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Frances Lennox ladles out dinner every night to the motley, exuberant, youthful crew assembled around her hospitable tableher two sons and their friends, girlfriends, ex-friends, and ftesh-off-the-street friends. It's the early 1960s and certainly "everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." Except financial circumstances demand that Frances and her sons Eve with her proper ex-mother-in-law. And her ex-husband, Comrade Johnny, has just dumped his second wife's problem child at Frances's feet. And the world's political landscape has suddenly become surreal beyond imagination....Set against the backdrop of the decade that changed the world forever, The Sweetest Dream is a riveting look at a group of people who dared to dream-and faced the inevitable cleanup afterward -- from one of the greatest writers of our time.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member delphica
(#1 in the 2006 book challenge)
I've never read anything by this author before. I liked this book a lot, the first half takes place in the 1960s and centers around a woman whose ex-husband is a Communist activist. She and her teenage children live with her ex-MIL, and the household includes a
Grade: A-
Recommended: To people who like novels that are about political philosophies, but not necessarily endorsing any particular political view. This is also a good book about sorts of seemingly trivial yet somehow significant happenings that make up family life, only using an unconventional family model.
I've never read anything by this author before. I liked this book a lot, the first half takes place in the 1960s and centers around a woman whose ex-husband is a Communist activist. She and her teenage children live with her ex-MIL, and the household includes a
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rotating cast of her children's friends. It's an interesting look at youth culture in England in the 60s. For some reason, every description of this book I've come across ends here. However, the second half of the book is set in the early 80s, and follows some of these teenagers (although now, obviously, adults), to Africa when AIDS is first emerging as an epidemic, and that was the half that I found more intriguing.Grade: A-
Recommended: To people who like novels that are about political philosophies, but not necessarily endorsing any particular political view. This is also a good book about sorts of seemingly trivial yet somehow significant happenings that make up family life, only using an unconventional family model.
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LibraryThing member Alinea
The ambition is characteristic of the novelist. Doris Lessing's fable of two continents and three generations takes us to Aids-struck Africa, Wilhelmine Germany and a dolefully delineated north London milieu of good intent and mental illness, whose casualties limp through the narrative. The
There's ideology by the bucket-load - some of it is the characters' rather than the author's. Chief culprit is "Comrade" Johnny Lennox, a diseased mind compounded of Marxist delusion and bourgeois self-hatred. Johnny loves humanity so much in the abstract that he gives himself licence to behave abominably to individuals, all the while self-justified by history's march. Even with the waning of the old faith, the psychology that sustained it is undiminished in its capacity to delude.
We have been here before with The History Man, yet Malcolm Bradbury's malevolent was also a believable charmer possessed of a dangerous energy. And energy is a beguilingly moral quality which can seduce both good and bad; Jeffrey Archer has it. Lessing's Johnny is a machiavel of the Jacobean stage, a person whose wickedness is so obvious one wonders why anyone is taken in.
This, however, is really a novel about women - heroic, striving, suffering, getting on with life and on in years, put upon, self-realising, getting there. There's noble German Julia, mother to ingrate Johnny, reading verses of scant consolation by Hopkins on the top floor of her Hampstead house. Downstairs in the kitchen is Frances, Johnny's abandoned wife, an earth-mother with a collection of waifs and strays attracted by self-abnegating benevolence and Elizabeth David recipes. There's practical Sylvia, who has the heart of the matter as well as Catholic faith. Being a bit of a lost cause at sex, she works in an African mission and then dies on the sitting room sofa. And then there's Rose, graduate of that kitchen-table school of bleeding hearts, who turns out to be a nasty combination of lefty rancour and tabloid values. This, then, is a woman thing - but emphatically not a feminist thing.
"The spirit of the Sixties, with passionate eyes, a trembling voice, and outstretched pleading hands, was confronting the whole past of the human race." And now here comes the flight from the enchantment, a summary and also an explanation of what went wrong. The best of the writing is reserved for Africa, where the Lessing genius for invocation of mood and place bounces off the page. But even here the anti-ideological ideology is well to the fore. Where international development is concerned, good intent's sweetest dream breeds a corruption of heart and mind that is recorded with a soi-disant Daily Mail abandon.
Frances hears the rants of her understandably disturbed son, fresh from the psychiatrist's chair, subjecting her to "what no human being should ever have to hear - another person's uncensored thoughts". And the characters go in for a lot of such expression. There are echoes here of Iris Murdoch's later novels - an unhappy epoch when a vast array of indistinguishable characters filled the Dame's unedited pages with their hellishly inconsequential philosophising.
This is a truly reactionary work in the limited sense that the author still stands at too close a remove to the object of abomination. In the full force of her reaction, she parodies and stereotypes. And there's an odd conflation of decades at work: though many in the 1960s and 1970s were soft on communism, the grand narrative had long since lost its interwar power to console.
The Sweetest Dream is offered as a substitute for the third volume of the autobiography Doris Lessing will not write (lest she offend "vulnerable people"). But what emerges is an awkward melange lacking both the realism of great fiction and the truthfulness of history. The nuance that is needed for both is lost in rancour.
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Sweetest Dream is also surely the saddest story- the savage cartography of a once fondly imagined land by one who was there. This is emotion recollected in hate.There's ideology by the bucket-load - some of it is the characters' rather than the author's. Chief culprit is "Comrade" Johnny Lennox, a diseased mind compounded of Marxist delusion and bourgeois self-hatred. Johnny loves humanity so much in the abstract that he gives himself licence to behave abominably to individuals, all the while self-justified by history's march. Even with the waning of the old faith, the psychology that sustained it is undiminished in its capacity to delude.
We have been here before with The History Man, yet Malcolm Bradbury's malevolent was also a believable charmer possessed of a dangerous energy. And energy is a beguilingly moral quality which can seduce both good and bad; Jeffrey Archer has it. Lessing's Johnny is a machiavel of the Jacobean stage, a person whose wickedness is so obvious one wonders why anyone is taken in.
This, however, is really a novel about women - heroic, striving, suffering, getting on with life and on in years, put upon, self-realising, getting there. There's noble German Julia, mother to ingrate Johnny, reading verses of scant consolation by Hopkins on the top floor of her Hampstead house. Downstairs in the kitchen is Frances, Johnny's abandoned wife, an earth-mother with a collection of waifs and strays attracted by self-abnegating benevolence and Elizabeth David recipes. There's practical Sylvia, who has the heart of the matter as well as Catholic faith. Being a bit of a lost cause at sex, she works in an African mission and then dies on the sitting room sofa. And then there's Rose, graduate of that kitchen-table school of bleeding hearts, who turns out to be a nasty combination of lefty rancour and tabloid values. This, then, is a woman thing - but emphatically not a feminist thing.
"The spirit of the Sixties, with passionate eyes, a trembling voice, and outstretched pleading hands, was confronting the whole past of the human race." And now here comes the flight from the enchantment, a summary and also an explanation of what went wrong. The best of the writing is reserved for Africa, where the Lessing genius for invocation of mood and place bounces off the page. But even here the anti-ideological ideology is well to the fore. Where international development is concerned, good intent's sweetest dream breeds a corruption of heart and mind that is recorded with a soi-disant Daily Mail abandon.
Frances hears the rants of her understandably disturbed son, fresh from the psychiatrist's chair, subjecting her to "what no human being should ever have to hear - another person's uncensored thoughts". And the characters go in for a lot of such expression. There are echoes here of Iris Murdoch's later novels - an unhappy epoch when a vast array of indistinguishable characters filled the Dame's unedited pages with their hellishly inconsequential philosophising.
This is a truly reactionary work in the limited sense that the author still stands at too close a remove to the object of abomination. In the full force of her reaction, she parodies and stereotypes. And there's an odd conflation of decades at work: though many in the 1960s and 1970s were soft on communism, the grand narrative had long since lost its interwar power to console.
The Sweetest Dream is offered as a substitute for the third volume of the autobiography Doris Lessing will not write (lest she offend "vulnerable people"). But what emerges is an awkward melange lacking both the realism of great fiction and the truthfulness of history. The nuance that is needed for both is lost in rancour.
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LibraryThing member jarvenpa
Well then. When I was a girl I read Doris Lessing as a guidebook for the creative and activist woman. You have to understand that that was in the 60's, and Lessing was a curious guide. I remember even seriously wondering if I ought, like the heroine in the Golden Notebook, to have different colored
So she holds in my life the position of a sort of mentor. The Girl Scout Guide to rad feminine life. Though she was never quite so simpatico as many others of my heroes.
And then we come to The Sweetest Dream, an odd novel that is prefaced by her disclosure that she shall not write the 3rd volume of her autobiography (because it would cause harm to others still living), but that...in this novel, she hopes to reveal the truth about the 1960's. And so on.
Well, okay then, I'm up for it. I lived through the 1960's, eagerly reading her novels. Of course, I was not in England, and possibly the whole grand dream was different there. I had forgotten how very lacking in a sense of humor Lessing is, how ponderously she loathes the communists (with all the fervour that a fallen away Catholic devotes to the evils of the Papacy), and how she does go on and on and on and on and on and on about the Terrible Failings of Everyone Else.
I suppose a Nobel prize winning novelist is too daunting to be seriously edited? Because I would have slashed this book to ribbons. There is an interesting sub-novel, in the African section, but even that has that ponderous falsity.
And the heroes and villains are set sternly in place from the start, with little cardboard traits and no real sense of...anyone. It is a shadow play, all of it (with the possible exception of the more complex character of Julia).
The best part? A novel in which the house is a main character!
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journals for various aspects of my life.So she holds in my life the position of a sort of mentor. The Girl Scout Guide to rad feminine life. Though she was never quite so simpatico as many others of my heroes.
And then we come to The Sweetest Dream, an odd novel that is prefaced by her disclosure that she shall not write the 3rd volume of her autobiography (because it would cause harm to others still living), but that...in this novel, she hopes to reveal the truth about the 1960's. And so on.
Well, okay then, I'm up for it. I lived through the 1960's, eagerly reading her novels. Of course, I was not in England, and possibly the whole grand dream was different there. I had forgotten how very lacking in a sense of humor Lessing is, how ponderously she loathes the communists (with all the fervour that a fallen away Catholic devotes to the evils of the Papacy), and how she does go on and on and on and on and on and on about the Terrible Failings of Everyone Else.
I suppose a Nobel prize winning novelist is too daunting to be seriously edited? Because I would have slashed this book to ribbons. There is an interesting sub-novel, in the African section, but even that has that ponderous falsity.
And the heroes and villains are set sternly in place from the start, with little cardboard traits and no real sense of...anyone. It is a shadow play, all of it (with the possible exception of the more complex character of Julia).
The best part? A novel in which the house is a main character!
Show Less
LibraryThing member otterley
I found this perhaps the most purely enjoyable of all of Lessing's books. It covers familiar territory, but does it with a sweep and warmth that is less familiar - it feels looser and less rigorous than some of her books, but is never anything other than sharp and perceptive - she skewers tabloid
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journalists, the international aid juggernaut, the posturing intellectual superstar and venal African leaders - she writes about AIDS in Africa with truth, love and terribleness - and comes in the end back to a table in a kitchen with a family, interconnected by blood, love, habit or happenstance. Show Less
LibraryThing member IonaS
This is a very readable novel, though there are many characters in it so it can be slightly hard to recall who is who. And there isn’t so much about communism in it, as in some of Lessing’s books.
Frances is the main character. She is an actress, writes articles and is also at one point an
She lives in Julia’s big house. Julia, a German who escaped Nazi Germany, is the mother of Frances’s ex-husband, Johnny, who is a fanatical communist, always trying to convert people, and who is thus extremely boring.
Frances has two sons, Andrew and Colin.
What is special about the house is that it is filled with youngsters, who come from goodness knows where. Frances makes nutritious meals for them. The youngsters mostly can’t live with their parents for some reason or another, some being neglected by them.
Julia has money and pays for some of he youngsters’ upkeep, if Frances does not.
One child in particular, Sylvia, who at the start goes by the name of Tilly because, when a litle girl, she couldn’t pronounce Sylvia properly, is particularly prominent.
Sylvia was looked after by Julia. She hardly ate anything until Andrew began to encourage her to do so.
There was a rather unpleasant girl called Rose.
Later, Sylvia becomes a doctor and goes to Africa to help at a so-called hospital. This is one of the most interesting parts of the book.
Rose becomes a journalist but is still nasty and only writes articles attacking people, including Sylvia and her hospital, though Sylvia is a wonderful doctor and saves many of the natives’ lives. The “hospital” has no beds, and patients, no matter how ill, have to lie outside, even when it rains.
I can highly recommend this book.
Frances is the main character. She is an actress, writes articles and is also at one point an
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“agony aunt”. She lives in Julia’s big house. Julia, a German who escaped Nazi Germany, is the mother of Frances’s ex-husband, Johnny, who is a fanatical communist, always trying to convert people, and who is thus extremely boring.
Frances has two sons, Andrew and Colin.
What is special about the house is that it is filled with youngsters, who come from goodness knows where. Frances makes nutritious meals for them. The youngsters mostly can’t live with their parents for some reason or another, some being neglected by them.
Julia has money and pays for some of he youngsters’ upkeep, if Frances does not.
One child in particular, Sylvia, who at the start goes by the name of Tilly because, when a litle girl, she couldn’t pronounce Sylvia properly, is particularly prominent.
Sylvia was looked after by Julia. She hardly ate anything until Andrew began to encourage her to do so.
There was a rather unpleasant girl called Rose.
Later, Sylvia becomes a doctor and goes to Africa to help at a so-called hospital. This is one of the most interesting parts of the book.
Rose becomes a journalist but is still nasty and only writes articles attacking people, including Sylvia and her hospital, though Sylvia is a wonderful doctor and saves many of the natives’ lives. The “hospital” has no beds, and patients, no matter how ill, have to lie outside, even when it rains.
I can highly recommend this book.
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LibraryThing member burritapal
Much of this book takes place in a three-story house, with a basement too, in London. This house belongs to julia, the matriarch of the family.
She was from germany, and she met her future husband philip, who was from england, before world war I. He went away to war, and then he came back, and they
Jolyon, or johnny, as he likes to call himself, was a communist, or at least he said he was. He met a young woman named Frances, and they had a love affair. He said he was going away to fight in the Spanish civil war.
In that week they married and Andrew was conceived, and that was the end of her good times,
"Now here she was, and it was a final capitulation:
Johnny had snapped at her, ‘I don’t think I’ve managed to teach you anything, Frances, you are unteachable.’ ‘Yes, I know, I’m stupid.’
Johnny would never stay at home, but went traipsing around the world, supported by communist communities. She would stay at home, now with two children. Johnny would ask Julia to visit her. Julia would try to give her money, but Frances would not allow it. Julia:
‘I would say that you have more reality than you can cope with.’
Frances eventually comes to Julia's house to live with her two sons, on the Middle floor, with Julia above her.
This book seems to be about, at first people living in that house, many of them just taking up space and being supported by Frances and julia.
There are some despicable characters in here. I don't know how the character Frances was able to tolerate, for example, Rose.
She's always cooking, and putting out great loads of food on a gigantic table.
Frances works at a newspaper, at first being an "aunt agnes," something like Dear Abby. Later on she starts writing articles about women's plight. She gets to know one of her work colleagues.
‘This is our chief politico, Rupert Boland. He’s an egghead but he’s not a bad sort of person, even if he is a man.’
As when I was in high school, and my contemporaries would talk about what they wanted to be when they were quote grown up, Many of the teenagers that stayed in Julia's house, had dreams of going off to different places, and doing unreal things. For example, one of the young men said he was going to East africa,
"Frances understood that there was no need to say anything as crass as, Have you got a passport? A visa? How are you going to pay for it? And you are only seventeen."
Rose, one of the despicable teenagers that took up space in the basement, claimed that Frances's son Andrew had made her pregnant. Frances had to play the parent for Rose, as she had to for many of the other teenagers, who stayed in Julia's house.
She signed Rose up for a class course in a college. She let Rose's parents know.
"But they would not pay for Rose’s board and keep. They allowed it to be understood that it was Andrew’s responsibility to pay for her. That meant Frances, in effect.
"Perhaps she could be asked to do something in return, like housework–for there were always problems with keeping the place clean, in spite of Julia’s Mrs Philby, who would never do much more than vacuum floors. ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Andrew. ‘Can you imagine Rose lifting a finger?’ "
Johnny is disillusioned by the Vietnam war, and the lies of the so-called communism, of the USSR.
" ‘It was all . . . lies and nonsense.’ She could hear the tears in his voice. ‘What a waste. All that effort . . . people killed for nothing. Good people. No one is going to tell me they weren’t.’ A silence. ‘I don’t want to make a thing of it, but I did make such sacrifices for the Party.' "
Later on, Johnny gets married, and then leaves his second wife, and of course Frances is responsible for supporting her. Frances ends up getting together with her colleague from the newspaper, Rupert.
I really can't stand sex scenes, it makes me feel like throwing up. These are triggers for me, Because of my abuse...
"The sweet warm weight of a man sleeping in her arms, his mouth on her cheek, the tender heaviness of a man’s balls in her hand, the delicious slipperiness of. ."
The character from this book who I loved was Tilly, but that was just her nickname. Her real name was Sylvia.
When she first came to Julia's house, she was anorexic, and had extreme trauma from her mother's treatment of her. She was Johnny stepdaughter. When she said this, I communed with her character:
" 'But I must confess I’d be happy to spend my life lying on my bed and reading.’ "
I also like the character of Frances a lot. Except for when she was describing lying around in bed with Rupert:
"...a piece by Frances where she mocked the current fad for alien excitements like Yoga, and I-Ching, the Maharishi, Subud.
One of the young people who stayed at Frances and Julia's house, later turned out to be a minister in the country they called zimlia which was a thinly disguised Zimbabwe.
"They are all so privileged, they have everything, they have more than any of us ever had..."
These were the thoughts he had, when he came to stay in london, and began a student life there
"It’s not fair, it’s not right, why do you have so much and you take it all for granted. It was that which ached in him, hurt, stung: they had no idea at all of their good fortune."
It is hard, very, for the older ones, world-whipped, when they have to listen while the idealistic young demand explanations for the sadness of the world.
In the Eighties, at the behest of another ideological imperative, all the mental hospitals and asylums were closed, and their inmates turned out to sink or swim.
Julia: "If you were dead, Sylvia, then you’d not be missing much, you’ll only end up like me, an old woman with my life behind me, dwindling into a mess of memories, that hurt."
‘Don’t you think it is strange that stupid people should have such power?’
A piece of a poem of an author Julia liked:
"I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent ."
Frances: "Lord, just imagine, if there had been no Rupert she would have gone on in the same dull willed routine of duty, and without love, sex, intimacy."
This, though she has to support Rupert's ex-wife, and take in his two spoiled brat children.
And here we go again:
"Frances and Rupert lay side by side in the dark, her head on his right shoulder, his right hand on her right breast. Her hand lay on his inner thigh, her knuckles against his balls, a soft but self-respecting weight that was giving her confidence."
She was from germany, and she met her future husband philip, who was from england, before world war I. He went away to war, and then he came back, and they
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were married. They had a son named Jolyon.Jolyon, or johnny, as he likes to call himself, was a communist, or at least he said he was. He met a young woman named Frances, and they had a love affair. He said he was going away to fight in the Spanish civil war.
In that week they married and Andrew was conceived, and that was the end of her good times,
"Now here she was, and it was a final capitulation:
Johnny had snapped at her, ‘I don’t think I’ve managed to teach you anything, Frances, you are unteachable.’ ‘Yes, I know, I’m stupid.’
Johnny would never stay at home, but went traipsing around the world, supported by communist communities. She would stay at home, now with two children. Johnny would ask Julia to visit her. Julia would try to give her money, but Frances would not allow it. Julia:
‘I would say that you have more reality than you can cope with.’
Frances eventually comes to Julia's house to live with her two sons, on the Middle floor, with Julia above her.
This book seems to be about, at first people living in that house, many of them just taking up space and being supported by Frances and julia.
There are some despicable characters in here. I don't know how the character Frances was able to tolerate, for example, Rose.
She's always cooking, and putting out great loads of food on a gigantic table.
Frances works at a newspaper, at first being an "aunt agnes," something like Dear Abby. Later on she starts writing articles about women's plight. She gets to know one of her work colleagues.
‘This is our chief politico, Rupert Boland. He’s an egghead but he’s not a bad sort of person, even if he is a man.’
As when I was in high school, and my contemporaries would talk about what they wanted to be when they were quote grown up, Many of the teenagers that stayed in Julia's house, had dreams of going off to different places, and doing unreal things. For example, one of the young men said he was going to East africa,
"Frances understood that there was no need to say anything as crass as, Have you got a passport? A visa? How are you going to pay for it? And you are only seventeen."
Rose, one of the despicable teenagers that took up space in the basement, claimed that Frances's son Andrew had made her pregnant. Frances had to play the parent for Rose, as she had to for many of the other teenagers, who stayed in Julia's house.
She signed Rose up for a class course in a college. She let Rose's parents know.
"But they would not pay for Rose’s board and keep. They allowed it to be understood that it was Andrew’s responsibility to pay for her. That meant Frances, in effect.
"Perhaps she could be asked to do something in return, like housework–for there were always problems with keeping the place clean, in spite of Julia’s Mrs Philby, who would never do much more than vacuum floors. ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Andrew. ‘Can you imagine Rose lifting a finger?’ "
Johnny is disillusioned by the Vietnam war, and the lies of the so-called communism, of the USSR.
" ‘It was all . . . lies and nonsense.’ She could hear the tears in his voice. ‘What a waste. All that effort . . . people killed for nothing. Good people. No one is going to tell me they weren’t.’ A silence. ‘I don’t want to make a thing of it, but I did make such sacrifices for the Party.' "
Later on, Johnny gets married, and then leaves his second wife, and of course Frances is responsible for supporting her. Frances ends up getting together with her colleague from the newspaper, Rupert.
I really can't stand sex scenes, it makes me feel like throwing up. These are triggers for me, Because of my abuse...
"The sweet warm weight of a man sleeping in her arms, his mouth on her cheek, the tender heaviness of a man’s balls in her hand, the delicious slipperiness of. ."
The character from this book who I loved was Tilly, but that was just her nickname. Her real name was Sylvia.
When she first came to Julia's house, she was anorexic, and had extreme trauma from her mother's treatment of her. She was Johnny stepdaughter. When she said this, I communed with her character:
" 'But I must confess I’d be happy to spend my life lying on my bed and reading.’ "
I also like the character of Frances a lot. Except for when she was describing lying around in bed with Rupert:
"...a piece by Frances where she mocked the current fad for alien excitements like Yoga, and I-Ching, the Maharishi, Subud.
One of the young people who stayed at Frances and Julia's house, later turned out to be a minister in the country they called zimlia which was a thinly disguised Zimbabwe.
"They are all so privileged, they have everything, they have more than any of us ever had..."
These were the thoughts he had, when he came to stay in london, and began a student life there
"It’s not fair, it’s not right, why do you have so much and you take it all for granted. It was that which ached in him, hurt, stung: they had no idea at all of their good fortune."
It is hard, very, for the older ones, world-whipped, when they have to listen while the idealistic young demand explanations for the sadness of the world.
In the Eighties, at the behest of another ideological imperative, all the mental hospitals and asylums were closed, and their inmates turned out to sink or swim.
Julia: "If you were dead, Sylvia, then you’d not be missing much, you’ll only end up like me, an old woman with my life behind me, dwindling into a mess of memories, that hurt."
‘Don’t you think it is strange that stupid people should have such power?’
A piece of a poem of an author Julia liked:
"I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent ."
Frances: "Lord, just imagine, if there had been no Rupert she would have gone on in the same dull willed routine of duty, and without love, sex, intimacy."
This, though she has to support Rupert's ex-wife, and take in his two spoiled brat children.
And here we go again:
"Frances and Rupert lay side by side in the dark, her head on his right shoulder, his right hand on her right breast. Her hand lay on his inner thigh, her knuckles against his balls, a soft but self-respecting weight that was giving her confidence."
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Awards
The Economist Best Books (2001.38)