The Golden Notebook

After reading two of her books I’m still not too sure what to make of Doris Lessing.  There was this moment in Shikasta where everything fell into place and I could finally enjoy the book.  I kept expecting that moment in The Golden Notebook, but it just didn’t come.  That’s not to say that this is a bad book at all, it’s just bloody heavy going and I’m not convinced that the pay-off is worth the effort of wading through the book.  It tells the story of Anna Wulf, writer.  While most definitely not suffering from writer’s block she fills four notebooks with ponderings about separate aspects of her life, finally combining them in the titular golden notebook.

I won’t be entirely negative about this book, because there are parts of it that I really enjoyed.  Mostly these moments occur in the black notebook, which is about Anna’s past and her writing life.  One section of it tells a story set in Southern Rhodesia during World War Two and it’s just fantastic.  I think that I liked this bit because it’s simply the part with the most coherent narrative. Nowhere else in The Golden Notebook do people have such clear cut motives.  I get that Lessing is recreating how directionless people actually are and the fact that life is made up of these open ended narratives, but at 576 pages this is a really frustrating read.  There’s a part with a wonderful cliff-hanger in one of the Free Women sections of the book (these chronicle Anna’s current life).  One character attempts suicide and even this, when the narrative resumes goes off at an unexpected and undramatic tangent.

I also really wanted to like this book because it’s full of politically aware and forward thinking women.  Anna and her friends love to discuss socialism and sex and are, for the time, frank about both.  But again, they drift.  Everyone ultimately ends up disillusioned with socialism before it even kicks off and, yes this reflects history but it’s still immensely unsatisfying.  And, as much as I want Anna to be a feminist, after a string of unsuccessful affairs she reveals that her ultimate goal in life is to get married.  She doesn’t need a husband; she’s financially independent and able to look after her daughter.  It’s a ridiculous goal to have.

Ultimately why I don’t like this book is because it feels like an overlong joke.  Throughout, Anna insists that she is not suffering from writer’s block and that she does not want to write another novel.  It’s abundantly clear to basically everyone else that this is a lie.  Anna eventually overcomes this denial about 540 pages into the book and by this point it doesn’t even feel like character development, simply because her character’s been deconstructed to the point that there is no character to develop.  Anna’s character is confused throughout.  She refuses to be defined as a writer at one point in the book because this is just one part of her life, but as the four notebooks show, each element of her life blends into others.  No, she is not one thing, but an intrinsic part of what she is is a writer.  I think I’ve read this book too young.  It’s definitely one of those stories that I feel like I didn’t enjoy because I missed something.  I’m not a mother and I don’t have experiences of socialism that I can compare Anna’s to and I’m just left feeling a bit naïve.

I am currently reading artsy Danish crime thriller Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow, by Peter Høeg.