The Sweetest Dream: A Novel
by Doris Lessing
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Book Summary Information
Author: Doris LessingEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-12-24
ISBN: 0060937556
Number of pages: 496
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780060937553
- Condition: USED - Very Good
- Notes: 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Sweetest Dream: A Novel
Book Review: "The infinite incongruity that life was capable of"
Summary: 4 Stars
"The sweetest dream" of the title is a world of equality -- a world in which no one is poor, no one is oppressed, and no one is inferior. It is a dream that has beguiled many, including, in her youth, Doris Lessing. The particular variant that captivated her was British Communism of the Thirties and Forties. She became disillusioned with communism in the Fifties, and in this novel she excoriates it as well as other forms of political thought (mostly liberal or leftist in nature) that ignore the sanctity and dignity of the individual life and, as this review is entitled (borrowing a phrase from the novel), "the infinite incongruity that life [is] capable of." Life is messy, some people are evil, and others are weak, while political doctrines are far too neat and tidy . . . and, in their oversimplification, ultimately hypocritical.
The story of THE SWEETEST DREAM is almost epic in scope. It is told through the lives of three generations of ordinary but extraordinarily strong women: (i) Julia Lennox (nee von Arne), who was born into a solidly bourgeois German family and escaped that country as it turned to Nazism via her marriage to Englishman Philip Lennox; (ii) her daughter-in-law Frances Lennox, who married Julia's son Johnny, but then was left to fend for herself and their two sons, with considerable help from Julia, as Johnny (shamelessly self-centered and all the while going by the sobriquet "Comrade Johnny") pursued his lifelong worship and support of Stalinist communism; and (iii) Sylvia Lennox, who as the daughter of Johnny's second wife became his step-daughter but whom he also foisted off on Frances and Julia to provide meaningful and loving parenting. For the most part, the action of the book is divided between the mid-1960s in London, where Frances and Julia open their home to a motley assortment of alienated and/or rebellious youth, and the 1980s in Africa -- specifically, "Zimlia", which is Lessing's name for (I believe) Zimbabwe -- where Sylvia heroicly tries to carry on as a doctor in a rural mission midst AIDS and wretched poverty while the post-colonial African rulers and the self-righteous international aid community flatter and enrich one another in air-conditioned resorts and hotels.
While epic in scope, the novel is not quite as grand in execution. Like life, it too is messy, but on this score art need not mirror life. It is not just that the narrative could be more refined. (In some places, it bears the all the indicia of first-draft status.) It is also that the political commentary could be somewhat more subtle. Lessing is scathing in her portrayals and denunciations of various breeds of ideologues, so much so that at times THE SWEETEST DREAM itself verges on becoming a screed. For example:
* On feminism: "The beginning of the new feminism in the Sixties resembled nothing so much as a little girl at a party, mad with excitement, her cheeks scarlet, her eyes glazed, dancing about shrieking, 'I haven't got any knickers on, can you see my bum?'"
* On leftists: "The most immediately visible likeness was the hostility to people not in agreement. The left-wing or liberal children * * * maintained intact inherited habits of mind. 'If you are not with us, you are against us.' The habit of polarisation, 'If you don't think like us, then you are a fascist.'" * * * "They all used words like fascist all the time, anyone they might be having a tiff with was a fascist. They were so ignorant they did not know there had been real fascists * * *. They did not seem to know that fascist, Nazi, were words that meant people had been imprisoned, been tortured, had died in millions in that war."
* The most bitter and derisive portrayals are reserved for communism. For example: At the end of the novel, an aged Comrade Johnny gathers around himself disciples and comrades of yore, who "reminisce as if the great failure of the Soviet Union had never happened" and "with tender admiration * * * drank to possibly the cruellest murderer who has ever lived."
Even more than communism or other ideologies, what Doris Lessing really detests are hypocrisy and people who do not think for themselves. No doubt many readers will experience a blush of discomfort. Still and all, despite the polemics and occasional ham-handedness, THE SWEETEST DREAM is worth reading, even if just for the sprawling story.
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