Dream Sequence
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A novel about the brutality of fame and what happens when fandom turns to obsession, from the Booker-shortlisted author of The Quickening Maze
Henry Banks, a brilliant, anxiously ambitious young actor prepared to go to any length for a role, is finally on the brink of achieving serious celebrity.
However, Henry has – unwittingly – become an important part of the life of recently-divorced Kristin. Sitting in her beautiful, empty Philadelphia home, Kristin’s obsession with Henry grows and she becomes convinced they are destined to be together. Flying to London she resolves to bring their relationship to fruition no matter what the cost…
‘This mordantly clever story about fame, fantasy and narcissism is deliciously funny… Foulds is a very fine writer’ Observer
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The latest from Foulds (In the Wolf's Mouth) is an outstanding and unyielding exploration of celebrity, fame, and all its attendant obsessions. Kristin is recently divorced and living alone in the Philadelphia home she once shared with her ex-husband, who's since moved on to his third marriage. The one thing that gives her joy in "her new, ruined life" is the British TV show The Grange and its irrepressibly handsome star Henry Banks. In London, Henry has no idea Kristin exists and is eager to move on from the small screen. Between starving himself into the kind of ugliness necessary for the lead role in an acclaimed Spanish director's new movie and partying with models and rich heirs in Qatar, Henry's star is rising and he is about to launch into the highest stratosphere of fame. Kristin's infatuation with Henry, meanwhile, becomes an obsession, and she boards a flight to London to try to get as close to him as she can. When Kristin and Henry's paths cross, to devastating effect, Kristin must contend with the dissonance between the reality of Henry and her fantasies of him. Foulds's novel is fun, smart, and tense, part psychological drama about media-driven obsession and part razor-sharp social critique.
Customer Reviews
Like a dream
The author is a mid-forties British novelist, poet, and one-time forklift driver, educated at Oxford
and East Anglia.
His first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times (2007), based around the World Memory Championships, won the Betty Trask prize, which rewards traditional novels, not experimental ones (Yaay!), and earned him the title of Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. I liked it too.
The Broken Word (2008) is a long narrative poem about the Mau Mau Uprising of all things. It generated great critical acclaim, numerous prize nominations and won a Somerset Maugham Award. It was a tad too clever for me, but I liked The Quickening Maze (2009), set in a Victorian ear asylum, which was shortlisted for the Booker.
Dream Sequence is a novel about Henry, a stage actor who rose to fame for a role in a British period TV drama a la Downton Abbey. Craving greater artistic credibility, he pursues and secures a role in a film under development by an enigmatic Spanish auteur that Henry regards as a genius. He’s not alone there
Kristin in Philadelphia is the recently divorced second wife of a wealthy businessman once her boss. She was the younger woman who usurped his first wife, and the same thing has happened to her now. She’s well off financially, but obsessed with Henry’s TV show and Henry in particular. Her ardour is fuelled by a brief chance meeting on a Caribbean vacation. Henry has no memory of it, but it was life changing for her. She starts writing long handwritten letters to him in London. His agent nicknames her “twice-a-week” because of the monotonous regularity with which her correspondence arrives.
No one ever replies to Kristin, but she is undaunted and travels to London to see the final night of Hamlet at the Barbican starring the object of her obsession, then stalks him.
The story unfolds in alternating third person narratives. The self-obsessed protagonists are not particularly likeable but well drawn and eminently credible. Mr Foulds’ prose gets better with every book. Meditations on fan culture in the age of social media do not come much better.
4.5 stars