Enjoying the God-Role

...Even Claire, normally the most down-toearth of the novel's cast, is at the end of the novel visited, like Caesar's wife, by a vivid and premonitory dream...

...These great manipulators are often women: Jean Brodie, the Abbess Alexandra in The Abbess of Crewe, and Georgina Hogg in The Comforters come quickly to mind...

...Kevin Woodstock, Rose's neglected husband, is also finding consolation elsewhere...

...Tom's films, or dreams, are of course distillations of the reality in which he lives, and the edges are further blurred when elements of his real life intrude upon the films and vice versa: when Jeanne, for instance, ruins Tom's ethereal dream of the substanceless hamburger girl by forcing her unwelcome and all too substantial reality upon him, or when his conception of a Celtic slave character is formed by his own perception of his unlovely daughter...

...He also launches into an affair with the film's glamorous star: not the mousy hamburger girl, who is played by an obscure French actress called, in reality as in Tom's dream, Jeanne, but a gorgeous glamour-puss named Rose Woodstock...

...made a specialty of the wives of redundant men," notes that love and economics, which he had thought, conventionally, to be opposites, in fact tend to be linked...

...Spark likes to demonstrate her own uncompromising vision of human life sub specie aeternitatis, but will not admit that for a Catholic who has decided to take literally Christ's statement that "whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die," the injunction memento mori is a little easier to face than it is for those who are less certain of how they are to spend eternity...

...but not for the intended victim...

...Is it possible that what I call love isn't love...

...and who, in return, hates him with a vengeful intensity...

...But which is the dream and which the reality...

...These statements indicate both Spark's strength as a writer and her weakness: strength because she writes from within a philosophical system that gives her assurance and a moral framework...

...her tone assured and unsentimental, always innocent of what she has called "that mortal sin of art, pomposity...

...You have to be God...

...All of them suspect that Marigold is in hiding, enjoying their discomfiture, for she is malign enough to savor such moments...

...Loyal to a fault, tolerant of his women, discreet in her own affairs, she makes an exemplary wife for Tom, who is selfish and single-minded in the manner of many artists...

...But in our century perhaps no metaphor for God has been as obvious and as powerful as that of the artist, especially the artist with a grand vision...

...that is, the film plot...

...Marigold, who is described as "nemesis" and "a wrecker," allies herself with the resentful Jeanne, who has begun to confuse her own life with that of her imaginary counterpart and to lobby for a heftier role not only in the film but in Tom's life...

...As a narrator she too often implies that she, unlike the blinkered, foolish majority of humanity, is of the elect: not only intellectually, which is true enough, but spiritually...

...There is his wife Claire, an attractive, elegant and vastly rich woman...

...In the meantime, Cora's husband Johnny, who has been made redundant at work, has taken his severance pay and run off to India...

...But in the way of artists Tom, who has finished The Hamburger Girl and moved on, takes no further interest in her at all...

...Tom and Claire, driven by guilt if not distress, launch a search while Cora, characteristically, enjoys an affair with the young man whom they hire to investigate the disappearance...

...The "reality...

...And then there is Marigold, Tom and Claire's daughter, a strikingly unattractive and unpleasant young woman whom Tom hardly pretends to like...

...For her, there is definitely such a thing as "absolute truth, in which I believe things which are difficult to believe, but I believe them because they are absolute...

...Teachers, like Miss Brodie, or Abbesses, are ideally placed to exercise their will to power...

...In due course Tom recovers and takes charge of the production again...

...Tom's lawyer suggests that the crane was unnecessary, a grandiose gesture: "An ordinary dolly is perfectly all right for directing a motion picture these days...

...weakness because that same system validates a personal vanity, an arrogance, that has always been noticeable in her work...

...There is his daughter from a previous marriage, the beautiful but slightly dim Cora, for whom Tom feels an affection that is perhaps more than paternal...

...As the novel progresses, subtle connections between Tom's "real" life and the "dream" life of his films become apparent, and in fact the boundaries between what Tom experiences as reality and what he sees as dreams turn out to be rather unclear...

...Now officially Dame Muriel, she is also the author of numerous volumes of poetry, short fiction, and biography...

...It is a valid and frequently potent vision, but a limited one...

...In the film the girl, Jeanne, was to be given a fortune by an anonymous benefactor...

...he describes her to his hospital nurse as "an unfrocked priest of a woman...

...When Claire drops the hapless Charlie, for instance, Tom jokes that Charlie is now redundant...

...Right up there I was beyond and above pausing a minute and listening to their suggestions...

...so are officials, or the leaders of groups or societies, like the would-be messianic Sir Quentin Oliver in Loitering With Intent...

...Tom was a believer...

...Brooke Allen, a new contributor to the NL, has written for the "Wall Street Journal" and the New York "Times Book Review...

...We are soon introduced to Tom's family...

...Jeanne and Rose Woodstock, each in her turn, become redundant, depending upon where Tom's attention happens to be focused...

...Tom's accident has interrupted his work-in-progress, a film provisionally entitled The Hamburger Girl...

...He "marvelled at his past dream, now exhausted by the reality of the film and his actual boredom with the tiresome, real Jeanne...

...And from his hospital bed Tom reflects, "Yes, I did feel like God up on that crane...

...Tom often wondered if we were all characters in one of God's dreams...

...In stressing the word "redundant," Spark plays not only with the ever-present fear, in contemporary Britain, of unemployment but with the notion of the redundant human being...

...In Reality and Dreams, as in so much of Spark's work, the characters are human because they are pathetic or ridiculous, not because they are noble or tragic...

...The novel's couplings have the stylized symmetry of Za Ronde...

...I think becoming a Catholic," she has said of her conversion, "made me feel more confident, because it took care of a lot of problems...

...Tom himself, who before his accident had "consciously or otherwise...

...That's settled, that's where I depart from, that's the north, the norm, and I can go around from that point...

...Still, as an author Spark has an odd tendency to the same failing she is so quick to single out in her characters: hubris...

...Jeanne and Marigold plot violence, and the story ends with death...

...In the thick of all this, the unloved Marigold mysteriously disappears...

...the dreams of God, no...

...is really, of course, nothing but Tom's initial dream...

...What do they think a film set is...

...But no, you have to be different...

...A democracy or something...

...I find women most interesting, really," Spark has admitted, "especially strong women, strong bossy women...

...He meant the very opposite...

...But the nationwide media attention devoted to the missing girl has directed her father's attention to her also, possibly for the first time...

...Remember that you must die," as the anonymous caller tells the old people in Memento Mori...

...To an unbeliever this would have meant the casting of an insubstantiality within an already insubstantial context...

...At the beginning of the narrative he is in the hospital, recovering after a near-fatal fall from a crane during the shooting of a crowd scene...

...Cora, far from being heartbroken at his defection, has taken up with the brother of Marigold's husband, Ralph, who as it happens has also been made redundant...

...Sure enough, she eventually turns up, having spent months living as a down-and-out and writing a book, Redundancy and the Self-Employ ed...

...A Roman Catholic convert, she is a great one for prodding her readers to look at things sub specie aeternitatis...

...He notices that her angry, sour face has a certain attraction, and he plans for her to star, in drag, in his next film...

...Balanchine, Diaghilev, Welles, Hitchcock, Spielberg: These have been our modern God-substitutes, creating their own worlds out of malleable human material...

...It was wonderful to shout orders through the amplifier and like God watch the team down there group and re-group as bidden...

...While almost every variety of spiritual sin is represented in her oeuvre, she specializes in the sort of pride that prompts someone to usurp the Creator's initiative and take the fates of his fellow beings into his own hands...

...This state of affairs, so to speak, is neither novel nor particularly interesting to the pragmatic Claire, who herself is enjoying a fling with Charlie, Tom's physiotherapist...

...Writers & Writing ENJOYING THE GOD-ROLE By Brooke Allen In Muriel Spark's novels the most memorable and villainous characters have tended to be those who dominate and mold others, who impose their own wills on them, who, in short, play God...

...Spark's well-known virtues as a writer are fully evident in this, her 20th novel...

...Our dreams, yes, are insubstantial...

...Tom, in his drugged delirium, confuses dreams with reality and believes that he himself is to be the benefactor...

...She clearly enjoys the God-role, sitting up in her particular crane and surveying her creatures with condescension...

...In Spark's latest novel, Reality and Dreams (Houghton Mifflin, 160 pp., $22,00), the hubristic artist is a film director, Tom Richards...

...Her prose is spare, cool, delicately inflected...

...The moral problems she poses are sophisticated enough to inspire thought, and never point to obvious solutions...

...Like many works of art, it grew from a single vision: Tom's glimpse, on a holiday in the Haute Savoie, of a nondescript girl cooking hamburgers at a summer campsite...

...Why do they continually bump into each other as if they were allied topics...