Reality and Dreams

by Muriel Spark Narrated by Jenny Sterlin

Overview

Award-winning British author Dame Muriel Spark is internationally renowned for her witty and engaging tales of life. Short and sophisticated, Reality and Dreams follows the career of self-centered, middle-aged film director Tom Richards. As he turns colorful incidents from his life into glittery, cinematic fiction, his foreboding dreams become all too real. Tom is passionately directing his latest film when he falls from a crane on the set. Awaking in a semi-conscious fog in a hospital room, he suddenly must deal with a comic, surreal procession of doctors, nurses, and out-of-work relatives. In a drugged daze, he dreams of ways to change his life. But some of his hazy visions come true as he recovers, causing Tom's real world to unravel into a distorted soap opera. Muriel Spark is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and winner of the prestigious David Cohen British Literature Prize. Her tantalizing story, Reality and Dreams, won the Arts Council Spring Book Award. With narrator Jenny Sterlin's expert pacing, all of the delicious surprises and the unsettling wisdom in this dark, contemporary comedy burst from the pages.

Editorial Reviews

Dwight Garner

It makes sense that Tom Richards, the sexagenarian protagonist of Muriel Spark's 20th novel, is a film director. There's always been something briskly cinematic about Spark's prose -- she writes as if she's cutting film, slicing her sentences into sequence with an X-acto knife. You're only a few pages into Reality and Dreams before the laconic, witty snap of Spark's declarations settles into an agreeably choppy rhythm: "She had married him for his looks which were admittedly star quality; but marriage was not a film; Cora was not a director; she had cast him in the role of a husband and he was hopeless at it. In screenplays the husband has a script to go by. Johnny had next to none." You can almost picture the now-elderly author -- she is a dame of the British Empire -- stubbing out a cigarette at the end of each paragraph and shouting the word "Cut!" to no one in particular.

This is a supremely confident novel, perhaps an overconfident one. It begins in a hospital room where Tom, an auteur who is directing a piece of art-house eroticism called "The Hamburger Girl," has landed after taking a nasty spill (12 broken ribs) during a crane shot. Tom's not a particularly sympathetic pile of broken bones; he's vain, abrupt with strangers, cruel to his family and dedicated to cheating on Claire, his wife. (Happily, she cheats right back.) Spark has a grand time rooting around in Tom's swaggering psyche -- so grand a time, in fact, that she occasionally slips and shoves clunky speeches into his mouth that seem like little more than her own editorializing: "How I long for some literate entertainment," Tom muses. "I used to know lots of older writers, thinkers and theatre people. They are all dead or nearly, now. The century is getting old, very old. Old with the faults of old age; especially what Eliot called 'the desperate exercise of failing power.' You see it everywhere. It's grotesque." (That Eliot quote is the ringer -- it's too precious to have sprouted organically from Tom's cranium.)

Once Tom is released from his cramped hospital room, Reality & Dreams takes a needed gulp of fresh air, too. We're plunged into the various psychological and moral intrigues that surround Tom's family -- notably those involving his two daughters, one of whom is a sweetie-pie earth angel (Tom calls her an "aesthetic delight") while the other is curt, mannish and bitter. "Marigold was simply a natural disaster," her parents decide. When Marigold suddenly vanishes, the family is thrown into a tizzy, for reasons you wouldn't suspect -- they're really not sure if they want to find her or not, and they feel simply awful about it.

Plot summary isn't very helpful when it comes to describing Spark's novels. There are funny and winning moments throughout Reality & Dreams, about such disparate subjects as movies, art, sibling rivalry, divorce, joblessness. And while Spark writes with blithe, ironic strokes, her narratives are always deeper and more probing than they seem. Still, Reality & Dreams never quite comes together as a coherent narrative. Spark probably knew this. She repeatedly tries to force the theme of "redundancy" -- redundant employees are fired, redundant spouses are left behind -- but it never really sticks. No matter. Spark's least inspired books are preferable to many writers' best efforts. This book is that increasing rarity: a slim novel that should have been longer. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The important thing about a new Spark novel is hardly ever the plot or even the characters, but rather that inimitable authorial tone: crisp, assured, utterly unsentimental but always full of delicious surprises. Her hero in the present refreshingly slim volume is Tom, an elderly British film director who, as the story opens, is in hospital, having fallen off a crane during the filming of his latest movie. After various title changes and corporate shenanigans while he is hors de combat, the film is eventually resumed-as is his life with his charming, wealthy and all-forgiving wife, Claire, their ungainly and rather sinister daughter, Marigold, and Cora, his beautiful daughter by an earlier marriage. All of them are endlessly unfaithful, but their lives are shadowed far more by constant "redundancies," in the hideous English euphemism for lost jobs, than by any sense of marital or romantic betrayal. Marigold finds it necessary to disappear to work on her secret life, and the mystery of her vanishing gives the book its principal plot line-and one that is resolved rather neatly by another accident with a movie crane at its conclusion. The spirit of the book is sprightly and faintly acidic, rather as if a bunch of 18th-century French courtiers were at frolic in contemporary London. And needless to say, there are countless divine Spark moments ("Not only am I old enough to be your father, I am your father. You should listen to me").

Library Journal

This work is vintage Spark, and to those familiar with this prolific and much-honored author, perhaps that is all that need be said. With the succinctness, clarity, and wit that has long marked her style, she explores the often shadowlike relationship between real life and the creative process. A glimpse of a girl selling hamburgers at a French campground ignites film director Tom Richard's imagination, and around it he builds his latest movie. When the film is still in production, he suffers a serious accident and awakens to find his vision being threatened as others try to take over the story. He also awakens to disruptions in his "real" life-many of those around him are losing their jobs, his daughters' marriages are in the process of breaking up, and long held resentments/ jealousies, both personal and professional, are coming to the surface. The result is a sexual and economic whirlwind that eventually leads to violence-and another film. For the creative artist, everything "in our world...[may] start from a dream," but dreams also start from reality. It is this paradox and its attendant parallels that Spark exposes so astutely and entertainingly in this highly recommended work. - David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersberg, Fla.

Kirkus Reviews

You know you're in the hands of a master when her sleek and suggestive new novel, a sophisticated comedy of manners, is so smart and seductive that you fail to notice how completely you've accepted a world gone utterly awry.

Tom Richards, a prominent British film director, wakes in the hospital a near-cripple; days earlier he'd fallen off a crane while lensing a key scene in his latest effort, 'The Hamburger Girl', a Proustian mediation on a fleeting event: a real-life tableau from southern France of a girl preparing lunch on an outdoor grill. Tom's fantasizes about endowing this young woman with a fortune, a possibility that's nurtured by the huge wealth of his wife, Claire, an American cookie heiress who endures Tom's on-the-set adulteries by engaging in some illicit affairs of her own. Together, the two put up with their disappointing daughter, Marigold, a dull and censorious creature. Something of a "natural disaster," Marigold cannot equal Tom's beautiful daughter from a previous marriage, Cora, who comes to his aid when Marigold disappears, an event covered in sordid detail by all the tabloids. A student of the "redundancy" that seems to be affecting everyone in England—literally at work, and metaphysically at home—Marigold has hidden out among the less fortunate classes, paying back her parents for years of neglect. When Tom's film resumes production, reality and dream further intertwine: Actors confuse their roles with life, Tom's family behaves as if they were in a movie, and Tom himself rants on to his devoted new friend, a West Indian taxi driver with an absolutist sense of morality: a perfect antidote to all the sexual and emotional games being played on this social merry-go- round.

The only reason we're never dizzy here is that Spark (A Far Cry from Kensington, 1988, etc.) remains in total control at all times: She can summon a world with a single gesture, a character with one seemingly artless remark. Profound art disguised as a lark.

AUG/SEP 98 - AudioFile

Sterlin gives a tart, sophisticated reading that mirrors the witty writing that has entertained Sparks’s fans for decades. While this latest novel may not be as involving as some of Spark’s earlier works, it does reprise one of her favorite themes, the parallels between life and art. In this case, those connections arise from Tom Richards, a self-centered British director confounded by the correspondence between his film projects and his messy personal life. Tom’s fall from a crane on the set of his most recent movie and his lengthy incapacitation lead to all sorts of complications, including the disappearance of his mean-spirited daughter, Marigold. Meanwhile, Tom is overmatched in his efforts to soothe the egos of various lovers, actresses, friends and relatives. The novel’s disappointment lies in characters who are not fully realized or engaging, a lapse that even Sterlin’s arch narration can’t surmount. M.O. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170908332
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	11/11/2011
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God's dreams.

The first thing he discerned when he regained consciousness was a woman in white. This angel was calling him by his first name, Tom, although they had never been introduced.

'Are you a nun?' he said.

'No, I'm Jasmine. I'm a nurse. Come on, Tom, I've got to wake you up. I've got to put this other pillow under your head. And lift the top part of your bed. Like this ...' She manipulated with her foot a lever of the hospital bed so that he was slightly raised. 'Otherwise,' she said, 'you might feel groggy.' She stuck a thermometer in his mouth before he had time to speak, and took his wrist in her hand, looking at her watch. He saw by her watch that it was twenty past twelve. The sun was visible behind the curtains, so it must have been daytime.

He dozed off while she was still counting his pulse. When he woke half an hour later as it seemed, it was dark, it was ten-forty at night as he learned from the new nurse, the night nurse, name of Edna so she told him. So does our trade direct our perceptions and our dreams he thought: Tom was a film director. Cut into the scene of the morning with the scene of the evening. The same nurse, but was it the same? Anyway it was Edna and the same scene.

'Where's the doctor?' Tom said.

'He looked in this afternoon. Were you awake?'

'Perhaps.' Tom wasn't sure. He thought he might remember a doctor's face looming over him.

Edna let his bed down by manipulating the lever. There was a drip inserted in his foot that he had been aware of since he woke but hadn't been able to remark on. Edna was nearly black of skin. 'Where do you come from, Edna?' 'Ghana,' she said, or was he mixing her up with someone else? When he woke it was the daylight of early morning.

Enter a lady in white, this time with a head-veil. 'You are one of the nuns?' She was. She was Sister Felicitas come to take a sample of his blood.

'They took my blood already,' he said.

'That was your urine.'

'What are you going to do with my blood?'

'Drink it,' she said.

'What time is it?'

'Seven.'

'How can you be so larky so early in the morning?'

'It's late. We rise at five.'

'Was that you singing? I heard singing.'

'That was us in the chapel.'

She was gone in a whisk of white. In came his breakfast tray, supporting it seemed, dusky Edna.

'Do you call this breakfast?'

'First you get liquid, then soft, then solid.'

She poured out some milky tea. He opened his eyes. The tray had disappeared.

He was now thinking of the plans he had made, the vow he had taken, before his operation. He intended to keep it.

'Good morning.'

Two women came in with a mop and pail. One dusted while the other slopped the floor of that room in the international hospital. Now two nurses came to make his bed. They got him up. They helped him through to the bathroom. They shaved him with expert hands. Oh go on shaving, it's nice. But then they unplugged the razor. Someone had put an enormous bunch of flowers on the far table, a mixture of roses, lilies and asters, most remarkable and expensive.

The surgeon: You're going to be all right.

What did he mean, I'm going to be all right? So earnest. I never thought I wasn't.

Beside his bed a table on wheels, moveable to any convenient angle. On the table was a telephone. Good, I will wait till I feel a bit stronger, after the liquids and the soft.

'When will I be on solids, Edna?'

'I'm not Edna, I'm Greta. You have solids tomorrow.'

'Greta, where do you come from?'

'Hamburg.'

He felt like a casting director. Greta is absolutely built for the part. But which part?

The telephone rang.

The difficulty of his turning to lift the receiver was solved by Greta who wheeled the table to an angle where the phone was close to hand.

'Yes?' His voice croaked.

'Is that you, Tom? Tom, is that you?'

'I suppose so. I'll be on solids tomorrow.' He was actually wider awake than he wanted anyone to know.

'I suppose I can come and visit this afternoon?'

'No, tomorrow.'

Claire, Tom's wife, arrived in the afternoon. He hadn't yet told her the plans he had made. She would be intrigued by them but not anxious. That was one advantage of having a very rich wife. You could make plans without her worrying immediately how it was going to affect her budget. Tom once had a wife who referred back every action, every thought of his, to her budget. She was much happier divorced with a well-paid job of her own.

He had a belly-ache. Came Sister Benedict with her injection.

'Tom! ... Tom! ...'

Claire was by his bed, smiling, holding his hand. 'You're going to be all right,' she said.

Nobody had said he wasn't.

He said, 'I want to see Fortescue-Brown.' That was his lawyer, full of fuss and business, never letting you get a word in. I only keep him, thought Tom, because I am too genuinely busy to change.

'Fortescue-Brown!' said Claire.

'Yes, Fortescue-Brown,' he said.

'At a moment like this you want to see Fortescue-Brown?'

'That's right,' he said.

She pulled up a chair and sat close to his bed, pushing the wheeled table out of the way. When he looked again only the chair was there and a nurse was coming in with a tray of filthy supper.

'What is your name?'

'Ruth.'

'Well, Ruth, I can't eat that white soup.'

'What would you like to eat? I'll ask for something else.'

'I am straining every muscle in my imagination to think of something else. Forget it.'

'You have to keep your strength up,' said Ruth. She had a tiny waist and an enormous backside. He couldn't keep his eyes off it. She was about thirty with straw-coloured hair drawn back, and a pale face. She would have cast well as a German spy in those old days of yore. She disappeared and to his amazement came back with an egg en cocotte which he consumed absent-mindedly.

'Are you expecting any visitor this evening?' Ruth had come to take away the tray. By her watch it was half past six.

'My daughter, Marigold, an unfrocked priest of a woman.'

Marigold was suddenly there.

'Well, Pa, I hear you're going to be all right,' said she, with her turned-down smile, skinnily slithering into a chair and arranging her coat over her flat chest. She should never have married. No wonder her husband James had decided to write travel books.

'How's James?' Tom said.

'So far as I know he's in Polynesia.'

'I said how, not where.'

'Don't wear yourself out,' she said, 'with too much conversation. I bought you some grapes.' She said 'bought' not 'brought'. She dumped a plastic bag on the side table. 'This is a wonderful clinic,' she said. 'I suppose it costs a fortune. Of course nothing should be spared in a case like yours.'

You must not imagine Marigold was particularly deprived.

In the morning Tom rang Fortescue-Brown and made an appointment for him to come to the clinic at three in the afternoon.

Love and economics, Tom mused. 'I have always,' he thought, 'considered them as opposites. Why do they continually bump into each other as if they were allied topics? Is it possible that what I call love isn't love?'

He was touched that lovely Cora his daughter by his first wife had flown into London to see him. She had obtained leave for the occasion from whatever she was doing in Lyons for Channel Four. Her first words were 'Pa, you're going to be all right.' She went on to say how her husband, Johnny, had been declared redundant at his job, an administrator in Parsimmons & Gould the paint people. She continued that she had managed to get a cheap bucket-shop flight to see him. 'And what,' thought he, 'has Johnny's redundancy got to do with me, my broken ribs and thigh? And her cheap flight? Did she come for love or what?

'And I am glad,' he continued in his mind, 'that Johnny has been made redundant. I am glad with the gladness of the lover of truth: the man has always been superfluous.'

He said, 'Marigold has been here.'

'I know,' said Coral.

'She brought me some grapes,' Tom put in experimentally.

'I know,' said Coral. 'Don't you want to watch the news?'

There was a television in the corner, stuck up on the wall, and a controller by the side table. Tom switched it on. A Nigerian politician being interviewed -- 'Democracy,' he said, 'is not a one-man cup of tea.' Tom switched off.

'Are you in pain?' said Fortescue-Brown.

'Yes, indeed, Mr. Brown, I am.'

'Now, Tom,' said he, 'reflect. You are getting angry again. Angry and arrogant. There was no need, no need at all, for you to go up on that crane. An ordinary dolly is perfectly all right for directing a motion picture these days. But no, you have to be different, you have to be right up there beside the photographer, squeezed in, and without a seat-belt. You have to be God.'

'Are you suggesting that God wears a seat-belt?'

'Nothing, nothing would surprise me after being your lawyer for twenty years. When do you get out of this penitentiary?'

'Next week, but I have to take two nurses home with me.'

'Two?'

'One for day and one for night. Is it your money or mine?'

'I told you to take out an insurance.'

'Well I didn't. Find some money. Scratch around.'

He was no sooner out of the door than Tom chucked a tumbler full of water at the door, so that Fortescue-Brown could hear it. Broken glass and water all over the place. There was something else he had wanted to say to the lawyer, but never mind. There was a vow. But what vow?

As the cleaners mopped it up Tom smiled sweetly at them. 'It just flew out of my hand as I sat up.'

'Don't try to sit up, Mr. Richards. Just ring the bell.'

Tom lay thinking ... Yes, I did feel like God up on that crane. It was wonderful to shout orders through the amplifier and like God watch the team down there group and re-group as bidden. Especially those two top stars and the upstart minor stars, with far too much money, thinking they could direct the film better themselves. There was none of the 'Just a minute, may I suggest...' that held up my work constantly on the floor. Right up there I was beyond and above pausing a minute and listening to their suggestions. What do they think a film set is? A democracy, or something? I simply don't regret that crane for a moment. All I want to know is who fouled us up. Who made the wheels hiccup on the tangle of wires, so that I was thrown clean off, crash. Twelve ribs and a broken hip, and lucky, very lucky, to be alive.

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