AS any of Muriel Spark's many and ardent admirers will testify, six years is far too long to wait for a new novel from this author. But that has been the length of time since Symposium, the most recent offering from Spark until now for once, the phrase "eagerly awaited" can be justifiably employed.
Just as unusually, the word disappointing is liable to be heard whenever Reality and Dreams comes up for discussion. Like most of her previous work, it is a slim book unlike most of the others, it is also slight. The very best Muriel Spark, typically set in 1950s London, involves an impoverished young woman writing in the first person singular and in a casually amused tone of her struggles against social and financial restrictions. The Girls Of Slender Means in both its title and contents perfectly encapsulates this side of Spark's fiction, which was laid aside in the late 1960s when the author focused her attention instead on the international rich.
When A Far Cry from Kensington was published in 1988, it seemed (and was acknowledged as) a wonderful return to the old form, while Symposium two years later, although concerned once again with a cosmopolitan cast, had more spirit and verve than many of its predecessors in the same vein. Reality and Dreams, on the other hand, reads almost like a throwback to that period in Spark's career when she was curiously obsessed with the daily minutiae of the wealthy without ever quite managing to convince that she was truly familiar with the subject matter.
Like The Public Image, this book's central characters are involved in film making as with The Takeover, one woman enjoys a fabulous (but unexplained) source of income, and in common with Territorial Rights, detectives are employed to trace missing persons. Here, Tom Richards, a famous English film director, falls from a crane while working on his latest picture and is taken to hospital with broken ribs and a fractured hip. While recuperating from his injuries, he sees his project taken away from him but eventually regains control of the film thanks to his own financial input. Having completed this work, he then moves on to another project.
While Tom begins an affair with an actress, his incredibly wealthy wife, Claire, brings a similar relationship with a physiotherapist called Charlie to a close. Tom's beautiful daughter by his first marriage, Cora, having been deserted by her husband, conducts an affair first with her brother in law and subsequently with a detective.
Meanwhile, Claire and Tom's daughter, Marigold, having also separated from her partner, disappears (hence the employment of detectives), is eventually discovered and comes to take a leading role in her father's latest film while conspiring to kill him in what will seem to be an accident. There are, in addition to these, a multiplicity of other characters, such as a taxi driver called Dave who is shot in the head while stopped at a set of traffic lights but survives to warn Tom that he may be in danger, and Jeanne, an actress of modest abilities though great resentment who is dismissively killed on the novel's penultimate page.
For a mere 160 pages, Muriel Spark packs in a lot of plot but she does so at the expense of character and credibility. Given her strongly avowed religious faith and the way she fashions her story, it is almost as though she were telling a parable but of what? It is typical of her style in Reality and Dreams that a youth who had seen the vanished Marigold is introduced and then dismissed with the sentence The police eventually believed the boy, whose name for the present purpose is irrelevant, and let him go." It is not just the boy's name which is of no relevance here, but the character himself. The lofty voice and deus ex machina tricks serve the writer ill and make Reality and Dreams very much a minor addition to her canon. {CORRECTION} 96090300081
