Tom Richards was on top of the world.He was a film director, at the top of the highest, shouting orders through a megaphone and watching his world moving under his command.But something went wrong – a wheel moved when it shouldn’t – and he tumbled back to earth.He was no longer a god, he was just a sixty-three year-old man with a fractured and twelve broken ribs, trapped in a hospital bed and having to watch the world move about him with no direction at all.People swirled about him.Nurses. Wives. Ex wives. Mistresses. Daughters.He watched them come and go, and his film, his life seemed to be slipping from his control.Cora, his favourite daughter, has a fractured marriage, and maybe Marigold, his less favoured daughter has too, as she has gone missing.Tom recovers and goes back to work,but his film has changed beyond recognition and Rose, his mistress and his leading lady suggests that maybe his accident wasn’t an accident at all.In her twentieth book, published in the nineties when she was in her eighties, Muriel Spark’s authorial voice spoke as strongly as it ever had.The clearsightedness and the oh so subtle wit are quite wonderful.She created a fine gallery of characters – not likeable characters but they were terribly readable – and gave them just enough plot to keep things interesting and to throw a wealth of ideas into the air.Reality. Dreams. Redundancy …There’s more in this 160 page book than there is in many books twice the size. It shouldn’t all work together but somehow it does.I wouldn’t list this among my favourite Muriel Spark novels - and I’d definitely recommend reading her earlier novels before her later ones – but it’s an intriguing piece of writing.
The first book I have read by Spark, a humorous yet frivolous affair about humorous yet frivolous people circling around the orbit of a famous film director, who begins the book in hospital after a serious accident in a camera crane.Tom Richards is said protagonist, using his time of convalescence to think about how to finish his latest film, plan future projects and meet with members of his extended family. He has an open marriage with his current wife, as well as an ugly and hateful daughter, and a loving and beautiful daughter from a previous marriage.Reality and dreams is quite a title, suggestive of a grand theme, yet I think it was wasted on this slim, glib story of selfish, inconstant film folk. That is not to say that it wasn't entertaining because it was, similar to Waugh at his most throwaway. The themes just didn't carry any weight though; redundancy effected many of the characters, which can be an awful thing, but again it was treated so lightly, so facilely, that I couldn't even work out why it was so prominent. Witty, but underwhelming.
Do You like book Reality And Dreams (1997)?
After a three-month hiatus, I returned to reading novels (yay!) with this brisk little book. It centers on a movie director whose creative process often feels more stable and tangible than his private life, which becomes increasingly strange and illusory as the story goes on. It’s also one of those oddball British comedies of manners in which the characters are totally flip about marital fidelity, parent-child relations, etc. yet regard art with life-and-death seriousness. Amusing, admirably realized, not exactly relatable.
—Hol
Sometimes you read a book in which there are many, many bad things, but one or two great things make up for it. Sometimes you read a book with which there isn't much wrong, but also nothing really right. 'Reality and Dreams' is like the latter. The characters are interesting. Something seems to be being said. Unfortunately, the interestingness of the characters isn't greater than usual, and whatever is being said is so weakly said that it probably wasn't worth saying, unless the point is that the rich and famous live as if they were in a happy movie, whereas the rest of us live in a murder-mystery and are either the accused or the victim. Which is probably so obvious that it isn't worth saying. Anyway, disappointing compared to the other Spark I've read.
—Justin Evans
This is the first book by Muriel Spark I have read and it was a shocking disappointment. I came to her work expecting the literary excellence promised both by her reputation and by the blurb of this book.Unfortunately, this (mercifully) short novel is actually one of the worst I have read. A cast of crashing bores, bolstered by a family fortune, exchange painfully unrealistic dialogue and each other's sexual partners in an ever more preposterous storyline. The ludicrous conversations and inner thoughts of these shallow, self-obsessed and truly horrible people should surely be satirical but are clearly meant in earnest by the author. No one could sympathise with these vastly unappealing characters - I was looking forward to the supposedly 'unexpected violent ending', hoping in vain that every single one would either spontaneously combust or hurl themselves from the tops of their towering egos.Sadly the abrupt, silly ending was in keeping with the rest of the book - a galloping waste of words.
—Emma
