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The Sweetest Dream: A Novel

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Doris Lessings's 24th novel, "The Sweetest Dream" concerns itself with people from whom we never seem to find escape, even if we want to...family members.

This is a book that many people may not like. It's fairly long, not divided into chapters and, for the most part, lacks a plot. Rather than plot, Lessing chooses to concentrate of the needs of family members instead...immediate family members and extended family members. This is a book filled with "issues" and each character seems to have his or her opinion on each and every one of them. If the book seems too long, consider this: the pages are filled with so much dialogue during the discussion of these "issues" that they (the pages) simply fly by. It really doesn't take long to read "The Sweetest Dream."

I wouldn't say that this book is "about" anyone in particular, although its heart and soul is Frances Lennox a British actress and writer, who, at a very young age, made the mistake of marrying Johnny, a devout communist. Although she attempted to correct that mistake, she seems to only become mired even more deeply in Johnny's troubled life and times.

Frances and her two teenaged boys are at home much of the time while Johnny cavorts in various parts of the world. He only seems to light long enough to deposit yet another person on Frances' doorstep for her to take care of. (The latest being Johnny's current wife.) Frances finally finds a little peace and solace in the home of Johnny's widowed mother, Julia. This is a house filled with misfits: Frances' and Johnny's sons' friends and Sylvia, the troubled, anorxic daughter of Johnny's current wife. Although Frances dreams of the theatre, the need for cash seems to trap her in the world of journalism instead. Meantime, she's become the "family" caretaker and caregiver, much to Julia's distress.

Why doesn't Frances tell the selfish and self-centered Johnny when to quit? After all, his own mother thinks he's a cad, a brute, a loser. Frances, though, just keeps on lavishing love while her dreams of the theatre and a real man by her side seem to be slipping away. To find out whether they really do or not, you'll have to read the book.

While "The Sweetest Dream" is a very well-written novel with a premise that seems to have all the requirements, as I read, I realized that something was missing from the narrative. It is passion, fire. The characters seem almost defeated from the start. While believable, they are somewhat flat. I think Lessing needed to delve more deeply into their hearts and souls. It is only in the book's final development that Lessing really lets us care. And no, it isn't too late.

In the final analysis, however, "The Sweetest Dream," though a little flat, is still a wonderful book and one any fan of Doris Lessing absolutely should not miss.

While there are many critiques of the radical left written by conservatives (often as dogmatic and out of touch with reality as their targets), this is a critique from a liberal/moderate left viewpoint that should touch a chord to people who are concerned about the injustices in the world while knowing that there are no simple solutions. The title of the book refers to the dream world that will come after the "glorious revolution."

This book is in the form of a narrative about a group of people from the sixties until our time. The plot is rather weak and several of the characters are extreme stereotypes but they and the story serve as a vehicle to chronicle the social evolutions of the last 40 years and it is there where Lessing is at her best giving wonderful snapshots of the times while providing her sharp social commentary. The story takes place in London and a fictional African country that seems to stand for Zimbabwe. There are strong sketches of the suffering of the African people, emphasizing the role of the local corrupt despots in contributing to their misery. Lessing does not use the term, but I have heard Africans describing their new elite as the "black British". Her descriptions do justice to the term. She provides devastating pictures of the radical left, both of the old time Communists and of the "new" left. Comrade Johnny is as irresponsible a husband and father as one can possibly imagine and at the same time an unrepentant Stalinist who completely disregards reality. His dogmatism may seem unreal but I had the misfortune of knowing such people when I was growing up (outside the U.S.) and they are indeed as dogmatic as Lessing describes them (and often almost as irresponsible as comrade Johnny). The main sympathetic characters are three women, unselfish in the extreme. Johnny's mother Julia, his first wife Frances, and his stepdaughter Sylvia provide the models for women who keep families and societies together in each of three generations. There is also an African woman, Rebecca, who plays a similar role in a mission and eventually she dies from AIDs transmitted to her by her husband. Sylvia works as a doctor in an African mission hospital and she provides the main link between the two geographical locales. Most of the male characters are unsympathetic, from the corrupt African officials to the globe trotting agents of "philanthropic" organizations that tend to do more harm than good. However, there are several female villains as well. One of them, Rose, is a vitriolic yellow journalist as self-centered and irresponsible as the male villains. Lessing provides devastating and funny sketches of her and other extreme feminists. With all her feminism Rose complains that "political correctness" is plot of the American imperialists to take over the world. Another ultra-feminist comes across the statement that the "female mosquito transmits malaria" and rails against the "fascist" establishment that she thinks is responsible for the statement.

Because political and social commentary is a big (and the strongest) component of this book the reader's own political orientation will affect the enjoyment of the book. If you think that Stalin has been misunderstood, or if you think that social problems will be solved by posting the ten commandments in schools, this is not a book for you.

This is a wonderful novel about an extended, 60s-style household: for one reason or another - damaged families, poverty, even laziness - people congregate to heal and party. There are two strong women at the center of it: a German immigrant and her daughter-in-law, whom the former's do-nothing, Marxist son abandoned with two young grandchildren. The reader follows all of their fates over a period of about 40 years, from war-torn London to a fictional developing country near S Africa. It is vivid and moves very swiftly.

The characters are extremely well developed and exist in a kind of static balance even as they change and grow: there is always at least one angry and presumptuous taker, one giving and loving soul who is saving someone, one person healing and ready to move into a do-gooder role themselves. Etc. When one leaves the nest, another seems to take her place in rapid succession, and most of them tend to return as if to their own families. The balance of personalities is well thought out and realistic.

What distinguishes this novel from those that are similar is that, rather than romanticizing the characters in some two-dimensional way, Lessing is simply relentless in showing their shortcomings and limitations. Fate does not deal kindly with any of the characters, though some (not necessarily the nice ones) do better than others; the evil ones rarely get theirs, though they lead rather sad lives, and the good ones must struggle very hard just to tread water.

Lessing is also very hard on all the ideologies that are floating through the plot: she goes after communists, hippies, feminists, the internationalist development elite, journalists, and even Third World leaders. In other words, there are no simple answers; instead, the questions just get tougher. While there is a lot of humor in this, it is very dense, a kind of reverse history of idealism, showcasing the self-serving egotism that underlies the motives of virtually all the characters. What is amazing is how well it succeeds in bringing these ideas to life through the characters, though I found the second half of the book, much of which takes place in Africa, less strong than the first half.

Finally, the people are all extremely English. This means that there are many levels to read the book on, with subtexts implied rather than stated outright. Far more tedious than that is the patience of those suffering or being taken advantage of: I wondered what martyr complex led them to tolerate real jerks who turned around and betrayed them in horrendously destructive, cruel, and selfish ways. (I would have kicked them out without a thought, but then I am only married to a Brit and far less tolerant than she.) That is the only tedious bit in this truly fine novel.

Warmly recommended.

This story centers around three women, Julia, Frances and Sylvia, each one a very strong central character interweaving with each other throughout the book..I enjoyed the book and found it exceptional..in some instances the plot did fall a bit, but the tempo picked up again quickly..I feel it brought home the real situation of the poor in a third world country that very few of us in the affluent west realize ..the tragedy of a complete family being stricken by AIDS which at that time period was not recognized as a disease, but a evil spell..cast by shamans of local tribes..Lessing the fine writer that she is proves with age one gets better!!

IN THE SWEETEST DREAM the author creates an irresistible force. She objectively explores the confusion of swinging London`s post-WWII children as they boogie through the night in the 1960s and, exhausted, drift into pot-sweetened dreams before awakening a decade later to clean up the social mess left behind. She demonstrates how this decade was a different experience for men than for women. Lessing`s grasp of the issues and her political thrust prove remarkable. Lessing is 82.

Her protoganist Frances Lennox cannot say no. An Earth Mother, she supports an extended family that includes drop-ins and drop-outs, while her loquacious, intellectual ex-husband, a speech leech, avoids family responsibility as he steals their food and lectures them on how to save the world. A journalist, Frances tolerates too much. Through her and Lessing`s other well-crafted characters we see the themes that disturb the author. Action sweeps forward to Africa, and back to the life of Frances`s mother-in-law in the 1930s.

All the above is opposite to The American Dream. Doris Lessing unearths the vacuity of dreams that, sad to say, end up mocking us. This provocative novel probes passionately into its subject. Yet, its readability maintains around-the-kitchen-table accessibility.

"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.

Doris Lessing - The Sweetest Dream.


In the first half of this splendid book we are back more or less in the territory of the author's The Good Terrorist. Frances Lennox, a middle -aged woman living in a large Hampstead house, presides unassertively over a large dinner table frequented by a group of 1960s youngsters brought home by her sons and who mostly belong to the radical left. Her Stalinist (later Maoist) ex-husband (irresponsibly abandoning wives and children seriatim) also drops in from time to time when he is not being a delegate in plushy hotels abroad, and plays the guru to the youngsters. Some rooms in the house become almost permanent squats for the young people who have often fallen out with their middle class families. Frances herself is a middle class left-wing Liberal; but she is unwilling to assert herself even when some of those who avail herself of her hospitality abuse her for being bourgeois and for belonging to an exploiting class. The politics of these youngsters are depicted as crude, their rhetoric based on clich s and slogans, their behaviour as selfish and self-indulgent. For instance, they defend their shop-lifting as an anti-capitalist activity. Clearly this novel is in part a scathing political tract against the radical left. But it is much more than that, as the psychology of Frances, of her sons, her mother-in-law, and each of the other young people is displayed with an insight which makes this a great novel and a captivating read.

In the second half of the book, in the 1980s, we move to "Zimlia", a newly liberated African country. Sylvia, Frances' step-daughter, has trained as a doctor and has then gone to work in a desperately poverty- and AIDS-stricken village in that country. In Zimlia we meet again some of the other youngsters who had sat around Frances' hospitable table: two of them, Africans who had been exiles from the country before its independence, are now in with the corrupt and incompetent government; three others have become leading figures in wealthy NGOs, moving importantly from one international gathering to another, and distributing largesse to the corrupt government without troubling to make sure that the money reaches the people who most need it. Again any possible resentment a reader might feel about being exposed to another political tract is likely to be overcome by the sheer brilliance with which the setting, the circumstances and the characters are described. Here, too, one knows that Doris Lessing is burning with rage about intellectual and political corruption, but, though there is nothing subtle about the political level of the book, her craft is such that one becomes deeply involved with and interested in the many people she so vividly portrays. The Sweetest Dream of a better world that black and white radicals had hoped for is cruelly dispelled in the shadow of Stalin, Mao, and tin-pot dictators in Africa, and Doris Lessing seems to say that it is an illusion to think we can transform the world by politics, but that individual acts of goodness and unselfishness can create pools of light in the surrounding darkness.

This is one of her best books. It's like The Golden Notebook meets The Good Terorrist. Her right-on observations of how people behave has never been more true. Some of the characters are really evil, just like real life. Some of her characters are good, no matter what; like real life. She is one of the best writers ever and this is her best book in years.

People who think this is not a good Lessing book simply haven't been paying attention. She is still an astonishing writer.

It's the sixties and Frances Lennox and her two sons try to make the best of their situation, which requires that they live with her conservative mother-in-law, who is the German matriarch of this English family. Francis's ex-husband, who is a Communist rabble rouser, dumps his second wife's problem child Sylvia with Frances and she takes charge of the girl as if she were her own in this excellent and dramatic novel that takes you back to the tumultuous sixties. The book moves forward through two decades, reliving the politics of the times through the voices and views of Ms. Lessing's well drawn characters. A super story laced with satire.

In this testament to a time long ago, The Sweetest Dream: A Novel reminds us of a colorful era when the boundaries were blurred, the issues were paramount, and many young people (and some older ones) were celebrating the revolution.

Frances Lennox is trying to make it on her own, raise her two sons, and manage to maintain a household for the seemingly ever-growing group of hangers-on that shows up regularly at the house owned by her former mother-in-law Julia, whose generosity she depends upon. Neither of them are very happy when ex-husband Johnny (and black sheep son) shows up frequently, expecting the king's treatment.

During one of these moments, Frances gives in to the feelings she often hides. Her ex has just savagely put down his son Colin, whose first novel is being published; in his rant, Johnny reams his son out for his bourgeois beliefs and attitudes. Frances calls him to task for his behavior, which goes against the grain for her and wrings her out emotionally.

Following this dramatic scene, Frances gives in to her feelings, showing them freely, for the first time ever: "And then, a surprise to herself, Frances laid her head down on her arms, on the table, among all the dishes. She sobbed. Andrew waited, noting the freshets of tears that renewed themselves every time he thought she had recovered. He was white too now, shaken. He had never seen his mother cry, never heard her criticize his father in this way."

But despite the emotional moments Frances suffers, from time to time, she continues the task of cleaning up other people's messes.

Throughout this tale, I wanted to shake this woman; but I also knew that she was, in a way, a victim of her times.

The book was long, with relentless moments such as these, which I found tedious, despite being able to relate to the story. Nevertheless, the most I can offer is four stars at this time.