Reviewed by Jack Goodstein
Dreamers, the latest from New Zealander Brian E. Turner, is a little book with big ambitions. Weighing in at a meager one hundred and twelve pages, it aims at the kinds of themes and ideas one might expect of a work two or three times its size.
This of course is not necessarily unusual, the novella as a genre has often been the vehicle for big ideas: think the like of Melville’s “Billy Budd,” Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”
The length of a work need not inhibit an author’s ambition, but it must inevitably have an effect on the way he presents his ideas. Space may not limit what an author explores, but it must limit the way he explores it. This is the challenge of all of the short literary forms: how, to paraphrase Keats, pack every rift with ore. Moreover there is always the danger of biting off a bit more than you can chew. Dreamers, a May/December love story, manages the mastication if not always the packing.
December is Thomas Young-Felo, a middle-aged owner of a used book store in Wellington, new Zealand. As a young man (a young fellow–there is a thread of symbolic punning in the names Turner gives his characters–a wise old Jewish shopkeeper is Solly, a cryptic ice cream vendor is Clotho) he had studied at Oxford on a scholarship, made a bad marriage to a bar maid he’d gotten pregnant, and eventually abandoned his wife and young daughter and returned to New Zealand. His life since has been stained by feelings of guilt over his actions and regret for what might have been.
May is Katherine de Bris (debris and all that name might suggest), a young English teacher and amateur actress who hasn’t been able to form any lasting relationships with members of the opposite sex. “All her life it was just one man after another, and they always wanted just one thing. All men. And when they’d had that they were off and away to find their true love on some other shore.” Indeed, her latest lover, recently gone, is but the latest example. Perhaps it is this kind of experience with men her own age that makes her ripe for an older man. Presumably the older man is less interested in that just one thing, and if not less interested, perhaps less capable–both presumptions open to argument.
May and December meet when Katherine comes into Thomas’ bookstore to buy a book to prop up a table leg on the set of the school play she is helping to produce. Now while this may seem a bet far fetched–one has to wonder why an English teacher might not find it in her heart to wander into a book shop to browse or even to buy a book to read, it does serve as a device to get these two unlikely people together. It turns out that the book she buys is a dusty volume of letters from Thomas Carlyle to his sister, and some banter about dry as dust Victorians gets the ball moving, surely a first for creator of Diogenes Teufelsdreck . As one would expect, one thing leads to another, and December begins to have dreams about May, and May is suddenly having thoughts about older men. There would have been a time when with a plot that began like this, there would have been a coming together, and then a falling apart, and then a coming together again, and they would have lived happily ever after, as for example in Jane Austen’s “Emma.”
And in a sense, that’s almost how it happens in Dreamers, almost but not quite. That kind of scenario might work well enough in a simpler time and place, in a time before the novelist had begun to consider the ontological nature of his work, the relationship between illusion and reality, between authors and their characters, the creator and his creations. One might read John Fowles’ “Mantissa” or Andrew Greeley’s “God Game” to see how far such things can be carried. Turner takes the theme in a different direction. Fowles and Greeley are more concerned with characters going off on their own out of the author’s control; Turner is more interested in the idea that human beings may well be analogous to characters in a novel, thinking they have free will but in reality bound to the whims of an Author. While Turner never goes quite so far as to deny his authorial control over his characters, he does suggest that there is perhaps not that much to distinguish between characters in the hands of an author and readers in the hands of an divinity.
“Did you ever stop to wonder what you were? I suppose everybody does at some time in their life. It is a profound thought isn’t it, the meaning of life and all that? We like to think we are in charge of our own destiny, but are we? We might be puppets like Pinocchio, controlled by the strings of The Almighty’s thought. Or we might be characters in a book or a play under the control of the skein of the author’s imagination. It was Thackeray in Vanity Fair that talked about characters as puppets; Turner (or his narrator at any rate) suggests that it may well be that both he and his readers are no less puppets in the hands of an Almighty novelist, than his characters are puppets in his hands. In this sense, like the out of control characters in Fowles and Greeley, might well be said to have at least as much free will to act, to come together, to fall apart, as any of us subject to threads of fate beyond our understanding. There are possibilities before us. How they will work out is anybody’s guess.
The simple love story is further complicated by the author’s concern with the character’s dreams and illusions in relation to the realities in which they live. Thomas first appears in a second-hand designer suit, a suit intended to create an image, an appearance certainly at odds with what he really is. Katherine is first presented in a home made sweater graced with two parrots adorning her breasts and one in the back, a sweater her seemingly conventional supervisor finds inappropriate, and which also seems to suggest an attempt to create an image of herself as she wishes to be seen. “The jersey was one that Kate had knitted herself. One day she had said to herself, no, she wasn’t just a flighty intellectual, no, she could actually do something mundane and practical such as knitting a jersey. Well it had to be bright colours of course in order to express her personality.” But does it express her reality, or is it in fact an expression of what she would like people to think her personality to be: “. . . due to her inexperience at knitting, the jersey didn’t cling to her figure at all.” Before their first date, Katherine dreams of Thomas as a genteel sophisticate, only to find him rather shabbily dressed, and even worse, serving an undrinkable white wine. Thomas dreams of Kate as a woman to whom he can tell of his past, a woman who would see beneath his surface and understand his soul, only to find their early meetings confined to pedantic discussions of Carlyle.
Their dreams and illusions are the stuff of the popular romance. Dreamers’ back cover refers to the book as a “rearrangement of Mills and Boon reality. (I must confess my own ignorance of Mills and Boon. I thought they were perhaps some academic metaphysicians from the reference to reality. But thank god for Google.) What we have then is the contrast between the expectations raised by the kind of romance where the hero is dark and dashing, and sweeps his beautiful lady off her cliche feet and into his king sized bed, with the shy and dowdy book worm who can’t bring himself to kiss his lady love, let alone cajole her into the bedroom. Romantic illusions create expectations and expectations create trouble–think Emma Bovary.
Yet is it really that simple? Not for Turner. Not quite.
“Gentle travelers on the common road to our final destiny, we live in a world which is made up of blocks and stones and where all objects of the senses are separated one from the other. Certain philosophers will say we are dreamers and that what we see and touch in our waking state is merely an illusion, a dream in the mind of a sleeping god. When we allow ourselves to rest in the arms of sleep we would expect to pass from this sad world into the world of dreams, a place where phantom images, which are pale shadows of the blocks and stones, intrude. And from the world of dreams we might even progress further into the realm of deep sleep where the sleeper dreams no dreams and does not desire the objects of desire, where experience is unified and thought dissolved, where one is full of peace, truly enjoying peace and finding the path to knowledge. It has been suggested that beyond the world of sleep lies a realm where a reality which transcends life exists. A place where on might become united with the great-soul of the effulgent Lord of Light. A realm of perfect union that is the goal of all our striving.”
It would seem then that there are dreams and there are dreams. There are the sentimental dreams of the popular romance. There are the mystical visions that lead to the perfected union with the ideal. Dreamers predicates the need to destroy the one in order to achieve the other.
About the Reviewer: Jack Goodstein is a professor emeritus at California University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught English for more than thirty years. His work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Critique, Theatre Journal and College English and in literary magazines such as The Maine Review, The Small Pond Magazine of Literature and The Jewish Digest. In 1990 at age 51, he tried his hand at acting, and while he has always loved the theatre from the audience, discovered an unexpected addiction to the stage as a performer. Since then he has appeared in more than sixty plays throughout Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania. He has also done film and commercial work. This ultimately led to his attempts at writing for the stage. His one act, Pinochle was given a staged reading at the ATHE conference in Toronto in July of 1999 and was published by the University of Charleston Press. In April 2000, his one act, Poker, was produced by the Pulse Ensemble Theatre in Manhattan as part of their OPAL series. Bride of the Father(2000) and Creative Daydreaming (2001) were produced by the Gallery Players of Park Slope in Brooklyn. Other one acts have had readings or been staged at Far Off Broadway and Northern LightsTheatre in Canada, and New York University and the Cafe Sha Sha in New York.
Dreamers
By Brian E. Turner
June 2006, Paperback,
1-86942-054-3
NZ $25.00
Originally published on The Compulsive Reader. Reproduced here with permission.
