He went out looking for love, and found a revolution 
The Crowd Dreams of Love is a futurist novel
in the tradition of Wells, Huxley, and Orwell.
A comic meditation on individual and social love,
it is the story of a reclusive composer in a major
modern city. Three women draw him into
the life of his times: Marie, an immigrant waittress
with connections in the murky Underground;
his student the beautiful pianist Eva; and
his ex-lover Caroline, now one of the most
famous movie stars in the world- as famous
for her political opinions as for her movie roles.
Each has her own reasons for involving herself in
Dr Lawrence's comic search for lasting love,
and he follows the logic of his feelings for each
off one cliff after another.
But by simply following his heart,
this most apolitical of all artists finds himself
pushed into the midst of a bloody revolution .
His journey from the personal to the political
to the spiritual brings him under the surveillance
of the omnipresent Federal Police, and the arrest
of Caroline's famous husband leads them
to a corporate concentration camp,
where dissidents are Re-Educated back
into socially-acceptable roles.
The Crowd Dreams of Love occurs in a world
not very different from our own,
where technology has made privacy impossible,
where crowds have minds separate from those in them,
where people wonder what is going on,
where time can be traversed by longing-
and where love pervades all we do.
'Love makes sense of the dream of life,'
says Doctor Lawrence, and there is no more
perfect example than himself, who went outside
one day to find love, and was instead caught up in
the violent tumult of the world.
The music of our time
As if composing a fugue, L, the protagonist of this novel, attempts to weave the private, the personal and the public aspects of his life into some kind of coherent whole. Quietly at first, driven by nostalgia and the spirit of a long dead friend, L sets out to recover love or at least its memory. But, encountering three women he's loved and lost, he's soon enmeshed in their divergent compulsions. His misplaced compassion, sentimentalism and self-containment are turned on their heads as these women's lives, still being lived, unfold in complication and overwhelm him. Inexorably, he is pulled into the wider currents of the "crowd," the aimlessly violent and passionate tides of revolution. His personal meditations are swept up in the fast-moving human river running just outside anyone's door. But what drives this river, L comes to see, drives him as well.
L is a musician and so this book is a book of refrains and echoes, a series of counterpoints leading us back to a simpler melody. The style is effortlessly articulate, tonally and thematically wide-ranging but held together by a single voice wanting to learn.
A reclusive composer is drawn into the tumult of his time by the three women in his life.A meditation on time, love, and the inevitability of change, The Crowd Dreams of Love asks the frightening question: What would it take to start a revolution?
crowd dreams, crowd, dreams, love
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