The Sweetest Dream: A Novel (2001)

The ambition is characteristic of the novelist. Doris Lessing's fable of two continents and three generations takes us to Aids-struck Africa, Wilhelmine Germany and a dolefully delineated north London milieu of good intent and mental illness, whose casualties limp through the narrative. The Sweetest Dream is also surely the saddest story- the savage cartography of a once fondly imagined land by one who was there. This is emotion recollected in hate.

There's ideology by the bucket-load - some of it is the characters' rather than the author's. Chief culprit is "Comrade" Johnny Lennox, a diseased mind compounded of Marxist delusion and bourgeois self-hatred. Johnny loves humanity so much in the abstract that he gives himself licence to behave abominably to individuals, all the while self-justified by history's march. Even with the waning of the old faith, the psychology that sustained it is undiminished in its capacity to delude.

We have been here before with The History Man, yet Malcolm Bradbury's malevolent was also a believable charmer possessed of a dangerous energy. And energy is a beguilingly moral quality which can seduce both good and bad; Jeffrey Archer has it. Lessing's Johnny is a machiavel of the Jacobean stage, a person whose wickedness is so obvious one wonders why anyone is taken in.

This, however, is really a novel about women - heroic, striving, suffering, getting on with life and on in years, put upon, self-realising, getting there. There's noble German Julia, mother to ingrate Johnny, reading verses of scant consolation by Hopkins on the top floor of her Hampstead house. Downstairs in the kitchen is Frances, Johnny's abandoned wife, an earth-mother with a collection of waifs and strays attracted by self-abnegating benevolence and Elizabeth David recipes. There's practical Sylvia, who has the heart of the matter as well as Catholic faith. Being a bit of a lost cause at sex, she works in an African mission and then dies on the sitting room sofa. And then there's Rose, graduate of that kitchen-table school of bleeding hearts, who turns out to be a nasty combination of lefty rancour and tabloid values. This, then, is a woman thing - but emphatically not a feminist thing.

"The spirit of the Sixties, with passionate eyes, a trembling voice, and outstretched pleading hands, was confronting the whole past of the human race." And now here comes the flight from the enchantment, a summary and also an explanation of what went wrong. The best of the writing is reserved for Africa, where the Lessing genius for invocation of mood and place bounces off the page. But even here the anti-ideological ideology is well to the fore. Where international development is concerned, good intent's sweetest dream breeds a corruption of heart and mind that is recorded with a soi-disant Daily Mail abandon.

Frances hears the rants of her understandably disturbed son, fresh from the psychiatrist's chair, subjecting her to "what no human being should ever have to hear - another person's uncensored thoughts". And the characters go in for a lot of such expression. There are echoes here of Iris Murdoch's later novels - an unhappy epoch when a vast array of indistinguishable characters filled the Dame's unedited pages with their hellishly inconsequential philosophising.

This is a truly reactionary work in the limited sense that the author still stands at too close a remove to the object of abomination. In the full force of her reaction, she parodies and stereotypes. And there's an odd conflation of decades at work: though many in the 1960s and 1970s were soft on communism, the grand narrative had long since lost its interwar power to console.

The Sweetest Dream is offered as a substitute for the third volume of the autobiography Doris Lessing will not write (lest she offend "vulnerable people"). But what emerges is an awkward melange lacking both the realism of great fiction and the truthfulness of history. The nuance that is needed for both is lost in rancour.