It’s thrilling to see Spark give her novel – and the whole genre – a damn good kicking

In Reality and Dreams, Muriel Spark exposes the brittle artificiality of a film diretor as he recovers in hospital after an accident. None of our lives, as individuals, add up to a great deal, Spark seems to be telling us.

In his highly personal 2003 study, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited ,the critic and scholar Harold Bloom talks about the dangerousness of Shakespeare’s literary enterprise. It’s there in all the plays, he says, Shakespeare’s sense of risk-taking with language and plot, his great experiment with theatre, but in the story of the young Danish prince questioning his own sense of reality and self the playwright has taken himself out to the very edge of reason, testing his imagination at every turn, only to realise that there seem to be no limits to what he might do next.

I think of the novels of Muriel Spark in the same way: each one different from the last; each pushing in its own way at the limitations of the form itself. What we had to start with is left in pieces by the end; every fresh story something surprising, strange and whole and new.

And just as Hamlet is dangerous both to himself and to his creator, as Bloom suggests, so, it seems to me, Reality and Dreams brings its author to the absolute extremities of her literary project. Of course, whether it comes near to achieving the cataclysmic aftermath of one of the world’s most important pieces of art is not the point. Rather, the issue is that its author is engaged in the same sort of struggle, with the same selfawareness and curiosity and doubt. Is the novel still useful, in the way it once was, to show us who we are? Is reading about other people a good way to spend our time?

These questions and more fly up at us as one by one Spark dispenses with all the easy satisfactions of representation and mimesis, with plot or character progression or ‘good’ writing or ‘style’; all those mainstays of narrative are gone as we enter fully into the madness of this strange story of manners and morals and what it might be like to make art. For to be in the midst of that story, praxis, that theatre of invention, is to feel the inventive maelstrom of Spark’s imagination and intellect, the gorgeous, whirling exhilaration of the novelist giving her novel – and so the whole genre – a damn good kicking. This, I think, is what Reality and Dreams is all about.

Let me explain in more detail what I mean. And there might, anyway, be a hint as to what Spark’s up to in the title. For Reality and Dreams, begins, no doubt, simply, realistically, enough – the story of a filmmaker laid up after an accident falling off a crane while shooting the final scenes of a movie, who, with time on his hands fantasises about his next adventures, both sexual and artistic, as his family disintegrates and re-forms around him. Like the myth we read at school about Plato’s cave and our limited understanding of reality, this very London tale of Tom Richards and his affairs is one of brittle artificiality, reflecting perfectly the art Tom composes, made of nothing more than flickering images and light projected on a wall. ‘It was typical of Tom,’ Spark writes, ‘and in a way a part of the mores of that world of dreams and reality which he was at home in, the world of filming scenes, casting people in parts, piecing together types and shadows, facts and illusions, that he made no distinction between divorced members of his family and those still married.’

Yet, delusional as Tom may be, this world of his seems perfectly authentic on the page, as realistic and lifelike as that represented in so many kinds of English novels that might set out to tell about relationships and families. Indeed, there is a great deal in Reality and Dreams that speaks back exactly to the kind of novels that were being written when Spark was at work on the manuscript in the mid1990s, and before – all those stories about glamorous metropolitan lives that crowded the English language book-shops then as they do now. The

‘sentimental novel’ they called it once, the novel of manners, of society.

And look what the critics wrote about Reality and Dreams .‘A narrative which can become as unexpected and absurd as life itself,’ said the Observer. ‘Cool precision and puckish satire,’ the Atlantic

Monthly, and ‘like a visit from a farflung friend’, Newsday. For it does seem as though this novel might have been greeted as one of those other kinds of stories, or, at the least, as one of Spark’s early fictions – ‘the exquisite point between funny and painful’ wrote the New York Daily

News – not her twentieth. And yes, this story is funny – is there a Spark novel that doesn’t make us laugh? She believed laughing was the most ethical response to art, that it kept us thinking, on our toes. ‘The art and literature of sentiment and emotion, however beautiful in itself . . . has to go,’ she wrote in an essay about the role of art in society in 1970. ‘In its place I advocate the arts of satire and ridicule . . . Ridicule is the only honourable weapon we have left.’ Art should make us alive, she believed, reactionary. It shouldn’t do the job of feeling for us. That’s just an excuse not to do anything, not to feel or wonder or be frightened for ourselves.

Certainly the portrait of the ludicrous Tom and his vanities, the hilarity of his obsession with actresses, his drive-by nights in Soho while he searches for his runaway daughter, Marigold, who might be becoming an actress herself while also writing a book, carries all of Spark’s signature acid wit. Her detailed descriptions of the ill-conceived shenanigans of her protagonists, who slip through partnerships and career choices as though experimenting with different outfits for a party, combined with a sort of Edinburgh restraint – what Alan Taylor has defined as Spark’s quality of ‘nevertheless’, her setting of one idea against the other, the rigid formality of that process – makes the novel one great crazy shambles of cause and effect outlined by Spark’s sharpest pen:

‘I chose them,’ Tom said with shrill emphasis, ‘for their looks.’

‘Ah!’ said the upstart, ‘you can’t hire actors mainly for their looks’ He looked for support at the casting director, a mature woman . . . But the casting director had eyes only for Tom, whom she adored.

Yet while the story has unquestionably been designed to be funny, nevertheless, funny is not a description of this writer’s art. In that she is deadly serious – exercising a ruthless sense of composition that undoes her plot as she goes along, blowing all the so-called ‘characters’ clear out of their own novel and leaving them as nothing more than ideas, prototypes. So contingent, so random are the events that unfold in Reality and Dreams, and at such speed, in short, clipped, throwaway sentences and non sequiturs, it’s as though the narrative is without any consequence or conclusion. Spark seems to be suggesting, by giving her cast of players no depth or substance, that people who behave, who live, in the way Tom and his family do – in the way most of us live, after all, majestically concerned only with our own egos and work and loves and with no concern for overall pattern or meaning – are part of a life that may be nothing more than a show of poses and clothes. A cinematic flicker of light on a wall, played in the dark.

So much for the reality. What then of the dreams?

Well, transcendent is not a word that we tend to use in association with the brittle, metal-edged, barbed and often frightful works of this author – with her phalanxes of virginal sextresses and sex-crazed virgins, all those teachers and girls of slender means and abbesses . . . The novels seem too crazily obsessed with their origins, too literary and beautifully, self-consciously wrought, to appear interested in achieving some kind of epiphany or spiritual lift-off. But spiritual they are. In the end,

Reality and Dreams, all glamour and film and money and affairs, in leaving us with nothing, no ‘novel’ to speak of and certainly no plot, takes us somewhere else altogether that is contemplative, quiet. Empty, actually. Tom and the crane that hoists him and drops him, and his well-dressed wife and his runaway daughter and her ex husband . . . These are as beads on a rosary, one flicked off after another as the writer counts her way in sentences to a different place, somewhere not in a novel at all. ‘He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams’ is how Spark begins her enterprise. And as we come to the end of the 144 pages that make it up, having passed through the span of time that is our reading, we hear a kind of echo of that first sentence in the silence. What even happened there? To those people we’ve been reading about? Anything? Nothing? Here, more emphatically than in any of her other fiction, perhaps, Spark shows, in her apparent disregard for her story – for the fortunes and effects of her protagonists’ actions – that her novel might have meaning only in another context altogether.

Reality and dreams, dreams and reality . . . None of our lives, as individuals, add up to a great deal, she seems to be telling us. It’s the other thing happening off the page, the novel we can’t read, will never be able to, that is her real interest here. We may enjoy our films and books, even believing for a few moments that they can show the differences between us, tell our various stories in their complexities and even try to tell the truth. But really? In the end all of us, readers and writers and filmmakers and actresses are in this world together, deaf, dumb and blind and stuck in our dark caves, equally, precisely, the same.