quite profound.
Do you think of Gatsby as an Oxford novel? Despite its being located in New York, Oxford in the novel is a pervasive spectre: a place never visited except, at first, in rumour, and then eventually in memory. While Gatsby remains a magnanimously unknowable figure, that he’s an “Oxford man” is as deliriously circulated as the claim that he once killed somebody. The American Bright Young Things fill their vacuous existence with speculation. Murderers and academics are apparently glamorously synonymous, and Oxford, by dint of this, becomes symbol of elegant danger and authoriser of respectability all at once. Gatsby can be a homicidal maniac, for all his guests care; if he’s got the right education, then he wears the veneer of a gentleman, and in Fitzgerald’s acerbic interrogation of flapper-age hypocrisy, the glittery surface of people is all that seems to matter.
In Endeavour, Bixby’s elusiveness inverts the Gatsby myth. Everyone has of course already studied at Oxford; so Bixby claims to have gone to Yale, and nobody is really that bothered – Ivy League / Red Brick access credentials lose their glimmer amidst equals. In this post-university world, days are filled with fleeting, meaningless excitements: parties, alcohol, extramarital affairs, cocaine, heroin. It looks like every stereotype going and, of course, for a slim volume of Oxford students and alumni, it’s not too far off the mark. The rich ex-students have already been underwhelmed by the people that their university days have turned them into, and what’s far more enticing about their mild-mannered host are his ties to a narcotic criminal network.
Instead, Endeavour series 3 re-calibrates Gatsby so it can accommodate a concern that has subtly pervaded the previous two series: the liminal position of people like Morse, who enter Oxford University without the safety cushion of an upper set background, and who must negotiate the boundaries of class which reappear somewhat once they leave.
It has always been the governing question of the programme: who is Endeavour Morse? Is he just a cerebral detective – or is he underselling himself? Was there something “more” he could have been if only he’d better advertised his academic prowess? Is there is a self-stratifying genetic code at work under the surface of this cloistered little academic community, which only invites the underprivileged for a short stay but keeps the affluent indefinitely cosy? After all, Morse’s friends, for all their money, seem to like him – it’s his soul at stake in their company, not his reputation.
Is Morse an “Oxford man”? And if he is, is that moniker about as illusory for him as it is for the Great Gatsby himself?
Morse re-enters a world he used to know; the camera allows us to see it all afresh, as he does. This world of decadence and excess masks the nihilistic misery of people who’ve already seen and done everything and largely had everything achieved by their predecessors before they were even born. The result is an ongoing ennui which comes perilously close to communally-enforced depression. It’s hard to be envious of them, with their sprawling lonely houses and their breeding checklists in lieu of real love. None of Morse’s rich hedonistic friends appear truly happy in their privileged existence, and they cling, desperately, to their status, trying to solidify a crumbling social hierarchy and preserve an archaic upper class in a protective layer of snobbery, shutting out the would-be egalitarians. Or at least, that’s the feeling towards the end, when Morse appears relieved to return to the value system of the police force: loyalty. Loyalty fostered from real integrity, as opposed to shared class status, mutual misery and a lifetime’s worth of bullying. To quote the other literary giant quoted in the episode, Rudyard Kipling: “if you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, / Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch…”
But Endeavour undermines its own hopefulness. Even as the manor clan seem increasingly removed from the reality of Morse’s 1960s Oxford, the tragedy of Daisy and Gatsby (sorry – Kay and Bixby) and their inability to scale the verticality of class difference on love alone haunts beyond the end credits; because if the 1920s can be so easily accommodated by the 1960s, surely it follows that the 1960s can be just as easily be accommodated by today?
What Endeavour manages to do, every year, when I watch the series debut in my living room, at home in Liverpool – far removed from the enticingly glamorous spell that Oxford occasionally casts – is make me recognise more than I would necessarily like to. Sure, the bacchanal subset of entitled individuals who hurtle towards bored self-destruction in a rage of sex, alcohol and class As isn’t one we regularly confront; and if we do, they’re certainly not the people we expect to be holing up with for the rest of our lives. We’ve come a long way since then, to misquote the episode: nowadays everyone can be anything, and nobody feels the rift imposed by money and family when they’re chasing a deadline, and who even wants to fester in loneliness, however expensive?
But do you, like me, ever feel vaguely uneasy: do you ever wonder if you, like Gatsby, are trespassing on a territory you weren’t made for, and that one day, perhaps, they will find out your fraud? Do you ever wonder if love is inadequate to the gilded perimeter which life and history set up between us, and them?
