Reality and Dreams

by Muriel Spark

A director breaks a leg while directing his latest movie and finds a procession of people--wife, ex-wife, daughters, colleagues, rivals, lovers, and doctors--slowly taking away the control of his life and his creation of it.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, British Literature, Audiobook, 20th Century, Humor

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Spark received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature. She has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent. In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature". In 2010, Spark was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize of 1970 for The Driver's Seat.

Spark received eight honorary doctorates in her lifetime. These included a Doctor of the University degree (Honoris causa) from her alma mater, Heriot-Watt University in 1995; a Doctor of Humane Letters (Honoris causa) from the American University of Paris in 2005; and Honorary Doctor of Letters degrees from the Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, London, Oxford, St Andrews and Strathclyde.

Spark grew up in Edinburgh and worked as a department store secretary, writer for trade magazines, and literary editor before publishing her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1961, and considered her masterpiece, was made into a stage play, a TV series, and a film.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

A featureless effort from the mistress of the concise comedic novel. A cast of unlikeable twerps swan around having automatic affairs, and an unloved daughter flees the family bosom for a few months, to scant interest. Paper-thin plot and half-arsed characters, coupled with an earnest tone (as a vicious satire this might have worked—Spark seems to want us to empathise with these odious people) sink this late-career sigh. Three stars for the Sparkness, and for seeing me to bed with the satisfaction of having finished a novel before snoozing.

[Jean-Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Muriel Spark writes a soap opera or, if we're sticking to the theme, a B movie, although Tom Richards, film director and womanizer extraordinaire, would do well as a JM Coetzee protagonist (Slow Man initially comes to mind, given Tom's accident). There's a Daniel-Day Lewis movie about a philandering director, but this one, thank God, does away with musical numbers and navel-gazing in favor of plot--much breakneck plotting--and wasn't nearly as terrible as I'd been anticipating, given that this one of Spark's later offerings. I would even go so far as to say that I actually enjoyed it--in the way a friend and I briefly invested our cheapest emotions in Days of Our Lives during the pandemic. Redundancy used as a plot device is definitely on the more uncommon side. Loved the rather autobiographical name-dropping--Greene, Auden, with whom she really was friends--but then I suppose it's allowed if you're Muriel Spark.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tom Richards is a famous English film director married to his millionaire wife Claire. They have a open marriage to the anger of their daughter Marigold. The other daughter Cora is a beautiful but shallow woman.

The story revolves around Tom after a serious accident that takes him several months to recuperate. The story has his daughter Marigold fixated about redundancy, the breakdown of both daughters marriages and Tom having an affair with his leading actress Rose not making her husband Kevin very happy.

None of the characters are likeable, pretentious, narcissistic are two words that leap too mind. There are bits of humour in the story. I read also that Muriel Sparks wrote the story after a fall and took some heavy drug medication. Overall an odd story which does not paint film directors, actors in a good light.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

The latest Muriel Spark novella I chose at random off the library shelf proved something of a let down. Although her trademark incisive writing style is present and correct, the characters in ‘Reality and Dreams’ aren’t as vivid as I’ve come to expect. Moreover, Tom’s extended family are all unbearable and the plot rather lacks focus. A man recovers from injury; a couple of films are made; a woman disappears and reappears. There are some witty remarks and astute observations, but overall it left little impact. The best running joke was Tom name-dropping dead people. The dynamic between Marigold and her parents is exaggerated enough that it didn’t really convince me, despite some amusing byplay:

She added, “That basically means people like you, Pa. And while we’re on personal subjects, your nose is far too long, it sticks out. If I were an artist painting your portrait I’d make it look like a late-comer at a party compared with and joining the rest of your features. Small breasts are very good under clothes.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “you sound quite intelligent and almost human. I don’t say you are so but you sound so. And only sometimes. You need a man to wake you up and that’s the truth, Marigold.”

Far from Spark’s best, in my opinion, yet still worth a read.

[Baz · Rating 4 out of 5]

The great novelist Penelope Fitzgerald reviewed Reality and Dreams in 1997, and said that Spark saw the novel as a kind of game. Almost all her novels—her career spans six decades—are overtly meta, and at heart prod and challenge and dissect ‘the whole business of truth and invention.’ She does it again in this novel by delving into the world of movies and movie-making, where people are in ‘the tract of no-man’s land between dreams and reality, reality and dreams.’

Her main character Tom is making a movie, and the novel’s opening sentence is: ‘He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams.’ Spark, one of the sharpest writers I’ve ever read, always starts with a bang. And just keeps going bang bang bang till the very end. Line by line she’s one of my favourite sentence makers.

In Spark’s classic fashion the narrative is never anything but elusive and wild but at the same time compulsively readable and easy to follow. A short novel with a big cast, the story moves incredibly fast. There are affairs, injuries, a disappearance, attempted murder, and all sorts of shenanigans. Spark’s world is deliciously off-kilter, her style and sense of humour entirely her own, and the brilliance that shines on every page comes across as having been achieved with effortless ease.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Chrystyna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reality and Dreams by Muriel Spark - ok
I hold my hands up. I really didn't get this one at all. I have no idea what it's really about.

OK, there is a story of sorts. Tom is a film producer/director. The book opens with him in traction having fallen from a crane that he was using to direct from. He's under the influence of a lot of pain medication and finding he can't tell the difference between reality and dreams.... so maybe that's part of the theme.

The film that was in production was The Hamburger Girl. Based on a fleeting glimpse of a girl cooking and selling hamburgers on a French camp site that Tom saw whilst on holiday and has fixated on ever since. He's built a whole story around that fleeting glance... again it's his dream rather than the reality of the girl.

Tom also has two wives - one current, one ex - and two adult daughters, one from each marriage. Again, he imagines things about these women as opposed to the reality of their lives.

The thing is, nothing much really happens in the book. I still don't get the point. I did like one sentence that might help: "....here in the tract of no-man's land between dreams and reality, reality and dreams." Maybe we all live like that. What is real and what is imagined. We do make so many assumptions about people and situations.

Eventually I gave up trying to understand. Instead I read Kirsty Gunn's Introduction to the book and found this:

"In the end, Reality and Dreams, all glamour and film and money and affairs, is leaving us with nothing, no 'novel' to speak of and certainly no plot, takes us somewhere else altogether that is contemplative, quiet, empty actually."

Afternote: I've now finished reading Martin Stannard's biography of Muriel and found that she wrote this after a fall following surgery which put her in traction and under the influence of strong pain medication.... so another occasion where part of the story is semi autobiographical.

[Randy Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have now read all of Muriel Spark’s twenty two novels! I’ve already decided I will start at the beginning and read them all again if I live long enough. I should say I have read all twenty two of her fictions because I have long said that while they are fascinating, engrossing and worth reading, they aren’t much in the way of novels.

This books is as good as any to explain what I mean. There are characters and they exist in place and time so in that very basic way, this is a novel. But the characters don’t have psychological and/or emotional depth. They don’t have an arc of development and the insights one gathers aren’t from the four squares of the novel. Instead, the insights flow from the ideas that novel explores.

For example, in ‘Reality and Dreams’ Tom and Claire have a long marriage and they have two children who are now adults. The idea at play in the depiction of their marriage is a tricky one. How are these two people so close, so connected despite a comfortable emptiness as to passion, romance or sex. We accept that they have a successful marriage despite plenty of evidence that there is no reality in the form that we typically associate with a successful marriage.

Even more stunning is that the entire family including the children’s spouses don’t connect in a family way. Yes they treat each other as family members but they don’t have any of the usual connections or affection that we associate with family life. We the readers place our sense of reality, our need for dreams on top of a story where those things aren’t particularly present. Yet we still invest the story with those attributes because we are so use to doing so with the novel.

Muriel Spark’s greatest gift was her ability to quickly and powerfully invest a barebones story that subverts most novelistic tropes with a powerful, confident narrator that overrides any doubts or quibbles or lacking in traditional novelistic devices there are. It is with this confident voice that Spark is able to explore the ideas that are important to her while discarding the trappings of the novel and still give at least this reader a vigorous mindful massage.

[Mighty Aphrodite · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tom vive in un mondo in cui la realtà e i sogni si confondono, si disperdono e si ricreano, come una forma di creta calda e scivolosa sotto mani inesperte e fantasiose. Anche il volto di una ragazza visto per un momento in un camping francese si può trasformare in un nuovo mondo, in una storia complessa ed esaltante.

La mente di Tom è un animale vivace e indocile, incapace di resistere all’inattività, agli stimoli che paiono affollarsi davanti ai suoi occhi e con cui la realtà non si stanca mai di nutrirlo e irretirlo con tutte le sue infinite possibilità. In fondo, Tom è un regista famoso e apprezzato, un regista che – nel suo tentativo pericoloso di avvicinarsi al cielo – si sente un po’ Dio. Un dio che, però, non riesce a rimanere concreto e reale, a plasmare il mondo per renderlo ancor più vivo, ma che trasmuta in sogno amori, odi, donne, visioni di esistenze alternative.

Nonostante la confusione di una esistenza in cui passione, amore e affetto si disperdono tra la moglie, le figlie e le varie amanti che animano i suoi set, la vita di Tom non si sgretola, non cede sotto l’urto di sempre nuovi stravolgimenti; ma è tenuta in ordine da una moglie dolce e di classe, Claire, che accetta lo stile di vita del marito ed è pronto a farlo proprio, in un equilibrio che si estende negli anni e che non fa che rafforzare il loro legame.

La nota stonata in questa dolce sinfonia, la mina vagante incomprensibile e piena d’odio, pronta a colpire a tradimento, è Marigold, la loro unica figlia. I due genitori la guardano sempre con una certa dose di stupore e scetticismo: non riescono davvero a comprendere come faccia quella ragazza così rigida e moralista ad essere il risultato della loro unione; è così diversa, così sprezzante, con un’espressione che quasi rasenta la malvagità se si ha il coraggio di guardare a fondo in quei suoi occhi così piccoli.

Continua a leggere qui: https://parlaredilibri.wordpress.com/...

[Geret · Rating 3 out of 5]

no work of art can be replaced. a work of art is like living people

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like to read in electronic formats because as I’m reading along and notice a passage I might want to use in a review like this I can simply highlight it there and then and send it to Evernote to retrieve later. And all that without hardly having to slow down at all. In this book only three single sentences stood out:

Redundancy worries me; it hangs over us all.

Tom was in fact thinking the deeply disloyal thought ‘Why should anyone bother to murder Marigold?’

She moved in with Johnny naturally and casually, presumably while waiting to decide on her next man.

I’m not saying the whole book boils down to these three sentences but they do stand out.

In an interview with Martin McQuillan Spark said how much she wanted to write about redundancy—several of the characters in the novel are made redundant in that they lose their jobs; others lose their purpose—and she says, “The issue is to have a whole new philosophy of life where usefulness is questioned.” It’s a very utilitarian view but it does hit an important nail on the head: Is there a direct correlation between our lives’ meanings and our feelings of being useful. (Whether or not we are or need to be is irrelevant.) I’m not talking about a Grand Purpose, to write the Great American Novel or find a cure for Alzheimer’s because only a minority ever live in even the shadow of one of those goals, but the notions that we’re needed, that the world is (even infinitesimally) a better place with us in it.

For the book’s main character—Tom Richards, 63—his raison d'être is to make films. If he’s not making a film he’s thinking about making a film. At the start of the book Tom’s not technically redundant—he’s suffered a serious accident during filming and is facing several months of recuperation—but he has been shown how easily he can be replaced; the show must go on an all that. The powers that be have handed the reins to another director and it very much looks as if his project, his vision—he’s also the writer—will be butchered if he can’t get back to work quickly. And then, of course, there’s always the fear that he may never work again. He could always make a start on his memoirs but what then?

Tom has two daughters, Cora, his daughter by his first wife, “the family beauty” whom he dotes on and the Marigold mentioned in my second quote (Tom’s daughter to Claire, his second and current wife) who is not a beauty, not even on the inside. She is, however, quite the philosopher. At a dinner party shorty after her father’s accident she voices her opinion on a number of topics but this is what she had to say about her parents:

‘[T]here comes a time when one has to see things sub specie aeternitatis. Which means,’ she said, turning to Ruth [her sister-in-law], ‘under the light of eternity. That is what my parents now have to do. Examine their utility, their service ability, their accountability, their duties and commitments, instead of respectively womanising and manising as they have done in the past, as they continue to do, and as they no doubt mean to do.’

Claire is rich but affluence on its own is not a purpose.

Although it was true that money was a built-in part of Claire’s personality, she was many things besides. Tom was fully aware of this. What steadily drew him towards her was her loyalty to him which always predominated over her infidelities; the latter hardly counted. So that, when from time to time Tom muttered to himself or to one of his women friends, ‘My wife has a man,’ the remark held no foreboding, and no more than a touch of impatience.

It would be hypocritical of Tom to whinge because, over the years, he’s also taken many lovers; it was seen as a perk of the job. To call what they have an open marriage is probably technically accurate only the matter was never discussed; there was nothing to discuss; they supported each other and put up with each other and, really, what more does one want from a marriage?

Marigold wants even less from hers. Surprisingly she has managed to snag a husband, James, who, shortly after getting married, had decided it might be best if he became a travel writer and is often away from home which says a lot. When Marigold visits her father in the hospital, for example, he asks…

      ‘How’s James?’
       ‘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.

At first it looks like Marigold is going to be a minor character and probably not even the comic relief but things change when she vanishes without trace. Then she becomes much more interesting. Of course after a while the police start to consider the possibility, since there’s been no demand for money for her safe return, that she’s been murdered. And that’s where her father has his uncharitable thought. I actually stopped when I got to that point and read that sentence out to my wife. “Isn’t that the saddest thing?” I said. If Marigold vanished off the face of the planet what difference would it make? She’s superfluous to requirements.

The third sentence I recorded concerns Cora who was married to Johnny, decides to divorce him but then (and this is what the sentence refers to) decides on a whim to move back in with him. Tom notes:

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.

Once again another disposable character, easily replaced, brought back into play only to be swapped out again when the time was right.

Frankly it’s hard to care about anyone in this book. What is particularly noteworthy is how Tom’s relationship with Marigold changes once she stops being merely his daughter and turns into a source of inspiration for his next film. She becomes useful but at what cost? She is more present in her absence than she ever was before. In Muriel Spark's Postmodernism Chickako Sawada notes that “the irony of the human condition—represented by a woman trying to be ‘an author in control’ but instead caught up in her own plot—is subtly accompanied by the irony of fate.” She’s not an ugly duckling who discovers she’s a swan but she is an ugly duckling who’s keen to avoid becoming duck à l'orange somewhere down the line and if that means biting the hand that feeds her (or at least having a good snap at it) then so be it.

In her interview with Martin McQuillan Spark says:

I don’t see the point in being discredited as a human being just because you’re unemployed. I never thought of it that way, but people do. That’s one of the things I wanted to bring out in the book, this frustration people have about redundancy. […] Maybe I don’t bring that out enough in the novel. I don’t want to plug away at an idea too much, to hammer things home, it’s better to let them diffuse.

Actually I think she does hammer things home. The word “redundant” (or some variation thereof) appears no less than forty-five times in the book. I got the point. That really is my only real gripe though. That the characters were people I struggled to relate to I simply learned to live with. Apart from Tom. He could’ve easily have been a writer but there’re fewer opportunities for philandering sitting behind a desk on your own all day.

The title of the book is probably not the best thing about it either but it all revolves around a poem by T.S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock’ which begins in the real world and ends in a dream. The irony is that most people spend their lives trying to make their dreams real although not all get to make films out of them like Tom or Kurosawa. Still for most of us the relationship between our dreams and reality is an uncomfortable one:

Tom often wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams. To an unbeliever this would have meant the casting of an insubstantiality within an already insubstantial context. Tom was a believer. He meant the very opposite. Our dreams, yes, are insubstantial; the dreams of God, no. They are real, frighteningly real. They bulge with flesh, they drip with blood. My own dreams, said Tom to himself, are shadows, my arguments—all shadows.

I can see why most reviewers have marked this down—three stars seems par for the course—because it’s not her best book. That doesn’t make it a bad book. Perhaps because of all the hammering some readers missed the subtlety in the background.

[tortoise dreams · Rating 4 out of 5]

A movie director, injured while on set, soon finds his real and creative lives in conflict, as are the economic and sexual aspects of the lives of his family, friends, and colleagues.

Muriel Spark is unsubtle here: this really is a book about reality and dreams. Normally I think of plot as secondary in a Spark book, and focus more on her excellent writing, keen wit, and sharp observation. But she was trying something completely different in Reality and Dreams, and her plot intertwines the real and unreal in every paragraph, every situation, every character. She has woven a tapestry of the real and the unreal as metaphor. Everything in Reality and Dreams can be labeled real or unreal. For example, the main character has two daughters one unreal (Cora) and one real (Marigold). But Marigold has two parts one real (female), and one unreal (male). Et cetera. One can argue whether each element is the real or the unreal. Perhaps she did this as an exercise, but the reader is confronted with this double vision on virtually every page of Reality and Dreams. After my first read I was a bit puzzled (I love Muriel Spark's books) and felt as tho I had missed something. On my second read it all fell into place, and viewing everything through the real/unreal lens made it much more enjoyable and intriguing. A.S. Byatt's back cover quote gave me the needed clue to understanding. Thank you Ms. Byatt, and thank you Ms. Spark. [4 Stars]

[Emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[Perry Whitford · Rating 3 out of 5]

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. The themes didn't carry any weight though. Redundancy effected many of the characters, which can be an awful thing, but it was treated so lightly, so facilely.

Witty but shallow.

[Luke Winter · Rating 2 out of 5]

avoid.

the drama is entirely driven by the intolerances and excesses of the rich. this is disguised as charisma, and written without any charm.

the characters are uninterested and uninteresting. the plot meanders. the title of the book appears in the text twice, neither time ringing a poetic punch.

the book is a masquerade of privilege assumed as entertainment. wealth itself does not afford entertainment.

i am annoyed at myself for sticking with this till the end. please do not. there is nothing at the end.

here is the best snippet:

"[the nurse] was making the bed with a flourish of sheets that looked like a ship in full sail."

[Ted · Rating 3 out of 5]

Totally forgettable book. I'm getting rid of books that I've read today. The only reason I know I've read this one is that I have a spreadsheet that says I have. (Plus I'd already given it a 3 rating on GR.) Picked it up, looked at it, concluded quickly "toss".

That's not to say that I may not have enjoyed the read at the time, it was probably okay. But even though it's very short, not worth taking up 1/4 inch of shelf space. If you see it at a garage sale for two bits, go for it.

[Kathleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

No one, not even Muriel Spark, can be brilliant all the time, I guess.

[Howard Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the gems in the Spark's lexicon.

[Andrew Wardle · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Like her earlier novella The Public Image, this is a compact, tightly-plotted short novel about the movie business. But unlike The Public Image, one of my few disappointments in her writing, this is Muriel Spark at the top of her game.
Famous director Tom Richards is recuperating after a near-fatal accident on the set of his latest film. Helped and hindered in equal amounts by his feuding family, his friends, lovers and hangers-on, he struggles to keep the film project alive and true to his very stringent "artistic" demands whilst also juggling a complicated love-life and a family most of whom seem to have simultaneously been made redundant (the setting is 1996, during the last despairing months of John Major's unpopular government). As usual with Muriel Spark, the plot occasionally descends into flights of fancy and isn't really the point. Her characters, her dialogue, and her witty commentary on diverse aspects of modern life, are the draw. The cosy, self-regarding world of "media types" (including authors) is gently lampooned.

**some possible spoilers follow**

A few characteristic shafts of wit (just the ones which tickled me, you could find as good on almost every page):
{the studio's substitute director comes to discuss the film with Tom} ".......he explained his method, which he called his artistic strategy, thus outraging Tom from the start.";
{a police detective comes to discuss a disappearance which forms an important subplot} "Tom sensed a touch of impatience with people whose lifestyle permitted the possibility that they were not murdered or kidnapped - people who could just walk out of one life into another.";
{a divorcing couple amicably divide all their possessions but for a 2-volume poetry collection} "All the venom these two people had stored against each other was spurted out in the cause of this quite replaceable book, which neither party cherished for any particular reason.";
""Out Of Work In A Camper" gave Marigold a glamour which Tom could only admire."

One slight misstep - as in one of her other novels, Ms Spark seems oddly naive about the world of crime and policing: a hit-man (yes, there's one of those !) takes an unsuccessful shot at Tom. "It could be anybody", a friend says. "How much could a hit-man possibly cost ?". "A lot", replies experienced police officer. As if. In 1990s Britain a contract killing would cost a few thousand quid. If that.

[Rahul Singh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muriel Spark continues to remain a favourite of mine with every book of hers that I read. She is intelligent, funny, clever and empathetic. Her books are a proof of her comprehension of the complexities of human ties. In this book, we follow Tom Richards, a renowned director who's had a terrible fall from a crane while shooting a film he'd been excited about. The fall has rattled him. The dreams he had of his life, the film, his family begin to decay as reality makes itself felt both bodily and socially. I remember beginning to read the book and found myself already giggling with joy. Spark's humour is unparalleled, truly. She has a way with writing scenes akin to Comyns, Pym and Howard where laughter is induced in very serious scenes. I was reading this book when events in my life were taking turns. The book became a fitting background for all the things taking place. At times, I sat and wondered if the book's title and general tenor is taking placing in my life: that reality and dreams often worked simultaneously, that reality came to destruct dreams, but it was the construction of dreams that made reality bearable in the first place. Could reality be separated from dreams? I know I am talking in circles but these were questions and conclusions that kept awake for nights on end. For all said and done, Spark's book is more fictional than some of her others I have read: the films and actors and fame with money; so far away from my life. But it must be Spark's genius to still make the story relevant and closer to home. As is the case, I am in sheer admiration of her. I hope to never stop reading Spark for the witticism and actually end up thinking much more about reality once I put the book down. What a writer!

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 3 out of 5]

REALITY AND DREAMS by Muriel Spark is very strange. This late novel -- she would write only 2 more -- is about a hubristic film director, a kind of auteur, who is recovering from a massive set of injuries after falling off a crane while filming. It follows him, his complex family circle, including daughters from two marriages, his wife, everyone's spouses and lovers, the actresses in his films, and the common man stand in, a taxi driver he makes friends with , until a murder attempt, targeted at the driver but likely intended in some way to get at the director, eventually makes the driver cut ties.
The characters live in a world of privilege and indulgence, yet the precarity of a failing job market infects its margins. There is a dreamlike quality established from the bravura passage where the director is emerging from drugged rest in hospital. Of course, he is himself in the dream business. Reality is at best and excursion for him and his circle, a place to slum it, to find material, to find a break from their anodyne lives.
It's a strange, uneven novel. In her final years, I feel Spark had outlived her era. Attempts at reflecting the world of the 1990s feel forced even inept, as in a reference to 'the Gay movement'. Keeping track of who is sleeping with who soon becomes complicated and feels pointless. Yet, there's more in this than many a more coherent novel by other writers. At some level it feels like a snide satire on Spark herself, the aging teller of tales still trying to play her god-games. And never being the one who pays the dreadful price one unfortunate does, at the very end, for everyone else's machinations...

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dame Muriel has written a book about a woman named Marigold.

The book purports to be about her filmmaker father. Possibly also about her heiress mother. But this is a book about her.

Her father and mother have affairs. They know about the affairs. They don't seem to care much about the affairs of the other. This angers Marigold.

Her mother, especially, is free with her money. This also upsets Marigold, despite being the beneficiary.

Marigold is very concerned with folks having their CVs in order. She begins to take interest in men made redundant through being laid off at their jobs. She sleeps with a number of them, despite her moralizing about her parents. She seems interested in a very weird bootstrappy way. She's altogether uncomfortable as a person.

We know she is because even her family cannot cease to note it. They note it in particularly surface level ways. We are meant to read these critiques as poor parenting, and not accurate reflection of Marigold.

That's basically the story in a nutshell, though again, the main characters are not Marigold. She is a peripheral, one who seeks the attention of becoming a main one. Her parents are the main ones. But it is how they react to her that seems to be the goal of the narrative. And it's a hard narrative to care about, because again, Marigold is written as a conservative ninny. If her family is all a mess, she doesn't come off any better for it. And it's weird to be guided along as though here, here is where sympathies must lie, when that character is impossible to garner sympathy for.

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

And so we come to Spark's 20th novel. Unfortunately, of the five or so that I have read, this is quite easily the weakest. Unlike 'The Comforters', there are very few ideas of any significance here and the ones that are touched upon are never explored in any depth. There are hints of Spark's comic wit but nothing even in the same league as 'The Girls of Slender Means'. Consider the final line of this novel:

'Both Tom and Cora felt her strength and courage sustaining them, here in the tract of no-man's land between dreams and reality, reality and dreams.'

Thus we are given (what is essentially) a thesis statement, yet it is for something we haven't actually experienced in the novel itself. The 'events' of the novel (which are usually haphazard and forgettable) have no lasting impact and veer more towards the mundane and the irrelevant than the deep or the surreal.

That's not to say I disliked the novel; certainly, it was readable, easy to follow and the quirkiness kept things moving along. But the problem is that it's 'Sparkian fluff' at its core, with no real message and nothing to really remember it by. Or, to put it another way, it's Spark in style but not in substance. For a starting point into Spark's usually brilliant world, I would never recommend 'Reality and Dreams' as it's a poor example of what the woman was capable of. How this novel garnered as much critical praise as it did is a mystery to me, surely the sad result of blind adoration.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Muriel Spark's writing. The dialogue (and there is loads of it) is just that tiny bit off kilter. Nothing is ever quite like it seems. A seemingly straightforward story of a film writer and director. Tom has fallen from a crane trying a fancy shot on his latest film. So he is recovering at home with visits from his vastly rich wife Claire, family (many spongers, redundancy in a theme that runs through the book) and friends. I enjoyed the stuff about the two daughters from different mothers. Marigold, especially, was a natural disaster. Everyone said she was difficult.

I enjoyed all the parts about Tom making pictures, especially when he goes back to the studio in a wheelchair. "The trouble with producers is that they want both an art film and a commercial success. They want sentimentality, emotion and higher moods of detachment. They want bloody everything".
Both Tom and Claire have affairs but stick together like glue. "What steadily drew him towards her was her loyalty to him which always predominated over her infidelities".

My copy of the book when it arrived was, unusually, a hardback. However, it said the cover picture was "Tours Sunset" by J.M.W. Turner. In fact it turned out to be "The Scarlet Sunset". My book was a 1996 Edition that seemed brand new. The quality of the pages and text was just superb, given it was twenty eight years old.

[Sherry Fyman · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have to vent: I hate this book. Ordinarily, if I pick up a book and push through half and still am bored out of my skull, I couldn’t care less about any of the characters and can’t remember who the heck they are, well, it would be simple. Put the darn thing down. But I can’t do that here. You see, several years ago my wife and I decided to read all 22 of Spark’s novels outloud to each other. Reality and Dreams is #20. Of the first 19, most have been good. Many quite good. Reality and Dreams is really only the second that bores me to tears. But we have to muddle through so we can go on to #21 and then climb the summit.

It’s been an amazing project, by the way. I would strongly recommend to every book lover to pick one author, maybe one you don’t know very well, and commit to reading their entire list of books in the order they were published. It’s quite an education to see a writer’s style develop and see what choices work, what she’s tried one time too many and, in the case of Muriel Spark, where her genius lies.

[Karen Whitehead · Rating 1 out of 5]

Blithering nonsense was my exasperated response upon finishing this. Perhaps the author felt she was having fun with some madcap characters but they were all so lightly and trivially sketched as to render them featureless. I also take issue with some gender descriptions. One of the characters, described many times as an “ugly woman”, wears men’s clothing as a disguise and is referred to as a “transvestite” and a “hermaphrodite”. The characters send each other faxes and seem to be able to receive them no matter where they are. The book was written in 1996 and the author was in her seventies. Was she trying to appear up to date with current technology? I blame her editor for letting things like that slide, and perhaps the publisher, who may have been keen on getting a new Muriel Spark to print.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

**SPOILERS**

I told my sister that Muriel Spark is a mush of Dickens and Wodehouse. I need to mush in some kind of dark author, though. Maybe just a pinch of, uh, i don't know, Stephen King? Goodreads references her "darkly comedic voice." I just love that about Ms Spark.

But this book. I kept going because the writing is just so pleasant. There was no Wodehouse, however. Not one tittle. It wasn't even Dickens: no great descriptions like in her other books, though a wise taxi driver who drives the rich guy around is a cool character to have in a story. And only the slightest hint of Stephen King. I miss the funny tone! I miss the author who sounds like her eyes are smiling.

Not one favorite bit do I have to copy in here, as is my habit. Not one.

[Till Raether · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

This swerves from being unnecessary and self-indulgent to being brilliant and prescient and back, sometimes within a single paragraph. I feel the more Spark turned to satire, the broader and at the same time fuzzier her focus got. Or threatened to get. I think Reality & Dreams (unlike, say, Symposium) works because Spark finds humour in her characters' cruelty. Plus I always enjoy what she passes off as plot: this weird accumulation of stuff that happens because it happens, and which she obviously makes up as she goes along. The writing is tight and chaotic at the same time, deeply undisciplined but super polished and concise, you can tell she enjoyed herself writing this but also couldn't wait to be done with it.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick, easy, pleasant read in the Muriel Spark style. Better books by Spark are Momento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the Public Image and Symposium. All the characters have affairs with others and their partners (apart form one!) generally seem okay with it. The protagonist is Tom Richards, a famous movie director in his 50s, married to Claire who comes from a very wealthy family. They have a daughter, Marigold who is an unusual daughter who doesn't understand why Tom and Claire are still married given they have affairs. Reality and Dreams has good dialogue, unusual characters and a couple of surprising plot twists that will to some extent satisfy Muriel Spark fans.

[James Frase-White · Rating 4 out of 5]

Happened upon, thanks to Kindle, a Muriel Spark novel I'd not read. What a delight to read her again. This book, about a movie director, wealth and redundancy is a pure charm. It seems as potent and important today as it did when it came our in the late 90's. It is a mischievous probe of the makers of dreams--film people--and those who dwell, so far beneath them, common man, yet share the common adoration, and envy, the quasi-religious devotion of the rich and famous. Have a desert of a read, Spark at her best.