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The Summer Before the Dark

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I was going to attempt "The Golden Notebook" as an introduction to Doris Lessing but lost my nerve when I saw how voluminous it was. The Contemporary Reading List recommended "The Summer Before The Dark" as an alternative and I wasn't disappointed. The novel starts off promisingly with a vividly drawn portrait of a 45 year-old middle class Englishwoman (Kate Brown) at the crossroads of her life. Realising that she has devoted most of her adult life to her husband (Michael) and children without a thought for herself, she sets out tentatively on a journey of self discovery when decides she doesn't like whom she sees in the mirror. She throws herself into a temporary job translating for a global food conference, which leads to an affair with a younger man (Jeffery) and culminates in a startling confrontation with herself when she gets to know a young girl (Maureen) whom she shares temporary accomodation with while her family is away. Maureen may not know what she wants to be (she has proposals from suitors of all persuasion) but what she does know is that she doesn't want to end up like Kate and her own mother. While her good friend, the selfish and amoral Mary, isn't a role model, she has always retained that sense of self that has gone missing from Kate's life. A large part of Lessing's prose consists of internal monologue, words and responses from Kate's mind and soul, all tremulously spoken. The recurring dream sequence with the "seal" is deeply poignant and symbolic of Kate's search for her own identity. The novel is a wonderful example of feminist literature exploring issues that will have eternal relevance for women all over the world. Lessing's beautifully written prose often leaves me breathless. Read it !

"You are young, and then you are middle-aged, but it is hard to tell the moment of passage from one state to the next. Then you are old, but you hardly know when it happened." Thus Lessing opens her novel, announcing that her character, Kate Brown will be the exception. Lessing has created a character who bridges the midlife transition in a single summer, from typical upper-middle-class British housewifery to corporate executive to older-woman-younger-man romance to denouncing the hair color that masks her age. By the end of Kate's summer, she is not entirely certain who she is, but quite clear who she is not. Lessing is recognized as one of the important writers in the English language, and the body of literature on midlife women is enriched by her genius and wisdom.

Kate, a middleclass London housewife on the cusp of midlife, becomes ungrounded and goes in search of her life's purpose. The strange things she encounters while traveling through Europe -- a bizzare tryst with a much younger man, an impoverished villa in nowhere Spain -- an then back again to London suck you with such subtleness, you won't know you've been charmed. Lessing expertly threads Kate's journey with a recurring dream and gives the characters that aid Kate's discovery a surreal edge that's surprisingly convincing. You won't stop reading, and what this book says about the point of a woman's life will blow you away.

I hate to give a less than glowing review of any of Lessing's work, but this book is not one of her best. At best she can be transformative to read, I'm thinking of The Four-Gated City, The Sweetest Dream, The Golden Notebook, The Good Terrorist, Love Again. She has written some stellar books. Here, she is full of brilliant ideas, but they aren't fully integrated into the novel, so it is a little clunky to read, story hung with politically astute insights. Also, it's a little bit dated, such as, the protagonist is 45, which was considered quite a bit older in the 60s and 70s than we consider it now that the "Baby Boomers" are well over 45. There is a recurring dream in the book that could have been edited completely out, or at least made not as intrusive. It didn't add enough to justify how much of it there was.

As I post this review, I have read three of Lessing's novels from three different time periods in her career. This is one of her later works and it contains the strong feminine perspectives, dialogues, analysis, and commentary that is associated with Lessing. One could say that these are the trademark writing styles of Lessing. It is an interesting novel about a married woman who is having a mid-life crisis.

Doris Lessing (1919 - ) is the 2007 Nobel Prize winner in literature. She has a score of novels and many other works. Her complex novel The Golden Notebook (1957), her first novel The Grass is Singing (1950), and The Summer Before The Dark (1973) are considered to be her representative works. I read those three.

Having read The Grass is Singing (1950), her very first novel, I found that the present novel is far more complex, but not as complex as The Golden Notebook. The Golden Notebook is a story within a story and it is 600 pages long. The present novel is more conventional and shorter, just 240 pages. Also, the Golden Notebook has a score of characters while the present book has one strong protagonist.

Without giving away the plot, Lessing describes the personality of the female protagonist - a middle aged married woman - who is living in Britain and is still relatively young at 45 but has found herself left with an inattentive husband and grown up children.

How does she deal with that situation and what is the outcome? That is what the novel is about. The "Dark" in Summer Before the Dark, refers to the period of turmoil (physical and mental) that she undergoes. It is about her new career and her new friends, both male and female. Lessing gives mostly female dialogue and perspectives. In fact, the female characters are far more interesting than the males. In short, it is a book of self discovery of a middle aged woman, and her coming to terms with her life.

This is not a conventional novel. Lessing uses various literary techniques including writing from the perspective of the woman having an illness. This makes the book more powerful and engaging. Gertrude Stein used repetition to create a mood of chaos. Here the technique has the same effect - but not exactly similar. Lessing brings us into the world of the woman's slightly delusional state. We see the world through the eyes of the sick woman. Some readers might find that confusing, but others will see it as a powerful literary technique.

I liked the book and would recommend it. It is a short quick read that takes an evening to read. It contains most of the feminine arguments found in some of her longer works, but the present work is far easier read than The Golden Notebok (far, far easier) and it is a well written novel. If I had to pick one book that is easy to read and contains her arguments, this is not a bad choice.

As I read this book, I could not escape the fact that every scene was rife with commentary on the social conditions for middle and upper middle class women in the late '60s and early '70s. I was reminded of how very happy I am that that I was not a "Leave it to Beaver" house-wife. It also reminded me that we take many things for granted (like choices about education and careers and motherhood) that were fraught with angst in the very recent past. The characters in the book revealed the varying difficulties caused by the many rigid limitations that women faced before the sexual revolution took off a few years later.

However, I hesitate to call this a literary novel - because each character is little more than a mouthpiece for Ms. Lessing's opinions about many issues. The characters do not have a life of their own and are not especially real or compelling or deep. The plot is odd and not especially interesting. While, it is not hard to read, it pretty easy to walk away from. (I didn't catch myself staying up late to read just a few more pages....)

I am glad that I got a taste of this Nobel Prize winning author's writing, but I doubt that I will read more of her books.

Kate Brown is a 45-year-old London housewife and mother of four young adults who finds herself at a loose end. Neither her husband nor her children--all of whom are immersed in their own interests and do not spare her much thought at all--need her. She takes a job with an international civil service organization called Global Foods, the primary purpose of which is to host lavish conferences for well-heeled, jet-setting civil servants who are about as connected to the native workers they represent as Kate is to her family (despite all she has come to believe about herself after a quarter century of devoted caring).

In this 1973 bildungsroman for the new woman, Kate Brown wrestles with a serial dream about a stranded seal struggling to return to the ocean as she wrestles with the truth of herself and of her life .Along the way, she becomes a star with Global Foods, has a pathetic romantic affair with an American in Spain, and finds herself the flatmate of a young woman named Maureen--a well-off waif whose own search for the right road for herself coincides with Kate's. Kate and Maureen become each other's foil and friend for a little while, and then they move on--but only after they each make the startling realization that women make their reality by the image of themselves they project and that nothing matters. This is to say that they realize they can create their own realities and decide for themselves what is worth caring about--and in their own good time.

In the end, liberation is not a group project but an individual one. The rewards come slowly and strangely, but they do come.

This is a rich and lyrical story.

Our lives are governed by social conventions that are almost inescapable if we wish to have meaningful relationships with the people around us: marriage, language, law, family, class, money. Indeed, to the social contract theorist, our very civilization depends on the mutual adoption of these laws. But what happens when these conventions are rejected? What happens when someone dares to be different, to be a Raskolnikov and take an axe to convention's head? In the political sphere, we get revolution, terrorism, even civil war; in the aesthetic sphere, we get stylistic innovation, new genres (and thus the creation of new conventions), quite often classic art. Doris Lessing's 1973 novel, The Summer Before the Dark, is the story of such conventions, but on a more personal level - in the domestic sphere, the familial province of upper middle-class London. It is the story of Kate Brown and her transcendence of these conditions, of her awareness of how she has allowed them to define her, and of her burgeoning social subversion in a time and a place where simply to question was itself unconventional.

Kate is haunted by a vaporous family of four children and a consultant neurosurgeon husband. So sketchy and minor are these characters that if they were needed for anything more than they give to the novel, they could not bear the load. They seem to exist for only two reasons: to define Kate by their presence (as the negative space about the portrait of a lady) and thus their absence, and to bestow upon her her roles for the novel: mothers, by definition, must have children, as wives must husbands. Though unemployed, her days are filled with the duties of mother and housekeeper: cooking cleaning listening consoling nursing; as often diplomatic as they are simply domestic.

The novel, having thus constructed her milieu, then flings Kate's family to separate parts of the world as they all take their own summer holiday, leaving Kate alone. Instead of sitting idly at home, Kate, a fluent Lusophone, takes a translating job with Global Foods, a company "whose decisions are of importance to people hauling sacks of coffee on a hillside thousands of miles away." Promoted to administrative duties (a position that draws on her domestic organizational skills), Kate ends up in conservative Istanbul, where she meets a wandering Jeffrey, a young man with whom she decides to have an affair - something her (relatively) open marriage allows. They travel to Spain where Spanish social conventions envelope them like a flexible grammar, as is visible in this finely wrought passage:

"...there are conventions in love, and one is that this particular sub-classification - older woman, younger man - should be desperate and romantic. Or at least tenderly painful. Perhaps - so these unwritten but tyrannical values of the emotional code suggest - a passionate anguish can be the only justification for this relationship, which is socially so sterile. Could it be tolerated at all in this form, which was almost casual, positively humorous - as if these two were laughing at themselves? They were indifferent to each other? Surely not! For their propriety was due to much more than good manners - so decided these experts, whose eyes were underlined with the experiences of a dozen summers, enabling them to flick a glance over such a couple just once, taking in details of class, sexual temperature, money."

But Jeffrey soon tires of the "red-hot coast during the months of bacchanalia" and, having been there before, promises to show Kate the 'real,' central Spain. Despite falling ill, they continue through oppressive heat until Jeffrey's weakness forces them to stop and seek medical aid. Kate leaves him in that small Spanish village and returns to London, taking a hotel room because the Brown family decided to let their home out rather than leave it vacant for some few months. It becomes clear upon arriving in London that she, too, has taken ill. She descends into a feverish delirium that burns away the last vestiges of Mrs. Michael Brown and, once weathered, allows her a clear view of herself, naked under the clear, unfiltered light of no particular social lens. Here we have reached the middle of the novel, the fulcrum of its story, and its best scene.

In an interview given just before the publication of The Summer Before the Dark with Joyce Carol Oates, Lessing said that she has always been interested in women who define themselves by their marriage, as Kate does. It is a small step to make of this particular something more universal: a person's defining themselves by any social convention. It is the roles we play that give us a sense of self; it is what we see reflected back from the person with whom we are speaking that reveals to us our own shape. In the different spheres of society we know (or come to learn) what is expected of us. In the economic sphere, we sing the buyer-seller duet; in marriage, husband-wife; in family, parent-child; in art performer-spectator. In and out of these bubbles of interaction we move as between rooms without doors: effortlessly. It is with gentle subtlety that Lessing reveals her conditional life to Kate, as, gradually, more and more light is revealed to one whose eyes have been closed for a long time.

It is in language that Kate's quest for meaning begins - quite literally. From her role as translator for Global Food to her time in Spain, a nation with a language so close to Portuguese that for Kate to hear it was like trying to look through "windows paned with sheets of quartz instead of glass." The seeming evanescence and comedy of meaning is felt not only by Kate, but by her neighbour and friend, the adulterous Mary Finchley.

"'She said', said Kate, 'that Eileen's problems would be easily supported and solved in a well-structured family unit like ours.' Mary suddenly let out a snort of laughter. 'A unit,' said Kate. 'Yes, a unit she said we were. Not only that, a nuclear unit.' They laughed. They began to roar, to peal, to yell with laughter, Mary rolling on her bed, Kate in her chair. Other occasions come to mind, each bringing forth its crop of irresistible words. At each new one, they rolled and yelled afresh. They were deliberately searching for the words that could release the laughter, and soon quite ordinary words were doing this, not the jargon like parent-and-child confrontation, syndrome, stress situation, but even "sound," "ordered," "healthy," and so on. And then they were shrieking at "family," and "home" and "mother" and "father.""

Later we are told that it was "Kate's guilt...that ended [the] occasion...", as though the words themselves are sacrosanct, as though to make light of them is to endanger the "foundations" of one's "identity," to shake one's trusses. Kate is becoming aware that words are representations of things and not the things themselves and her guilty reaction is generated probably as much by anxiety for the wider implication of this as it is by the alcohol she is drinking: if a thing is represented by words and pictures and an agreed meaning, what represents Kate? The realization she comes to is the same that not a few married woman come to: she is defined by her marriage, by her role as "wife," by her role as "mother." It is this idea that expands to create the theme of Lessing's novel and is wonderfully and ironically conveyed (as, with a theme such as this, it must be) in the central and best scene: when Kate goes to the theater. Feeling that an evening out is just the thing to accelerate her convalescence, Kate has the hotel reception book a ticket for a play. ("She did not care which play. She wanted to see people dressed up in personalities not their own, that was all.")

Here, at this play about a woman whose marriage suffers from the stifling ennui of convention, and whom, after a brief interlude of adultery, returns to her bucolic, bathetic life - here, Kate goes to pieces. "So very Russian," an audience member remarks - and indeed, Kate's eccentric behavior seems at times (fittingly for a play by Turgenev) to channel that of Dostoyevsky's Fyodor Karamazov or even his Underground narrator. She curses the actors in one scene and praises them in the next; her behavior, attracting attention for her vocalized thoughts, might be likened to Karamazov's acting the fool both because it is expected of him and because he believes himself to be the better man. However, despite her febrile ramblings, Kate is lucid enough to move beyond the conditioned response of sympathy, the response she gave when she first saw the play four years ago:

"She was thinking that there must be something wrong with the way she was seeing things. For although she was so close in to the stage, she seemed a very long way off; and she kept trying to shake herself into a different kind of attention, or participation, for she could remember her usual mood at the theatre, and knew that her present condition was far from that. It really did seem as if she looked at the creatures on the stage through a telescope, so extraordinary and distant did they seem from her in their distance from reality. Yet the last time she had sat here she had said of Natalia Petrovna, that's me. She had thought, What person, anywhere in the world, would not recognise her at once?"

And later:

"...and very soon everyone stood up to applaud and applaud, in the way we use in our theatre, as if the need of the actors to be approved, the need of the watchers to approve, feeds an action...which is a comment quite separate and apart from anything that has happened on stage, nothing to do with whether the events shown are ugly, beautiful, admirable or whatnot, but is more of a ritual confirmation of self-approval on the part of the audience and the actors for going to the theatre and for acting in it. A fantastic ritual. A fantastic business altogether."

It is a paradox of fiction, in particular of literary realism, that in its realistic depiction of human emotions and behavior we achieve respite from the barrage of the staged modern life. In his story "Zetland: By a Character Witness," Saul Bellow has his eponymous protagonist recommend Moby-Dick to his wife:

"...it [Moby-Dick] takes you out of the universe of mental projections or insulating fictions of ordinary social practice or psychological habit. It gives you elemental liberty. What really frees you from these insulating social and psychological fictions is the other fiction, of art. There really is no human life without this poetry."

In The Summer Before the Dark, Lessing has given us a portrait of a lady who becomes aware of her social conditioning but chooses to return to the life she lived before her enlightenment, suggesting not that it is the rejection and subversion of social convention that is the first step towards identity and self-knowledge, but simply the awareness of these civil codes and the refusal to sit so comfortably in their mold.



Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at [...]. © David J. Single, 2010 [[...].]

Kate Brown, who lives in the London suburbs, is happily married and the mother of four children. But she has reached a point in her life when she feels extraneous. Invisible,even. As her husband gets ready to leave for a conference in the States, she ponders what her summer will be like. And then an opportunity presents itself that will allow Kate to spread her wings a bit and explore another world. As she leaves for the position as an interpreter, she has no idea what will be unleashed over the next few months.

As we follow Kate's journey, we experience with her the joys of freedom, along with the risks. Will a foray into a brief affair bring her what is missing in her life? Or will the opportunity to earn her own money give her something she wants? But unexpected events turn these experiences into something quite different, as we see Kate's journey turn dark, with strange and symbolic dreams.

Then her journey takes her to a flat and a young girl who is on the verge of her life, while Kate is at a different crossroads. They share experiences and thoughts, and when the journey ends and the dark unfolds into springy lightness, Kate is ready to finally go home and rejoin her family. But she has a different perspective and a new way to be.

The rich symbolism throughout The Summer Before the Dark (Vintage International) reminded me once again why Lessing is such a great writer. Kate's recurring dream of a seal she is struggling to rescue and carry to safety reminds us that her nurturing aspects have controlled her life. She now must move on to something different. As she thinks about going home, she realizes something significant, as described in this passage:

"The mood she was in when she walked in at her front door again would be irrelevant: now that was the point, it was the truth. We spend our lives assessing, balancing, weighing what we think, we feel...it's all nonsense. Long after an experience which has been experienced as this or that kind of thought, emotion, and judged at the time accordingly--well, it is seen quite differently. That's what was happening, you think; and what you thought or felt about it at the time seems laughable, jejune."

There were parts of the novel that seemed very heavy with introspection, and the feelings evoked sometimes weighed me down. But then I moved on to the richly textured parts during which Kate arrives at her realizations. Definitely recommended for anyone who loves following a woman's journey toward finding herself. Five stars.

I agree with "devoted reader"--I was struck by
the insights of this book, but felt that the characters
were subservient to them.