Reality and Dreams

Reality and Dreams, Dame Muriel Spark's twentieth novel, is a masterpiece of restraint. It's a slender book, but such is Spark's skill that the superbly entertaining work conjures wholly the world of its characters with all the clarity and power imaginable from a book of any length. The story casts a famous English film director Tom Richards, his wife Claire, their beautiful daughter Cora and their unbeautiful daughter Marigold, a couple of sons-in-law, friends, et al, in an intelligent, sometimes brutally honest comedy of manners that swirls around Tom's movie projects, everyone's marital infidelities, the growing problem of "redundancy" in the workplace, and the slippery difference between art and life.