Be careful what you wish for

Adam Foulds’s fourth novel, Dream Sequence, is an exquisitely concocted, riveting account of artistic ambition and unrequited love verging on obsession. In previous novels he has been interested in exploring the limits of perception and knowledge. Here he examines, with beautiful, forensic attention, the minds of a young, thrusting English actor, Henry Banks (a mix of Dan Stevens and Henry Cavill), and Kristin, an American divorcée with a stalkerish crush on him from the other side of the world. She writes letters, decorated with butterflies: ‘He was the key signature in which the music of her life was played.’

This is a novel about celebrity and its consequences, with Henry as, in his own words, a ‘permeating light’. Ranged about him, like orbiting planets, are various others, each exhibiting complex layers of desire. It’s not the first time Foulds has written about such things; his Booker shortlisted novel, The Quickening Maze, was in some part driven by the aura of fame which blazed around the poets Tennyson and Clare.

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In Dream Sequence, the seekers of fame are manifold. Henry has been playing the lead in a safe, Sunday night Downton-esque drama called The Grange, and now, bored with his ‘reassuring’ handsomeness, desires cinematic credibility. Henry’s father, a bumbling am-dram type, has been trying for years to put on his musical about the Brownings (wish I could see that one); his mother quietly simmers, having given up a promising singing career to look after her children. And of course Kristin believes in her destiny as Henry’s lover, and wills herself to achieve her end. While she daydreams in California amid yoga lessons, setting up Google alerts for the tiniest mention of Henry’s name, her target starves himself and exercises manically in order to prepare for a role in a major production with a notorious director of ‘difficult’ films.