Rating: 2/5
Review:
Hmmm...
I’m a bit ambivalent this book. It has good things about it but in
the end I didn’t think it amounted to much.
Dream Sequence is
the story (although the description “story” might be pushing it a
bit) of Henry, a successful English TV actor hoping to be about to
make it big in films and Kristin, a comfortably wealthy, drifting
divorcée in the USA who once exchanged a word or two with Henry in
passing at an airport and has now become obsessed with him, believing
their love to be decreed by fate. We get separate accounts of their
lives for the great bulk of the book as Henry goes about the business
of being an actor and Kristin sets out for London to try to meet him.
Depending on your
point of view it’s either full of beautifully observed detail which
brings rich pictures of the characters, or a great deal of Fine
Writing for its own sake which doesn’t tell us much we didn’t
already know. I’m in the second camp, I’m afraid; to me, it
seemed an awful lot of very little, exquisitely described. It was
good enough to finish and things do take an unsettling turn right at
the end, but I don’t really feel any better off for having read it.
Adam Foulds does write beautifully much of the time, but even that
gives way to a mannered style in places. He does like to hammer us
with staccato nouns and adjectives; for example, I found these two
sequential sentences a bit much: “He needed change, music, air.
The flat was modern, built in the nineties, clean, spare, hard.”
And then a couple of pages later (of Docklands), “Its appearance
was anonymous, modular, global, financial.” Enough, already!
To be fair, much of
it is perfectly readable; it’s just that I kept wondering why I was
bothering to read it. Others may disagree, but for me this has far
more style than style than substance (and the cynic in me is
therefore rather expecting it to be nominated for the Booker Prize).
Personally, I can’t really recommend it.
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