Harper Perennial Modern Classics - The Golden Notebook [Paperback]

The Golden Notebook is Lessing's most well known of her works and with good reason. It is an incredibly complex and layered work that addresses such ideas as authorship of one's life, the political climate of the 60s and the power relation between the sexes. It would be naïve to consider this novel as just a feminist polemic. I know many people have read it only this way or not read it because they assume it is only this. Lessing articulates this point well in her introduction. The novel inhabits many worlds of thought. It just so happens that at the time of its publication it was a very poignant work for feminism. More than any book I know it has the deepest and longest meditation on what it means to split your identity into categories because you can not conceive of yourself as whole in the present climate of society and in viewing your own interactions with people. This obsession with constructing a comprehensive sense of identity leads to an infinite fictionalisation of the protagonist's life. Consider the following passage "I looked at her, and thought: That's my child, my flesh and blood. But I couldn't feel it. She said again: 'Play, mummy.' I moved wooden bricks for a house, but like a machine. Making myself perform every movement. I could see myself sitting on the floor, the picture of a 'young mother playing with her little girl.' Like a film shot, or a photograph." She can't attach her own vision of herself to the reality of her life. The two are separated by the ideologies of society which influence her own vision of who she should be.

This novel also captures the political climate of the era, a state of post-war disillusionment with the available models political ideology. They recognise the need for some kind of change, but are unable to envision a model that will work. Opinion is split into infinite personal categories of what government should become. Unfortunately, for all these good things which this novel intelligently discusses, it also has its own shortcomings that the reader should be aware of. Its representation of homosexuality is very limited. It has the unfortunate tendency to envision homosexuality as an idea of being rather than an actual state of being. No doubt, this was influenced at the time it was written by the meaning of being 'a gay' as being strongly attached to one's political position. The state of being a homosexual is inextricably attached to the misogynist vision of what femininity should be when it is actually something a bit more complex than that. Though Lessing is able to see through many misconceptions of her era such as the hypocritical actions of people who claimed to be fighting against racism while reinforcing racial divisions, the novel falls a bit short in other areas. Nevertheless, this doesn't prevent it from being a very powerful and enjoyable novel to read.

As Doris Lessing discusses in her own introduction (new for this edition), her best-known and best-selling novel has been viewed as being "about" various things: the battle of the sexes and man's inhumanity to woman; mental health; the difficulties facing left-wing politics following the failure and collapse of communism. As she herself points out, there is a definite irony in this, given that her central theme and premise was the need to see things as a whole and avoid compartmentalising different aspects of our lives (love life, family life, political life, work life etc. etc.). This remains a startling idea: what Lessing is essentially saying is that it is just this sort of compartmentalising that allows an otherwise kind character to be a shameless racist (there is a prominent example in the Black Notebook), or an operative of a totalitarian regime to commit acts of genocide then go home to a peaceful family dinner.

At the novel's opening, the life of Lessing's central character - (ex-)novelist Anna Wulf - seems hopelessly fragmented. Afflicted by writer's block, Anna pours the narrative of the various traumas of her life into four quite separate compartments: the Black Notebook relates to her "work life" as a writer; the Red Notebook her "political life" as a lapsed and disillusioned member of the British Communist party; the Yellow Notebook her (lightly fictionalised) love life; and the Blue Notebook her everyday existence. In all four areas, things grow increasingly desperate until Anna's mental health seems in serious question. However, it is only after what amounts to a "breakdown" followed by re-synthesis of her life as a whole in the eponymous Golden Notebook that Anna can really achieve mental and moral wellbeing.

It is a startlingly honest book, particularly for its time, and it is easy to empathise with Anna's plight. Lessing writes beautifully (particularly in the dark-hued and intensely nostalgic African sections of the Black Notebook), and throws off ideas and philosophical digressions like fireworks.

The book has undoubtedly dated a little, particularly in the ever-thorny area of sexuality and gender politics. As noted by another reviewer below, Anna's attitude to her gay lodgers is a tad dubious: it's fair enough to criticise them for being bitchy and misogynistic (they are!), but surely not for failing to be "Real Men"? Similarly, Anna not infrequently expresses (via her fictional alter ego in the Yellow Notebook) a somewhat unreconstructed craving to be sexually "Swept Away" by a "Real Man" (whatever one of those is) - while she clearly doesn't mean some sort of macho schmuck, this does jar a little nowadays. In part this is connected to Lessing's fascination at the time with a rather mystical version of Jungian psychoanalytical theory, with its ideas of "animus and anima": this was very trendy at the time (it crops up in the writing of Robertson Davies and Iris Murdoch, for instance) but seems less relevant nowadays. It is also worth remembering that Lessing was writing in the very early Sixties, well before the days of Shere Hite and Nancy Friday, and that her views on sex and sexuality were in fact very progressive and unexpectedly honest for the book's era. The novel's central theme (the need to live life as a whole) remains startling and compelling, and overall there is no question that this is a five-star read.

Call me a philistine, but I cannot understand why this monumental and self-indulgent book, first published in 1962, is said to be one the great classics of the 20th century.

It charts the life of Anna Wulf, a writer. Although every page is very well written and the many characters are well individualized, I have found this quite a difficult read. The chapters in this massive tome are enormously long, with few natural breaks: at times there are whole pages between paragraphs.

And the structure of the book is, I think, excessively complex. Anna is a divorcee with a little daughter; her friend Molly is a divorcee with a grown-up son. Their story is told in five instalments. Both women are ex-communists; both believe themselves to be `Free Women'.

The tile `Free Women' is certainly an ironical title as far as Anna is concerned, since her `freedom' brings her the most painful turmoil of emotions. After having been aware for a long time about the darker, crueller, more dishonest side of communism, she has, with a great psychological effort, `freed' herself from membership of the Party, but the wrench has left her in an aching vacuum, as well as haunted by the terrors and threats to human existence that are conveyed in the daily newspapers from which she obsessively collects clippings.

Worse: she feels `free' to engage in new sexual relationships with a series of men, but she is tormented in each of these relationships, to which she gives herself with more commitment than is felt by the men. She becomes increasingly damaged, veering backwards and forwards from love to hate, self-lacerating, driven towards total disintegration.

Between each instalment called `Free Women' are the contents of four notebooks which Anna is keeping: one black, one red, one yellow, one blue, each kept for a different purpose.

The black notebook relates to a successful book which Anna has already written and published, and which fictionalized her experiences in war-time Rhodesia. That book was about Communism, racism, and dominant-submissive relationships in a group of air force pilots stationed there.

The red notebook is about Anna's post-war experiences as a member of the Communist Party back in Britain. She was fully aware of the unacceptable side of Stalinist communism, even while she remained a member. Anyone who was a communist or a fellow-traveller in the forties and fifties will recognize the atmosphere.

Anna is struggling with a writer's block, but is trying to write another novel, dealing with the more painful parts of her life. The yellow notebook is part of this novel (and notes thereon) which describes the relationship of Ella (who is really Anna), a divorcee, with a doctor called Paul. (Sometimes the same characters, like Anna's ex-husband, are called by different names in the different parts of the book. In addition, the Paul in the yellow notebook is not the same person as the Paul in the black notebook.) Here (and later in the blue notebook) Doris Lessing records ever more minutely the relationship between the woman and the man: they vary often from moment to moment, from one conversational exchange to the next. These are very well done and at enormous length, but ultimately they are as exhausting for this reader as they must have been to the characters.

In the blue notebook Anna records her real life, part of which is the material for the yellow notebook. Most painful is the relationship with her last lover, Saul Green, an American ex-communist, who was himself a horrendously fractured personality: the schizophrenia of each of them reinforces that of the other.

And the new golden notebook at the end, which, the blurb says, `brings the strands of her life together and holds the key to her recovery'? Personally, I can't see any difference between the madness of that book and the madness which pervaded the end of the blue note book; and as for any recovery .... well, perhaps exhausted as I was, I'm afraid I just didn't get it. Dense of me, no doubt. But was I glad I had come to the end!

I have enjoyed some of Doris Lessing's books (The Sweetest Dream, The Grandmothers, The Good Terrorist) a great deal more than this one.