Reality and Dreams - Muriel Spark

 

     "He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God's dreams."  So begins Muriel Sparks Reality and Dreams.  The "he" is Tom Richards, a movie director, who has fallen from a crane while directing his latest movie.  Suffering from fractured hip and ribs, Tom moves in and out of sleep as an endless parade of nurses, doctors, and family members file through his hospital room to visit him.  As he lies in bed recovering his world is unraveling.  A new director takes over his movie, the title and plot are constantly changing, his daughters' marriages are falling apart, and all around him people are losing their jobs - being deemed redundant.

     Tom, on and off the set, sees himself as Godlike - directing his real world as well as his movies.  He views people in terms of how he would cast them in a motion picture.  Not only does he make his dreams reality in movies but he uses turns the reality of his life into cinematic dreams.  He becomes enthralled with the "stories" of the lives of his caretakers and when they are no longer needed he feels a loss.  "Their personal histories which he had become acquainted with were now lost to him forever like television serials broken off and never resumed."

     Still recovering and lacking mobility, Tom begins to go out at night in a taxi.  He befriends the driver, Dave, who is on call for Tom every evening, waiting outside Tom's house with the "engaged" sign on.  Tom sits in the front of the taxi with Dave as they cruise the city at night.  The first lines of T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock run through Tom's mind on these night rides:  Let us go then, you and I...  Prufrock, at the end of the poem, inhabits a sea dream in which if human voices wake him he will drown.  Tom, too, knows that he lives in a state between dreams and reality.

     When Tom's daughter, Marigold, disappears he is forced to dwell more and more in the real world in which he flounders.  His family and friends make half-baked attempts to locate her but it becomes apparent in their inability to give the police much insight into her life that they really don't know Marigold.  The novel plays out amid a sea of entangled, ill-advised relationships between all the people inhabiting Tom's world with sinister undertones and a plot twist at the end.

     As  with all Spark's works, her ability to make the absurd believable with vividly drawn characters and her darkly comic wit combine to create a sharp, incisive story held within a little slip of a book.