Rhett Butler's People
by Donald McCaig
Macmillan, HK$306
There's a special section of the twilight zone that's reserved for famous lovers. There for all eternity, Romeo and Juliet are still coping with adolescence. Antony and Cleopatra, neither completely sober, are having a blazing row. Ingrid Bergman sits listening to the piano in Rick's Cafe in Casablanca. And in some sumptuous plantation house, Scarlett O'Hara flounces out of the room saying 'Fiddle-dee-dee' and Rhett Butler, of course, still doesn't give a damn.
Sometimes these people are summoned back onstage for an encore or two. This happened with Alexandra Ripley's Scarlett ('The timeless tale continues...'), a 900-page monster that told us what happened to Margaret Mitchell's characters after the credits rolled and the lights went up on Gone with the Wind. As if that were not more than enough, now we have Donald McCaig's Rhett Butler's People, a lightweight by Confederacy-saga standards, weighing in at only 500 pages. If you feel you still don't know enough about the folks at Tara and Twelve Oaks, this book is for you.
Rhett Butler's People, however, is not another sequel, nor is it exactly a prequel. The cover announces, oddly, that this is 'the authorised novel based on Gone with the Wind'. Yes, this is the novel of the novel. As if to assure readers they are being given their money's worth, the blurb boasts that the book covers the period from 1843 to 1874 and this is nearly two decades more than is chronicled in Mitchell's story. So it is both prequel and sequel and something else (paraquel?) that fills in the bits Mitchell left vacant.
It's not a spin-off either, if that means taking some second-order character and giving them their own show. Here the star players are the ones we know from Gone with the Wind - loveable rogue Rhett Butler, incorrigible vamp Scarlett O'Hara, repressed Ashley Wilkes and his saintly wife Melanie. Here too the civil war rages again, Atlanta burns, Scarlett's father goes crazy and tomorrow is another day. It's just that now we have a lot more data.