Sweet Dreams by Michael Frayn
Published by Collins (1973) and Viking (1974). At least a dozen subsequent editions
From reviews and commentaries:
I will start by reprinting in full Anthony Burgess’s entry for Sweet Dreams in his book Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, since it gives enough of a plot synopsis. (I will also note that the only other novel from 1973 Burgess included was Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.):
This is a fantasy presented with disarming lightness of touch and tone which is profounder than it looks. Howard Baker, driving to Highgate, finds himself suddenly in a strange but most attractive megalopolis which is the capital city of Heaven. It is run by Cambridge men and women: God is Freddie Vigars, a distinguished but decent scholar of good family, whose wife Caroline is “a kindly-looking girl with thick white legs and her slip showing”. She says that Freddie, or God, is a terrific radical. The food eaten at heavenly parties begins with taramasalata, continues with gigot aux haricots and ends with apple crumble. Howard is set to work, with a team of awfully decent mountain designers, on designing the Alps. The world is being made, but the world we know (which is being made) already exists.
Selections from Fiddler on the Roof are played at receptions to meet God. Other Cambridge men are engaged on putting inspiration into the heads of great poets like Donne and Milton; one is even designing man. Howard ends as a planning assistant to God. “This is our task,” he says, as he carves the gigot; “‘to provide the harsh materials on which men’s imaginations can be exercised, and to offer, through the cultured and civilized life that we ourselves lead here in the metropolis, some intimations of the world they might envisage.” (“Meanwhile,” murmurs Miriam Bernstein, “here we all sit waiting for second helpings.’’)
It is an impossible liberal vision, all too Cambridge. But Frayn, who refrains from comment, who is altogether too charming — like his characters — with his easy-going colloquial prose, is fundamentally grim and sardonic. Cambridge cannot redesign the universe. The dream ends. Still, it might be very pleasant if these awfully nice and intelligent Cantabrians of good family could replace blind chance or grumbling bloody bearded Jehovah. There is no sin here, only liberal errors. Frayn was trained as a philosopher. This is a philosphical novel. It is deceptively tough.
• P. J. Kavanagh, The Guardian, 9 August 1973:
I’ve read it twice because it’s the sort of book you can read twice, it’s worked out carefully like a puzzle and it’s a pleasure to watch, second time round, the pieces smoothly sliding into place. At first reading you’re too busy laughing–and wincing–to notice the skill. Frayn has the gift of making you laugh at someone, then he stands back mildly to watch whether you notice the joke is on you. Very disquieting.
• Christopher Hudson, New Society, 9 August 1973
Sweet Dreams is a small masterpiece. Beautifully written, funny, perceptive, it is the most comprehensive satire Michael Frayn has so far perpetrated on his friends and contemporaries…. It is a delicious satire on the advance of an establishmentarian, a man whose persistent conformity is to the values of the self-supporting, self-rewarding claque of his acquaintances, whose progress from radicalism to conservatism is disguised at every step by their complacent acceptance of the moral and intellectual example they set to each other.
• Peter Ackroyd, The Spectator, 11 August 1973
Frayn’s humour is one or detachment and one of tongue in cheek; it is as if Kafka has been rewritten by Jerome K. Jerome. By hitting upon an allegorical, not to say beatific theme, of course, the author can let hit imagination ride. If I were to be imagistic, I would say that his theme can take on all the attributes of Howard’s red pencil case [you will have to read the book to learn about this marvelous pencil case]. It can do almost anything, and yet be redolent or tradition.
For Frayn can switch times and places with more speed than angels can gather upon the head of a pin. Howard is at one moment twenty-two and then thirty-eight. He can be both loving husband and gauche adolescent. His is a heaven for any novelist. After centuries of discussion about the Unities, there’s nothing like an allegory to put things out of perspective. Frayn can abandon the conventional requirements of the social novel, and exercise his comic invention to unplumbed heights. Character, motivation, and plot (those inane and vulgar equivalents of what we suppose to be life) can all be’excised at convenient moments. And since the staple of comedy seems to be the phrase rather than the chapter, a vignette rather than a story, this device has considerable attraction Its progenitor is Laurence Sterne but here–as Sterne and Frayn might both say–hangs another episode.
• Alan Green, The Saturday Review of Literature, 12 January 1974
To call Sweet Dreams a “novel of today” is to reveal only one face of Michael Frayn’s new gem. And on the whole, a small face. Yet the book is unquestionably about modern man, his wife, his children, his mistress, and his contretemps. The problem here is how to suggest its other facets without spoiling the pleasure of discovering how wide he ranges and with what comedy he invents….
It’s difficult to quote many of his brightest lines without revealing his theme. Two or three second bests will have to do: His hero thinks (as La Rochefoucauld might have) “you can create a good impression on yourself by being right, …but for creating a good impression on others, there’s nothing to beat being totally and catastrophically wrong.” And later, thinking that perhaps mortality rates can be reduced, the same man hesitates because “it won’t do to weaken the funeral as one of the main bonds of family life.” Elsewhere, two men who’ve long heard of each other but have never met say: “I thought you’d look entirely different.” “No . . . no . . . I look pretty much like this.”
It’s a bit as though Bertie Wooster and the Earl of Emsworth had met on the eerie void outside Granada that Shaw once peopled with the Devil, Dona Ana, the Statue, and Don Juan.
• And my own remarks, from NeglectedBooks.com:
Frayn achieves such a delicate balance between innocence and cynicism that he leaves you optimistic, light-hearted, but not naive. The tone of this book is comic but not boisterous; satirical but not biting; affectionate but not cloying. It’s one of the most perfectly realized books I’ve ever read–and perhaps the only book I’ll read a sixth time.
Frayn himself once remarked on the book,
Sweet Dreams is an ironic examination of the illogicality of the idea of heaven. I feel the same way about the idea of an ideal society on earth–they all fall to pieces logically. You can improve society piecemeal, of course, but I think the awful thing about changing anything is how many other changes that one change must necessitate. You can’t make one thing better without making other things worse…. Sweet Dreams is the best book, and the prose there is as good as I’ll ever write.
We will be talking about Sweet Dreams on:
US: Monday, 24 June
8-9PM Eastern
7-8PM Central
6-7PM Mountain
5-6PM Pacific
Australia: Tuesday, 25 June
10-11AM Australian Eastern
9:30-10:30AM Australian Central
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