The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 28 December 2006
by Doris Lessing
What good are high social and moral ideals in the so-called "real" world? In the face of human nature, in the face of greed and pettiness, how can high ideals succeed? History is littered with the wreckage of social experiments gone awry, with, perhaps, the most notable example being the late, little-lamented, Soviet Union. Doris Lessing might have a greater claim on this question than many authors, but this question is at the heart of a lot of fiction, particularly any fiction that has its roots in the idealism of the 1960s. Here, Lessing depicts a freewheeling household deep in the heart of the Swinging Sixties in London. Frances, ex-wife of a boorish Communist, is the matriarch of a household of free-spirited young people and teenagers. They are her children and their friends, exiles from their own households. This feels like a communal household, at first, but with Frances's experience in the Communist movement, with her greedy hypocritical ex-husband Johnny, and with Johnny's mother, there is a current of disillusionment in the middle of a raging Revolution. Johnny is deeply self-absorbed, promoting Communism, defending the Soviets against charges of their own, well-documented brutality, and being a crappy father to his two sons and a daughter. Frances takes these kids under her own wing with a winsome quality to her quiet surrender in this big Highgate house. The kids, meanwhile, grow up in a chaotic world with few rules, with notably predictable results. And, yet, as they grow older, they acquire a realistic attitude toward the great dreams of the Sixties. The attitude grows more concerned with how to deal with the facts of that imperfect human nature. And yet, Lessing isn't particularly convincing here. There is something too smooth about the kids' rejection of idealistic movements, and, by half way through this novel, the reader becomes aware of Lessing's own axe she is grinding. She is in full rejection of Communism, various forms of Liberalism, anti-nuclear crusaders, and even a bit of feminism. She paints such idealism with a broad brush that leaves little sympathy for the people who dare to dream big. These big dreamers, in fact, are portrayed as self-absorbed, blind hypocrites. And this seems just a bit much.
The book turns polemical at points, and in ways that show Lessing's prejudices and somewhat simplistic thinking, while at the same time portraying a story with complexity and an attempt to show that human nature will always win out over idealism. That idealism itself is somehow a broken aspect of human nature. In the second half, we are swept off to a fictional country in southern Africa. Zimlia is a newly independent nation ruled by ultimately greedy and hypocritical associates of Johnny and his Communist cronies. One of the kids who has grown up in Frances's household becomes a doctor in a remote Zimlian village. There she encounters the paradoxes and injustices of a nation dealing with official corruption and the ravages of the AIDS virus. Her own friends at home are blind to Zimlian plight. Large aid organizations have no real idea what is going on on the ground. There is no sense of the real problems people are facing. The ideologies are largely at fault for blinding people to the problems of the people. In this, Lessing is on to something, of course. The sweetest dream is that humanity learns to work together for the greater common good. Lessing crushes that dream under the reality of human greed and corruption, and leaves the reader, really, with little sense of hope. Perhaps that is a little too much reality, after all. Lessing may have thrown out the baby with the bathwater, the idealism with the corruption.
(Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature.)