Complex Novel of Substance
This is a long, complex novel dealing with several themes. There is the breakdown of personality represented by Anna Wulf's 4 notebooks & the attempt at synthesis in the 5th & final Golden Notebook. Anna is a different person with each man in her life & with her daughter, who anchors her in the reality of daily living. There is the dilemma of British Communists during the '50s as they learn of the atrocities committed by Stalin, which have subverted the social justice for which the rank & file naively worked. Being a Communist in Britain was not as dangerous as being one in the U. S.. There are scenes during WW II in Africa dealing with the problem of race. There is the battle of the sexes. Most of the men in the novel are takers & most of the women givers. Anna Wulf, the protagonist, is divorced & continually encounters married men who want her for a while, until she becomes emotionally involved. These men do not want emotional intimacy. The novel does not depict any good marriages. There is much about women's sexuality. Anna believes in the vaginal orgasm, which she defines as an entirely emotional experience involving love. There is also the artist's struggle. After publishing a critically acclaimed novel, Anna has writer's block. Her dreams are very important to her & seem to be an outlet for her creativity but a diversion from her writing. She undergoes psychoanalysis. It seems to her that Freud dominates her unconscious life & Marx her conscious life. Near the end of the novel, she meets a man who is also a struggling writer. He understands Anna's problem & helps her to overcome her writer's block.
Lessing has some profound psychological insights in this book, good characterizations & some vivid description, especially in the African scenes. It is well worth reading, but the best of her work that I've read is her big book of African Stories. It irritated me to hear Garrison Keillor on a recent Prairie Home Companion read snippets of Lessing's writings & ridicule her writing as clumsy & the choice of her to receive the Nobel Prize as a travesty. I found no inept writing in either book.
