Reality and Dreams (edition 1997)

A short, light read, amusing...and confusing. Not sure what it was trying to say (if anything). The book seems to have two halves. In the first, Tom the movie director (our protagonist) is recovering from a fall off a crane while working on a movie. He recovers, completes the movie, and the second half begins. Here, he's working on a new movie and the daughter of his first marriage suddenly disappears. Tom's driver is shot, but survives, and the daughter is suspected of hiring a gunman, but for what reason, I never did figure out.

The book is my first by this author, and her wise, knowing narrator voice reminds me of novels by her friend, the late Gore Vidal. A lot of telling, rather than showing, which only a writer this good can get away with. It makes the story fly by quickly--perhaps too much so. ( )

The usual excellent Muriel Spark stuff. ( )

Spark can pack an awful lot into 181 pages or so. The randy film director Tom gets up to various and sundry shenanigans. Does he wake or sleep? That is the question.
Gore Vidal thought it was Spark at the top of her form. John Mortimer admired her 'sharp and short' style. A S Byatt discovered that Tom's life and his films are distorted shadow images of each other, and the subtlety of the parallels only slowly becomes apparent.
For me, Spark is an acute observer who knows what long-shots are, and what are shoo-ins. ( )

A golden-hued gem from the author's later years (published when she was 78). It's no Jean Brodie, but still delightfully brimming with Sparkian vim and verve.

The novel concerns a middle-aged film director and his wandering libido, as well as his complicated and meandering family. Fellini crossed with Iris Murdoch? It's a social comedy in the well-established British tradition. At first glance, it may seem slight, perhaps superficial, but like early Waugh or most of Ivy Compton-Burnett's work, there's a lot going on beneath the surface.

"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 insubstaniality 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 bulge with blood. My own dreams, said Tom to himself, are shadows, my arguments - all shadows." ( )