THE DREAM ROOM

A family borne aloft, then gradually destroyed by the experience (and the enigma) of flight is portrayed with compassionate insight in this terse, if intermittently obscure, novella by the Dutch author of The Great Longing (1995) and In Babylon (2000).

We first meet its unnamed narrator when he’s a 12-year-old boy growing up in the 1960s in the Netherlands, living with “a father who wasn’t very interested in the world and a slightly absent mother.” The latter, Julia, is a former mayor’s daughter who had quit her nursing job to care for the latter, Philip Ziegler, a WWII bomber pilot who had left his family behind while spending the war years in England, then been injured after the armistice, while working as a crop sprayer. These details and others emerge from several scenes that describe (in impressive specific detail) the family’s attempt to make ends meet by building model airplanes for their “doll doctor” (i.e., toyshop proprietor) landlord. As Philip’s depression and inertia deepen, and Julia grows more remote and emotionally eccentric, the narrator is tutored, in effect, by Philip’s former military comrade Humbert Coe, an ebullient gourmand and sophisticate who encourages the boy’s (rather odd) passion for cookery. The major concerns here don’t seem to fit together until a rain-soaked night during which relationships are bluntly clarified, and a brief epilogue set nearly 30 years later, when the narrator, himself now a “doll doctor,” tells a group of children a pointed “fairy tale” about a sculptor whose imperious king demands a stature of the world’s most beautiful woman. Möring’s compact fable of innocence beguiled, betrayed, and eventually matured into sobered acceptance has something of the abrupt elliptical tensile strength of fiction like Ford’s The Good Soldier and L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, and its dense metaphoric weave makes it close kin as well to Michel Tournier’s subtle symbolic fictions.

A fine companion to Möring’s longer novels, and probably his most accomplished yet.