The Golden Notebook

I finished reading Doris Lessing’s "The Golden Notebook". Reading through it was alternatively a chore and morbidly compelling. I didn’t have problems with the themes or the ideas, being sympathetic to both feminism and communism. Even though at the time the particular brand of communism was Stalinism, there are interesting and truthful insights on the internal and external dilemmas faced by the card-carrying members and the fellow-travellers of the Party. Universal themes of toeing the official line in face of compromises with the Truth, purity and hierarchy, which can be easily translated to contemporary experiences in the corporate world.

As for feminism, well, its themes are just as universal. The novel was vilified in its time for being castrating, and in truth the women attack the poor central character of Richard for his faults – a married man and compulsive womanizer, and a ruthless captain of industry. Maybe it’s caricatural that all the “free women” in the book have a string of dehumanizing affairs with universally married men. Still, my short experience on internet dating sites has taught me that this is not so far-off from the situation out there. There are some insights along the book that I strongly identified with, the neediness of women, the pangs of jealousy, the compulsion to bolster up the virility of the most selfish men.

So this is a Novel of Ideas. A genre well-known for going hand-in-hand with didactism and poorly drawn characters. I hadn’t experienced it for myself until then. Yes, I could believe in the ideas in the book, as expressed by interchangeable characters in interchangeable situations, in an innovative form that I quite enjoyed: interweaving a novel and 4 notebooks compartimentalising the narrator’s thoughts into the political, sentimental and so on. What I couldn’t for one minute believe in was the characters.

This started early on in the book, in the first part of the embedded novel “Free Women”. Richard, the unfaithful tycoon, spends what seems like hours arguing in the apartment of emancipated Anna and Molly, defending himself and his values against the flurry of verbal attacks. Why? Why would someone like him do that? The answer is: he wouldn’t. That was my problem early on, and it didn’t get any better as the book went on. Not for one minute in the nearly 600 pages of the Harper edition did my disbelief suspend itself. And yet, I wanted to know more, more about the ideas of Doris Lessing, those ideas of mine that she was able to recognise, extract from her psyche and self-abused body, and put on a page.

And finally a little note. I wonder did Doris Lessing realise how much she used the adjective “dry”? It is a leitmotiv, expressing all sorts of things, emotional states, dialogues, always in a negative way. I don’t think it was conscious, it’s such a little word as to be inconspicuous. I wondered whether it was the experience of her childhood in Africa, where “dry” was dangerous, something to combat at all times. Then I wondered whether “dry” was rather an unconscious fear or the future, expressing literally the physiological end of her womanhood…

(Photo by Nora)