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.

Waxing Poetic: The Lonely Shoe Lying on the Road by Muriel Spark

 

     Muriel Spark (1918-2006) was an award-winning Scottish author most often remembered for her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  She was born in Edinburgh and attended James Gillespie's High School for Girls, the model for the Marcia Blaine School in The Prime of Jean Brodie.  She briefly taught English herself before marrying and moving with her husband to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).  When the marriage ended in 1944, she moved to England and lived in the Helena Club in London which later became her inspiration for the May of Teck Club in her novel The Girls of Slender Means.  She worked in intelligence for the remainder of the war. 
     In addition to her 22 novels she also wrote poetry.  In 1947, she became the editor of the Poetry Review.  She had a long writing career, publishing her last novel, The Finishing School, just two years before her death at the age of 88.
     This poem ponders a question most of us have asked:  "Why only one shoe?"

The Lonely Shoe Lying on the Road

One sad shoe that someone has probably flung
out of a car or truck. Why only one?

This happens on an average one year
in four. But always throughout my
life, my travels, I see it like
a memorandum. Something I have
forgotten to remember,

            that there are always
mysteries in life. That shoes
do not always go in pairs, any more
than we do. That one fits;
the other, not. That children can
thoughtlessly and in a merry fashion
chuck out someone's shoe, split up
someone's life.

            But usually that shoe that I
see is a man's, old, worn, the sole
parted from the upper.
Then why did the owner keep the other,
keep it to himself? Was he
afraid (as I so often am with
inanimate objects) to hurt its feelings?
That one shoe in the road invokes
my awe and my sad pity.

The Finishing School - Muriel Spark

 

     Set in a finishing school called College Sunrise, currently located in Switzerland but whose location changes from year to year, Muriel Spark's The Finishing School is a comic novel that reminded me of her early novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
     A married couple, Rowland and Nina Mahler, run the school while Rowland works (or mostly doesn't work) on a novel.  The school is small, unorthodox, and has exorbitant tuition.The student body consists of a group of affluent teens, including a princess of a possibly fictitious country, whose parents seem to want to get them off their hands.
     Among their nine students is Chris, a 17-year old who is writing an historical novel about Mary Queen of Scots and already has publishers interested in the work-in-progress.  Rowland immediately develops an intense jealousy of Chris and his novel.  His thoughts stray to wishing the boy would "die peacefully in his sleep."  He visualizes himself pouring green paint on Chris's bright red hair as he writes and watching it pour over the novel.  Chris is aware of Rowland's jealousy and enrolls a fellow student to keep his computer, discs, and printed pages of the novel locked away while Rowland continuously attempts to find and destroy it.
     Meanwhile, school is in session but the teachers own lives occupy them as much as teaching the students.  Rowland teaches creative writing and spends class time recording observations of Chris.  He tells Nina, "I've changed my mind about the book I'm writing.  It won't be a novel.  It will be a life study of a real person, Chris."  Nina secretly plots to leave Rowland at the end of the term but continues to teach her etiquette class (she calls it 'comme it faut'), instructing the students in how to properly eat an artichoke, the chances that a man inviting a girl to attend Ascot will be a crook, and the hazards of being too well-mannered.  Through it all the students and teachers get entangled with each other, the visiting lecturers, neighbors, and the hired help.
     The tension between Rowland and Chris intensifies and comes to a head when a publisher comes to see Chris about publishing his novel and agrees to also publish Rowland's The School Observed.  Things deteriorate from there and come to a surprising ending.
   The novel explores the themes of jealousy, ambition, and attraction.  Spark has a gift for creating eccentric but believable characters and these are briefly but vividly drawn.  It was a quick and humorous read.  I thoroughly enjoyed it but not as much a The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.


Favorite Lines:  (from Nina's 'comme il faut' class)
"First, if you, as a U.N. employee, are chased by an elephant stand still and wave a white handkerchief.  This confuses the elephant's legs."

     
- Frances