The Summer Before the Dark (1973)

As with much of Lessing's work (even The Golden Notebook), the metaphors here are quite heavy handed and rather obvious; the reader can't escape from the idea that this story contains a political message, and that the characters Stand For Something outside of just themselves. Readers preferring more escape in their story may want to pass this one up.

Despite this impediment, I was pleasantly surprised at the book. Kate, the protagonist, has internal conflicts and struggles that are believable; you can choose to identify with them and become involved in their eventual outcome. Although the other characters we're told enough of to care about are clear types (the liberated young woman, the neighbor couple who've reached an uneasy peace with polyandry, the troubled son, the cheating spouse), they are believable people for all that.

This is essentially the story of Kate Brown, who spends a summer doing work in various parts of Europe, called at the last minute to be a translator for a friend of her husband's. When the job is done, she proceeds on a love affair, and then comes back to England and wanders around lost for a bit, refusing to return home, wondering what is left of her life now her children are grown, resenting what she's given up of herself to her family. Lessing is strident about the costs of filling women's roles; Kate is just somewhat beaten. It's potentially interesting, and a reasonable example of point-making by the prior generation of feminists; and a quick read at only 247 pages. ( )

I think I would like this novel better if I were older—I don't yet have the... experience? distance? to really evaluate the evolution of Lessing's protagonist and decide if it rings true for me or not. I certainly thought the beginning of it was marvellously done, and Lessing impressed me as a marvellous writer when it comes to the internals—the sketching out of thoughts, of identity—but I became less and less certain of the novel as I reached the second half of it. Perhaps this was the reaction Lessing intended to evoke—a sense of being off kilter, of being unbalanced—but all the scenes with Maureen and her group felt rather awkward to me, as if authenticity was being sacrificed to agenda. ( )

This is not one of my favorite of Doris Lessing's many books, but it is a good one. It reminds me most of the Golden Notebook. Lessing is just a vast author. ( )

I classify much of Lessing's work as surreal because I haven't found the right word for it yet. It's related to fantasty, but far too real for that label. I'm just moving along in one of her novels, reading about ordinary people and their activities described with extraordinary skill, and suddenly I discover I have crossed the threshhold into a landscape of Big Foot, the Wizard of Oz, and Brave New World, never quite knowing when I took that step. I could describe her as Escheresque, But then Escher was an illusionist. If anything, Lessing is a dis-illusionist. In Summer Before the Dark Lessing has compressed ten years of a woman's midlife passage into three months. I first read the book in my nearly mid-fifties--in the midst of the experiences about which she writes. On either side of that experience, the book is a different story. And if you are not a woman, then it is, again, a different story. You may read it as an empty-nest story or a mid-life fling story or a bored-housewife story. It's valid on all these levels and many, many more, but it's famous as her menopause novel. Click here to read the review I wrote immediately after reading it.
http://www.stensrude.com/wred.html#lessingsummer ( )