Edmund Hardy
Our sweetest dreams are, apparently, ideological. Those seductive systems of thought which attract people who want to save the world on their own terms, but who end up mired in disillusion or pedantry. There’s prime potential for grim humour when people play at being revolutionaries, and Lessing is well-placed to crack the jokes: she was a member of the Communist party of Rhodesia in the thirties, and looks back to draw some harsh conclusions in her autobiography Under My Skin.
Reflecting on the atrocities carried out systematically by party activists in the Soviet Union and China, Lessing imagines herself watching while millions of peasants, thrown off their land, or their food forcibly taken, died in their masses. To believe that she wouldn’t have done anything similar is also to say: I am much better than all those hundreds of thousands who murdered, ill-treated and tortured in the name of the greater good. "I have to face the fact that I and my high-minded comrades… [were] all of the stuff of those murderers with a clear conscience. We were lucky, that’s all."
And so it’s no surprise to find that The Sweetest Dream is a novel with a thesis. It clearly sets out to dissect the Sixties, its mass psychoses and movements, and also has a humanist agenda simmering away as well. But rather than ending up with a book wearing its polemic on its sleeve, Lessing has managed to make this a central strength. The abstract arguments echo through the narrative: this is realism reshaped to focus on complex human realities. Surely no room for those jokes, then? Meet Johnny, a self-styled dashing revolutionary, a celebrity of the hard left, and an absentee father. His ex-wife Frances, at the centre of this novel, supports his family and acts as housemother to a group of people who include Johnny’s mother Julia as well as an assortment of runaways, lost children and damaged teenagers, all attracted by the ease and warmth which is the household’s defining characteristic.
Johnny is a painfully comic character, never matching his beautiful ideals with his cruel personal behaviour, and this is contrasted with the small acts of kindness which are natural to other characters such as Frances or Julia. He speaks only in political formulas and clichés – something which seems universal among today’s career politicians – and we are under no illusions that at the heart of this hypocrisy lies the error of mass-produced thinking, which dehumanises people; language and ideals become dangerous tools, and can carry us away.
Lessing sees ideology, faith, as a way for good intentions to be diverted into simplistic, and therefore attractive, systems of thought which waste human potential. They ebb and flow through history with an inexorable force. Johnny and his comrades live permanently in utopias, gain identity through their dreams, and without their faith would be deprived of everything they define as good. A self-serving egotism motivates these people, as it does most of the characters here, good, bad, or just caught by circumstance. No Dickens-style justice is meted out, and, as in the real world, these lives unfold in a muddled, often contradictory way.
The novel quickly gathers pace and opens out in several directions. It spans three decades, moves to a fictional post-independent African state (Zimbabwe in disguise), and encompasses an increasingly epic scope as the narrative unflinchingly explores anorexia, Aids, the dynamics of human relationships, while accurately satirising the further shortcomings of reductive ideals: Catholicism, feminism, hippies, and aspects of international development work.
The satire is pinpointed, not exaggerated – driven by a compassion to uncover the genuinely good beneath the dead or the half-baked. Nearing the end it becomes clear that echoing throughout has been a concern for the future; we have witnessed the burned-out utopias, the failures of the left, human damage of all kinds, and now we are forced to face what these realities will mean for the growth and change to come. Doris Lessing entered the canon of English letters back in the Sixties with The Golden Notebook, and now in her old age she retains a vigour and ambition which, across the diversity of her output, seems to overshadow that of many other post-war novelists, neatly side-stepping any cosiness or predictability that eminent literary status can come to mean.
