"Sweet Dreams", Michael Frayn
4 March 2023 04:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeThis is a curious little book by the playwright of "Noises Off", exploring the idea of how a heaven for the restless post-industrial age might function, beyond the concepts of virgins, endless food and drink, gold and jewels, etc.
Partly satire, partly I think a genuine attempt to answer the question of what would actually constitute a heaven of perfect happiness (a little sadness, but just enough to bring a pleasant nostalgia; the joys simultaneously of inaccessible love and of placid domestic bliss; the possessions you desired desperately as a child, and had forgotten; the ability to tell the perfect anecdote, to create, to be both your own familiar self and yet also attractive). And of course Heaven has to be populated by versions of all your family and acquaintances also, but in the perfect relationship to make you yourself feel good about their presence rather then in an awkward state of independence: they are there to entertain you, to keep you company and to admire your achievements, and to enable you to feel good by doing them favours. Perhaps Frayn's most astute insight is that there would have to be change in a modern-day Paradise, and not merely eternal contentment - because our happiness consists also of the perception that we are doing better now than in the past, and that we are in a state of promotion and progress. So his protagonist goes through different stages and different pleasures in life, from the workplace sparkling with creative energy to the rural idyll to the benevolent elder statesman with vast power to shape the world... and then quite unconsciously is returned afresh to the eager discoveries of his first arrival, to experience everything all over again as if for the first time (in itself a pleasure almost unattainable on Earth).
It is, of course, an immensely solipsistic heaven that revolves entirely around the experiences of the viewer whom it exists to gratify, and where God exists only so far as the perception of his existence can benefit the participant. The idea of sitting still for all eternity in worshipful communion with the ineffable no longer holds much appeal for most people.
If the book had not been billed on the back cover and in the foreword as a novel about a man who dies in a car crash and goes to heaven, I'm not sure, to be honest, that I would have realised what was supposed to have happened in the first chapter -- in which case it might have taken me a very long time to understand the rationale behind the odd, dream-like sequence of events! Reading this book is very like being in a dream, as I suppose the title ought to have warned me; it's all very surreal, as one might expect from a world the essence of which is that you can, indeed, eat your cake and have it simultaneously . But as the title also suggests, it's oddly sweet-natured. The protagonist is frequently ridiculous, but in a way that reflects the basic ridiculousness of human nature rather than encouraging us to think of him as deserving of our scorn -- the author is encouraging us to take a wry look at ourselves as much as he is satirising his own society.
And it's hard not to come away wondering what one's own heaven would be like, in an infinitely benign and malleable world containing every kind of beauty one can think of, alongside just enough darkness to whet appreciation...
Partly satire, partly I think a genuine attempt to answer the question of what would actually constitute a heaven of perfect happiness (a little sadness, but just enough to bring a pleasant nostalgia; the joys simultaneously of inaccessible love and of placid domestic bliss; the possessions you desired desperately as a child, and had forgotten; the ability to tell the perfect anecdote, to create, to be both your own familiar self and yet also attractive). And of course Heaven has to be populated by versions of all your family and acquaintances also, but in the perfect relationship to make you yourself feel good about their presence rather then in an awkward state of independence: they are there to entertain you, to keep you company and to admire your achievements, and to enable you to feel good by doing them favours. Perhaps Frayn's most astute insight is that there would have to be change in a modern-day Paradise, and not merely eternal contentment - because our happiness consists also of the perception that we are doing better now than in the past, and that we are in a state of promotion and progress. So his protagonist goes through different stages and different pleasures in life, from the workplace sparkling with creative energy to the rural idyll to the benevolent elder statesman with vast power to shape the world... and then quite unconsciously is returned afresh to the eager discoveries of his first arrival, to experience everything all over again as if for the first time (in itself a pleasure almost unattainable on Earth).
It is, of course, an immensely solipsistic heaven that revolves entirely around the experiences of the viewer whom it exists to gratify, and where God exists only so far as the perception of his existence can benefit the participant. The idea of sitting still for all eternity in worshipful communion with the ineffable no longer holds much appeal for most people.
If the book had not been billed on the back cover and in the foreword as a novel about a man who dies in a car crash and goes to heaven, I'm not sure, to be honest, that I would have realised what was supposed to have happened in the first chapter -- in which case it might have taken me a very long time to understand the rationale behind the odd, dream-like sequence of events! Reading this book is very like being in a dream, as I suppose the title ought to have warned me; it's all very surreal, as one might expect from a world the essence of which is that you can, indeed, eat your cake and have it simultaneously . But as the title also suggests, it's oddly sweet-natured. The protagonist is frequently ridiculous, but in a way that reflects the basic ridiculousness of human nature rather than encouraging us to think of him as deserving of our scorn -- the author is encouraging us to take a wry look at ourselves as much as he is satirising his own society.
And it's hard not to come away wondering what one's own heaven would be like, in an infinitely benign and malleable world containing every kind of beauty one can think of, alongside just enough darkness to whet appreciation...
[...]a perfect night's sleep -- deep, clear and refreshing, like gliding down through sunlit water on a hot day; such a perfect night's sleep that he is entirely unconscious of how much he is enjoying it[...] so perfect that from time to time he half wakes, just enough to become conscious of how unconscious of everything he is.