It takes a crisis to remind us all what is so great about Gatsby

'Even when you were broke, you didn't worry about money, because it was in such profusion around you." It is words such as these, written in a letter in the 1930s but in reference to the Roaring Twenties, that makes F Scott Fitzgerald somewhat of a literary seer to whom we now turn in these bankrupt days.

He knew what it was like to one day be floating in a jacuzzi of cash, sadly other people's, and for the next day the plug to be pulled. He knew the ignominy of having to waddle out buck naked and then start trying to reclothe oneself, which is why his work is now being re-examined through the lens of our own financial troubles.

Last week one of the world's largest movie stars arrived in town to the delight of the media and public alike. I'm not talking about Brad Pitt and Glasgow, but Leonardo DiCaprio and Sydney, where the American actor is shortly to begin filming a new adaptation of The Great Gatsby, this time directed by Baz Luhrmann, with the British actress Carey Mulligan, as Daisy Buchanan.

In America, at least, Gatsby is back in vogue. The soft green lawns that surround Jay Gatsby's mansion on Long Island have been well trodden over the years, most memorably by Robert Redford and Mia Farrow in the 1974 film, scripted by Francis Ford Coppola but more recently by the British actor, Tobey Stephens and Mia Sorvino, in the TV series made in 2000. So what is it that draws film-makers back to the short novel, first published in 1925, at the height of that decadent decade?

For Baz Luhrmann, who dazzled us with Moulin Rouge, it was the chance to hold up a mirror to a new generation. As he explains: "I feel the story of Gatsby speaks so directly to what we have just gone through."

But does it? The beautifully wrought novella tells the story of Nick Carraway, who in the summer of 1922 moves from the mid-west to New York to make his money as a stockbroker. He rents a house on Long Island and becomes enchanted by his mysterious neighbour, Jay Gatsby, whose palatial mansion is the scene of an apparently endless round of parties at which the host is seldom seen. Gatsby has only bought the house because it sits across the water from Daisy Buchanan, with whom he was once in love, and pretended to be a richer man than he ever was, Today she is married to a philandering husband, Tom and has a young daughter. Yet Gatsby believes the wealth he has secretly accrued through bootlegging can assist in winning her back.

Yet money will not provide the answer to his prayers.

Daisy will not leave her husband and when the pair accidentally run down Tom's mistress, he sets up Gatsby's demise at the hands of her grief-stricken husband. In the end the once great house is left empty and decaying, with no-one but a few servants and his father to attend Gatsby's funeral. Even Nick turns away from the pursuit of wealth, leaving the stockbroking trade to return to the mid-west.In many ways, it is the gilded life of Daisy and Tom Buchanan, who are able to float away, cushioned by the vast wealth, from the death and destruction they have both caused, that rings the loudest contemporary bell. The affluent bankers whose risks caused the current financial crisis are the ones that will easily sail through it while others less fortunate will go under.

An alternative reading is that the American dream is not guaranteed to all, that you may have the chance to achieve great wealth, but even if you do it will not always bring the happiness you might have hoped for. However, much as I do love The Great Gatsby if asked to point to one piece of F Scott Fitzgerald's work that speaks loudest to today's reader, I would point them in the direction of one of his short stories, Babylon Revisited. It is the story of Charlie Wales, an American who lived the high life in Paris during the golden years of the 1920s. During one drunken night out with his wife, they argue and she kisses another man in revenge, leading him to abandon her and head home. Too drunk to flag a cab, she is forced to stumble home through a winter's night, falls ill and, shortly after, dies. Guilt stricken Charlie Wales then spirals into a cycle of drink, is rendered into a sanatorium and loses both his money in the stock market crash, and the couple's daughter, Honoria, who is taken in by his sister-in-law. Three years later, he returns to Paris, sober, and having to re-claimed his wealth and is now trying to re-claim his daughter.

First published, 80 years ago, in February, 1931 in the Saturday Evening Post, the story was an accurate reflection of Fitzgerald's own life at the time. His wife, Zelda, was lost to him, in the grip of mental illness and in a sanatorium. The medical bills were mounting up and the financial success of his earlier novels and short stories had been squandered during their years in the south of France. What gives the story its power and resonance is the sense that even though Charlie Wales has managed to recover both his sobriety and his finances, it may yet be once again swept away. Regret also runs through the pages.

As he wanders through the streets of Montmartre, Wales begins to realise the folly of what he has done. "All the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he suddenly realised the meaning of the word 'dissipate' - to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something.

In the little hours of the night every move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase of paying for the privilege of slower and slower motion. He remembered thousand-franc notes given to the orchestra for playing a single number, hundred-franc notes tossed to a doorman for calling a cab. But it hadn't been given for nothing, It had been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offering to destiny that he might not remember the things most worth remembering, the things that he would always remember - his child taken from his control, his wife escaped to a grave in Vermont." The short story ends where it begins in the bar of the Ritz hotel in Paris, As Charlie ponders: "I spoiled this city for myself, I didn't realise it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone and everything was gone, and I was gone."

The reality may be that the US recovery has faltered, unemployment stands at 9 per cent, its credit-rating has been downgraded and China is now looming as the next superpower. Yet one point is worth remembering, America did falter and endure an appalling period during the 1930s, but then came the Second World War, from which the nation alone, emerged richer and more powerful than any other nation. Sadly, F Scott Fitzgerald did not live to see the fortunes of the nation rise to such new heights. Yet a year before his death in December, 1940 his coffers were briefly replenished when Hollywood bought the screen rights to Babylon Revisited, which 14 years later was turned into the forgettable film: I Last Saw You In Paris. Hollywood then, as now, always saw something in the present about Fitzgerald's work, the reason, is best explained by the famous last line in The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."