Dreamer

Dreamer by Charles Johnson gives a unique look at the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. By using a fictitious double, who must examine his own life in light of the civil rights era, Johnson allows the reader to see both King and Chaym Smith, the man who would be his stand-in, struggle with issues of nonviolence and its meaning in a violent world. This well-researched novel presents a fresh look at King's life by allowing artistic license to soar while it never clouds the truth. Although some details are the product of the author's imagination, others are well documented among King scholars. The presentation of fact in the environment of creative detail allows a glimpse of King that I have seen nowhere else. The story moves quickly and never digresses into detail that is irrelevant to the narrative, but gives enough pertinent detail to help those unfamiliar with the setting, while convincing those who know more details concerning King's life that the author is also a brilliant scholar. A GOOD READ.

While so many are willing to cast aside the struggles of the civil rights era as yesterdays news, Johnson tackles them head on. At its heart Dreamer is a valid book about M.L.King, whose worth comes from its peeling of King like an onion to expose the many layers and come close to the truth that doesn't appear every Feburary. Smith and Bishop are extremely developed characters who only deepen the books probing of King. A worthy read for a fan of fine lit. or American History.

You know a movie's a hit when the audience remains sitting while the credits roll. A great novel affects me the same way. I'm silently awed by the gift of a powerful story.Charles Johnson has written such a strong tale. His "hero," Chaym Smith, is an embittered, tattered, unemployed, former mental patient and drunk. He has one gift and one curse. He's brilliant, with a "photographic memory," and he looks exactly like Martin Luther King. Having thoroughly ruined his own life, he volunteers to serve as a double for King. If he dies substituting for the man he honors, at least his life will have meant something.King reluctantly agrees, and two young workers take Smith to the country to train him in King's body language and speech patterns. Smith is a quick learner, but a frightening debater. He insists equality is impossible. Even in the beginning, God preferred Abel to Cain (a variation of his first name) for unexplained reasons. Still, he'll risk his life for his Abel.Quoting extensively from King's speeches and colleagues' remembrances, Johnson shows how King's thought was moving beyond the narrow goal of racial equality to the basic Christian concept of self-sacrificing love for all. King wants to lead his people further than white suburbia, to the real Promised Land. Like Christ and Gandhi, his heroes, his prophetic message will generate violence.Especially in the passages written from King's point of view, Johnson, a National Book Award winner, shows the incredible pressures on a man whose words can provoke riots but not understanding. No matter how familiar the subject seems before you begin reading, this novel will haunt you.Kathleen T. Choi, HAWAII CATHOLIC HERALD

Charles Johnson's Dreamer offers a riveting portrayal of thelast stages of Dr. King's career. By alternating descriptions of"the minister's" personal ruminations with the first-person observations and experiences of the narrator (a somewhat Charles Johnson-like Matthew Bishop), Johnson creates the convincing illusion at least of Dr. King as a complete and real being at that particular time in his life.While the obvious subject matter of his plot is compelling--overwhelming, almost, in its rendition of perhaps the most significant and ramifying social movement in American history--it is worth observing that Johnson continues consciously (and ably) to work in the tradition of "moral fiction" he learned, absorbed, and finally inherited from his own great teacher, John Gardner. That tradition holds as a central tenet Gardner's defintion of a "good book" as "one that, for its time, is wise, sane, and magical, one that clarifies life and tends to improve it." While Dreamer, like Johnson's other fiction, obviously meets that criterion in general terms, Gardner's more concrete influence is subtly apparent throughout. For example, the scene in which Matthew ponders Dr. King's stitching his speeches and sermons together from various sources so skilfully that it is hard to tell where one voice ends and another begins recalls the strikingly similar techniques Gardner used in his fiction. Johnson doesn't make the explicit comparison, but it's obviously in his mind--as is the fact that both Gardner and Dr. King were accused, more or less, of plagiarism by some who did not understand their methods.Some readers have been puzzled at least by what they have seen as loose ends in Dreamer's conclusion: we never learn what those klutzy FBI men were up to, or what finally "happens" to Chaym. Such complaints, I think, seriously misunderstand what Johnson the novelist is up to at the end of his book. The ending is deliberately and meaningfully ambiguous, intentionally uncertain--although clues enough exist. "What became of Chaym?" is a very important question that Johnson purposefully refuses to answer explicitly, and it is not the only such question.

When you approach a new piece of fiction by Charles Johnson, you should be ready with all your gifts of intellect and insight. You can be assured that Mr. Johnson will typically bring those gifts of his to the event. Dreamer is characteristic of much that readers have come to expect of Mr. Johnson. For example, all of the book's major characters are quite well versed both in the eastern and western philosophic and religious traditions. He characteristically manipulates reality that way, much as one might bend light with a prism-and with the same kind of pleasurable, revealing results. On the other hand, there is much in Dreamer that is new for Charles Johnson, and, thus, for his readers. In Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage, he demonstrated an ability to combine and to jump across genres. It is not surprising, then, that Dreamer tends to defy categorization. Although it is fiction set within a (relatively) recent historical context, and although the figure of Martin Luther King, Jr., is at its thematic center, the book is not merely fictionalized biography. Rather than a book "about" Dr. King, this is a novel suffused by his presence--despite the fact that other characters have more time "on stage." The image of such a well-known figure looming over the story presents both potential opportunities and pitfalls for the author. Johnson's use of interior monologue to take us into the mind of a monumental figure is absolutely deft. Without a living Dr, King to consult, it would seem nearly impossible for anyone else to report what it was like to be the individual at the center of that whirlwind--but Johnson has done just that for us, and done it brilliantly. Historical figures, particularly martyred ones, tend to become, at best, abstractions or, at worst, icons. Johnson rescues King from either of those types of benign neglect and shows him rather as a human whose accomplishments came at the great expense of personal sacrifice. Before his life is lost he has tragically lost almost all time, not only personal time with his family but also time alone to think, to feel, and to continue his own intellectual and spiritual development. The counterpoint to King is Chaym Smith, a look-alike who resents and admires King, and who trains to become the dreamer's double. As does Lucifer in Paradise Lost, he at times threatens to steal the entire show. Yet Johnson does not take the easy route of making Smith a polar opposite of King. Smith too has gifts, and insights, and aspirations. Instead of being a pole apart, Smith is more like a brother who, by virtue of differing gifts and circumstances, careens along a different path through the universe. Structurally, neither King nor Smith can be the sustained voice that both frames and caries the novel from beginning to end. That voice belongs to Mathew Bishop, a Nick Caraway style narrator and a worker within the Movement who is all too aware of the margin by which he falls short when he compar