Book: The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

The book

Everybody but everybody knows other people’s dreams are boring. Why didn’t anyone tell Doris Lessing? This book is full of descriptions of her dreams and convoluted flights of fancy, which might possibly be of interest to her therapist (the excuse for some of the endless detail about them) but are tedious in the extreme for the reader. They don’t ring true and are full of glaringly obvious symbolism. I was going to type out a section from one of these dreams but started to lose the will to live. They are mind-numbingly dull. There’s a really long, involved one about an encounter with a tiger near the end of the book. Read at your peril.

(Here’s a bit I copied from a file – it’s not as dull or long as most of them: “I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains.” Need I say more?)

From the book: ‘How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to.’
You’re telling me. If you find them boring and they’re your emotions, how do you think we feel?

The word other reviewers have used is self-indulgent and I totally agree. The whole thing needs much more careful and extensive editing. Inside this tome, there is a slim volume of merit I’m sure but its traces are so rare and obscure that it isn’t worth reading for them. An editor needed to go through this with a scythe, or whatever tool would get rid of all the chaff.

Doris Lessing

What really offends me is any notion that this book has feminist credentials or is some kind of classic of any genre at all, eg ‘Widely regarded as Doris Lessing’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, ‘The Golden Notebook’ is wry and perceptive, bold and indispensable.’

It’s the opposite of everything feminism stands for. The women in it are totally in thrall to whichever man chooses to sleep with them. They have little volition. Unless Doris Lessing is suggesting that the fact that they are ‘Free Women’ (admittedly this term has to be ironic) allows them to sleep with other women’s husbands while remaining stalwartly single themselves. It’s all pretty pathetic.

‘Anna discovered she was spending most of her time doing nothing at all; and decided the remedy for her condition was a man. She prescribed this for herself like a medicine.’
Guess what? It doesn’t work. And anybody who thinks this is feminist in any way is seriously deluded.

Lessing says: ‘Although no one will ever believe it, I was completely unconscious of writing a feminist book. I was simply writing about what I saw.’
I believe it, Doris.

The structure comes across as an attempt to do something different for the sake of it. It doesn’t work or add anything to the novel, merely obfuscates any point the author is trying to make although I’m not convinced there was any kind of point in the first place. The idea seems to be to demonstrate her failure to communicate anything to the reader but a deep and lasting ennui as we struggle to get through her stodgy prose and endless whingeing.

If this really was seen as a ‘landmark novel of the Sixties – a powerful account of a woman searching for her personal, political and professional identity’ or as representative of any kind of feminist value or stance, it’s a sad indictment of the era. And it won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007!