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Amazon.co.uk Review
From swinging 60s London to liberated sub-Saharan Africa, the author depicts the human faces of a broad canvas of issues in this polemical piece. The novel ranges from anorexia to AIDS, to casting a questioning eye at the morality of the travellers on the World Bankgravy train. Moving from London to the tragic landscape of post-independence "Zimlia"--a thinly veiled Zimbabwe--Lessing documents the social movement and lost dreams of a post-war generation, for whom "it is always The Dream that counts". --Rachel Holmes --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
‘Her portraits of sympathetic human relationships are of quite staggering beauty…It would be hard to exaggerate the splendour of this book.’ The Times
‘The haunting brilliance of her characters…the passion of her ideas and vision, remain undiminished. She’s up there in the pantheon with Honore [Balzac] and George [Eliot].’ Independent
'A startling, burningly committed book…she is one of the great imaginative fantastists of our time' Spectator
'Thank goodness for Doris Lessing…she never fails to expose the essential folly of our dreams and good intentions…a great book with a cast of memorable characters' Evening Standard
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Customer Reviews
In the second half of the book, in the 1980s, we move to "Zimlia", a newly liberated African country. Sylvia, Frances' step-daughter, has trained as a doctor and has then gone to work in a desperately poverty- and AIDS-stricken village in that country. In Zimlia we meet again some of the other youngsters who had sat around Frances' hospitable table: two of them, Africans who had been exiles from the country before its independence, are now in with the corrupt and incompetent government; three others have become leading figures in wealthy NGOs, moving importantly from one international gathering to another, and distributing largesse to the corrupt government without troubling to make sure that the money reaches the people who most need it. Again any possible resentment a reader might feel about being exposed to another political tract is likely to be overcome by the sheer brilliance with which the setting, the circumstances and the characters are described. Here, too, one knows that Doris Lessing is burning with rage about intellectual and political corruption, but, though there is nothing subtle about the political level of the book, her craft is such that one becomes deeply involved with and interested in the many people she so vividly portrays. The Sweetest Dream of a better world that black and white radicals had hoped for is cruelly dispelled in the shadow of Stalin, Mao, and tin-pot dictators in Africa, and Doris Lessing seems to say that it is an illusion to think we can transform the world by politics, but that individual acts of goodness and unselfishness can create pools of light in the surrounding darkness.
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