The Sweetest Dream

The Sweetest Dream
Doris Lessing

Nobel Prize for Literature winner Doris Lessing tackles the 1960s and their legacy head-on in one of her most involving, personal, political novels.It’s the morning of the 1960s and it’s suppertime at Freedom Hall, the most welcoming household in north London. Frances Lennox stands at her stove, preparing another feast before ladling it out to the youthful crew assembled around her hospitable table – here are her two sons, smarting at their upbringing but beginning to absorb their mother’s lessons. Around them are ranged their schoolfriends and girlfriends and ex-friends and new friends fresh off the street. The feast begins. Wine and talk flow. Everything is being changed and being challenged.But what is being tolerated? And where will it end? Over there in the corner is Frances’s ex-husband, Comrade Johnny, who delivers his rousing tirades, then laps up the adolescent adulation before disappearing into the night to evade the clutches of his responsibilities. Upstairs sits Johnny’s exiled mother, funding all, but finding she can embrace only one lost little girl – Sylvia, who has to travel to Africa, to newly independent Zimlia, to find out who she is and what she wants. And what of the Africans, what will they tolerate?These are the people dreaming the 1960s into being, and the people who, on the morning after all that dreaming, woke to find they were the ones who had to clear up and make good.

THE

SWEETEST

DREAM

DORIS LESSING

Copyright (#ulink_914dbec1-463d-5e75-8653-8d868572e732)

Fourth Estate

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First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 2001

This edition published by Harper Perennial 2004

Copyright © Doris Lessing 2001

Doris Lessing asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006552307

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2013 ISBN: 9780007322770

Version: 2017-02-13

Praise (#ulink_649c6acc-0924-5fc2-81b7-f6c343f3845e)

Praise for The Sweetest Dream:

‘She has an extraordinary feeling for the peculiar vulnerabilities of the young, elderly and mentally unstable. And her portraits of sympathetic human relationships are of quite staggering beauty. Lessing illuminates the passing of the 20th century’s anti-capitalist dream: looking back, it seems extraordinary that the dream went on for so long: and looking forward, it is far too early to tell what its failure really means.’

RUTH SCURR, The Times

‘Thank goodness for Doris Lessing. While the rest of us flounder about noisily in the muddy waters of life, she never fails to expose with startling clarity the essential folly of our dreams and good intentions. Despite Lessing’s scathing exposé of pompous self-interest and futile idealism, her book is pervaded by what she would describe as “a layer of energetic optimism.”’

KATE CHISHOLM, Evening Standard

‘This book brings with it a rare kind of literary pleasure – the kind you might have in suddenly coming upon a long lost novel by George Eliot or Balzac. Six pages in, and you know that you have entered a fictional world which is already indelibly imprinted on your imagination, and which has in some measure shaped you. The characters are your familiars. You recognise their terrors and desires, the houses, landscape and politics they inhabit. Simultaneously, everything has shifted and is new. The haunting brilliance of her characters, whom one feels one knows rather better than one’s friend, the passion of her ideas and vision, remain undiminished. She’s up there in the pantheon with Balzac and George Eliot. We’re lucky she’s still writing.’

LISA APPIGNANESI, Independent

‘A startling, burningly committed book which contains a marvellous sense of possibilities opening as the fiction progresses, an enriching and absorbing conviction of change and growth.’

PHILIP HENSHER, Spectator

‘Lessing demonstrates that the realist novel is still possessed of a range and authority that makes all the clever antics of post-modernism seem like the giggling of naughty schoolchildren … Because Lessing is a humanist, in the end – though she spares us no revelation of selfishness, nastiness and stupidity – goodness prevails. She is one of the few writers who does not hesitate to offer up some characters for admiration, and who has no time for those who are cheap.’

ALLAN MASSIE, Scotsman

‘Lessing has always been a generous writer, and one who is determined to get to the bottom of things, and she effortlessly captures what is quintessential in each of her charming characters. She has claimed that her quest for the truth propelled her into becoming a writer. No doubt it is the same impetus that has produced a volume that speaks so loudly to the present. In its critique of mass-produced thinking and the long-term personal effects of war, The Sweetest Dream approaches a universal truth: both damage people’s capacity to give and receive love. Something to mull over in these troubled times.’

JUSTINE ETTLER, Observer

‘Lessing’s power is in her awareness of detail, commitment to truth and human dignity, strengths that hold the book together. The fate of her characters and the indignation of the author towards unfeeling humanity keep the work gripping and rewarding.’

JOHN F DEANE Irish Independent

‘Comrade Johnny, a figure of near-Dickensian hypocrisy, pomposity and selfishness, is the comic masterpiece of the novel, a flawless caricature of the career revolutionary, who speaks in formulas and clichés, lives parasitically and well on others, and blithely abandons his wives and children with the motto that “the struggle must come before family obligations.”’

ELAINE SHOW ALTER, TLS

‘Doris Lessing appears more and more as some Olympian figure, surveying from her mountain-top the chaotic, fumbling, ludicrous human panorama beneath. Here her panoramic sweep is worthy of a 19th century doorstopper: she casts her cool eye over whole decades (1960s to 1990s); entire ideological systems (shiny new Marxism, second-hand feminism, rusty old family values); large messy families, complete with neurotic ex-spouses and teenagers other people seem to have mislaid; drugs; anorexia; big chunks of Africa; Aids, Catholicism. It’s a beautifully made novel, with full-blooded virtues, both fictional and moral. Her portrait of Africa’s miseries, although devastatingly vivid, still manages to allow a few rather feeble rays of goodness to glimmer through.’

JAN DALLEY, Financial Times

With gratitude to my editor at Flamingo, Philip Gwyn Jones, and to my agent Jonathan Clowes, for good advice and criticism, and to Antony Chennells, for help with the Roman Catholic parts of the book.

‘And people leave who were warm children.’

Contents

Cover (#u0a2cb253-cd08-555a-ae03-602b72919496)

Title Page (#u922b1442-c749-5424-a98b-3ed4e45b1773)

Copyright (#ulink_746676b8-8cb8-5718-a1fa-86859eb6531f)

Praise (#ulink_87dbc4e2-0291-5d4b-bce5-b7fae019db83)

Dedication (#ulink_ea5d95ce-15ee-5f36-8747-a9c67d5471ea)