Reality and Dreams.

Reality and Dreams Muriel Spark Houghton Mifflin, $22,160 pp.

Muriel Spark, as well as being an extremely good novelist, is a conspicuously difficult one to review. This is partly because she is so impressively "crafty"--technically accomplished. Her ideas, themes, and even authorial attitudes are so deeply embedded in her plot and characters that the only way to describe what this novel is like and about is to order the reader to read it. In this sense (though not in any other), it is a bit like reviewing George Eliot. How can anyone say in 800 words what Middlemarch is about?

Another reason why I think Spark is hard to review is that she is a satirist--and this is no longer a well-understood mode of writing. It is easy to see her novels as heartless, even brutal: An external, omnipotent author plays games with basically harmless, if un-self-knowing characters, for the amusement of the author and an elite group of superior readers. The eighteenth-century understanding of satire has given way in our time to parody, irony, and verbal wit--far easier, though more dangerous genres. Satire, in the hands of its great practitioners like Swift, was a passionately moral form, articulating the most fundamental social concerns and implicating the reader within the narrative. (The decline of satire can best be seen in the fact that Gulliver's Travels is now read almost exclusively as a children's or a science-fiction book. This infantilization of the novel would have appalled Swift and baffled his contemporaries.) It would be a shame if we lost the capacity to read satire, and Spark continually reopens the genre, although we may have to make a self-conscious effort to follow her.

I do not think that Reality and Dreams is either a heartless or a frivolous novel--despite the fact that it is not gentle with its characters, and that it is at times almost excruciatingly funny. At its center is a group of extremely self-indulgent white Western (British, not surprisingly) contemporary people who have lost all grip on the line between fantasy and reality. Do their imaginations, dreams, and ambitions create their daily lives, or do their realities generate their dreams? Is it possible to distinguish?

As the central metaphor for this question Spark has intelligently deployed the world of the movies. Tom Richards, a successful film director, has fallen off a crane on the set of his latest movie; he has badly injured himself and has set the entire project of the film at risk. As a consequence, the film gets a new director, a new title, a new everything; but is it still Richards's? The movie was intended to explore an obsession Richards had developed for the image of a girl he had once seen but never spoken to at a campsite in France. Is the actress who plays this girl the same as the girl at the campsite site--a girl who never existed as a person with a history, but only as an image in a frame? Can Richards transfer the obsession to the actress? At one point, Richards tries to explain the concept of the film to a new friend of his, a rather straightforward taxi-driver. "The charm of this girl," Richards says, "is that she has no history."

"Then she isn't real," says his friend.

"No, she's not real, not yet." No history, no reality, on the one hand. On the other, the film, the celluloid image, may make her real.

People who believe that characters in soap operas are real and send them condolence letters when disasters strike are a well-known butt of ridicule among the sophisticated, but Spark seems to be insisting, in what is a very sophisticated novel, that this habit of projection is a real cultural question. We all treat as real the products of our own imaginations. What can this mean?

Spark's novel also insists that our dreams and realities cannot control the dreams and realities of others. Apart from the very earliest scenes when he is semiconscious in the hospital (and even then his reveries are constantly impinged upon by the activities of the nurses and doctors who care for him), Richards is not free to explore his memories and fantasies in isolation. His wife, Clair; their unsatisfactory daughter, Marigold; Cora, Richards's adored and beautiful daughter from an earlier marriage; Dave, the taxi-driver; the various actresses involved in the film; and an ever-extending network of family and friends are all involved in highly complex ways with Richards, with his reality, and with his fantasies. Moreover, they have their own reveries and realities that impinge upon him and his. The characters compete for the reader's attention, all insisting upon their own "director's cut" of the situation. The results are mayhem: a highly charged, shifting, uncertain brew, which Spark seems to suggest is made more volatile by unfettered libido and job insecurity--two things that might appear to be social realities, but are also the stuff of dreams. Perhaps not surprisingly the plot flares into violence of various kinds at various moments, and after the denouement no one is entirely clear what has happened at all.

I knew when I started this review that it would not be easy to describe the book. There is nothing particularly wrong with what I have written, but it has missed the sharpness of perception and the edgy wit of Spark's writing. It has also left out the light-handedness that characterizes all her novels. There is a kind of vibrant, flamboyant confidence in her writing that lets her get away with over-the-top characters, outrageous plotting, and a ridiculously inadequate ending--none of which you notice until someone demands an explanation.

This is a truly elegant and enjoyable novel. It plumbs no emotional depths but illuminates the shallow waters of most novel readers' lives in tantalizing and sparkling light (pun intended, in honor of the author).

Sara Maitland's most recent book is Angel Maker: The Collected Short Stories (Henry Holt).