Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Muriel Spark (Review of Reality and Dreams)

“He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams.” Thus begins Muriel Spark’s shortish, beguiling, twentieth novel. The “he” doing the wondering is Tom Richards, a sixty-something film director of some renown, who is recovering from a serious accident — a fall from a crane during the shooting of his latest film, The Hamburger Girl. This is about as profound as Tom gets (he is no great intellectual) and most of his waking moments are given over to thinking about himself — his future projects, his cares and woes, his love affairs and his wife and family.

The mazy and improbable plot largely centres on Tom’s relationship with his daughter from his second marriage, Marigold. Marigold is plain, difficult and demanding and an air of mutual dislike colours their respective attitudes to each other. Cora, Tom’s daughter from his first marriage, however, is beautiful and can do no wrong. Claire, Marigold’s mother, airily tolerates Tom’s egotism and his regular adultery. The family congregate around Tom after the fall (many broken ribs, a shattered hip), commiserate somewhat and go on their merry ways. Tom’s film is put on hold, retitled, then, after he has recuperated, starts up once more with Tom restored at the helm. Tom has an affair with his leading lady, Rose Woodstock, alienates another dysfunctional actress called Jeanne and presides over the several misfortunes of his daughters and sons-in-law.

It is all slightly ditsy and eccentric with a La Ronde style of serial infidelities adding a certain spice. Things get serious however when Marigold disappears: rather, things eventually get serious because no one seems to notice she has gone, at first. Finally the alarm is raised, the media are alerted, a search is initiated world wide and eventually Marigold is found disguised as a man living with some New Age travellers. It was all, it turns out, a way of tormenting her horrible father. Except that, mysteriously, a taxi driver companion of Tom (a compliant ear to Tom’s convalescent witterings) has been shot at and nearly killed. Was this Marigold’s doing?

By way of compensation for his paternal neglect Tom casts manly Marigold as a prescient Celt called Cedric in his latest absurd movie, set in Roman Britain, called Watling Street. Curiously, but then perhaps not, this is the movie business after all, Tom persists in recasting Rose Woodstock and Jeanne in this new film. Jeanne, now druggy and seriously unhinged, becomes a compliant agent for Marigold’s wiles. Marigold, still nurturing murderous thoughts, decides to kill her father by re-enacting the original crane accident, only this time with more fatal efficiency. Jeanne is engaged as saboteur but the plans go tragically awry.

Such summaries of Muriel Spark’s novels do them a misservice. What delights principally is the tone of voice, so enviably assured, such a distinct signature. In this novel the point of view is omniscient, we visit whichever character’s thoughts suit the Sparkian design. The voice is cool and spare, and in complete disinterested control: “The youth recounted his experience with Marigold but said they had parted shortly afterwards. He did not discount that Marigold was perfectly capable of hiring a hit-man if the plan suited her. The police eventually believed the boy, whose name for the present purpose is irrelevant, and let him go. Where was Marigold? Nobody knew for sure.”

The disinterest can also shade into ruthlessness. There has always been a nail-paring objectivity about Muriel Spark’s authorial style (this is what drew Evelyn Waugh to praise her first novel) and it provides delectable pleasures throughout her work, Reality and Dreams included. This aloofness can breed a certain air of cynicism or fatalism and gives rise to the darkness that seems to haunt the story. Tom and his brood are lightweights, people we care little for, whose lives and concerns, from one point of view, seem almost nugatory.

A conclusion that is perhaps borne out by the novel’s opening sentence, Tom’s ingenuous aperçu. What, indeed, if we are mere figments in one of God’s dreams? Where does that leave us? “As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods”—so Gloucester famously observed in King Lear and Spark’s wise and disturbing fiction often exploits a similar sense of human insubstantiality and unimportance with great subtlety and skill. Of course there is another layer here, apart from the nihilistic, that is readily developed. We can detect a God-like presence hovering over the action of the novel — that of the author: these characters are characters in one of Muriel Spark’s dreams. The dream/reality, art/life theme is further enhanced by the fact that Tom’s films all start from dreams he has had. He then makes these films “real” through the wholly unreal medium of film. Just as the plot slips and slides, and the characters’ various fates chop and change almost at whim so too does our sense of the reality of what we are reading shift and blur. There is, in the end, only one person who can make sense of the whole can of worms — the artist.

However, in Reality and Dreams the controlling role of Muriel Spark is a little too overt, I feel. Her unique sensibility functions best when the voice is subjective, the point of view confined or in first person, as in her two wonderful late novels A Far Cry from Kensington and Loitering with Intent. This method localizes, and validates, that clear-eyed, unabashedly, brutally honest gaze on the world and its denizens. Omniscient narration has the opposite effect: the mode has its attractions but, in this day and age, it can seem a little too manipulative and knowing. Perhaps in this elderly century (and Spark makes some play with this notion) the predetermined, the ordered, the sense of everything-in-its-place is fundamentally inimical. In our novels, that most controlled of artefacts, we need at least the illusion of uncertainty, of ignorance, of the random.

Reflecting on his dream notion Tom concedes that, “‘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.” The dreams of Muriel Spark, as we have seen in her exemplary oeuvre, are frighteningly real, also, and bulge and drip to great effect. Reality and Dreams, however, is a little muted, and a certain shadowiness detracts from the real frisson. We may not have, in this latest novel, Muriel Spark in her full symphonic majesty but we can still relish the real pleasures of this work on a smaller scale — a nocturne, say, a suite, a variation on certain themes — as we wait impatiently for the major work to resume.

1999