THE SWEETEST DREAM

Doris Lessing tackles the 1960s and their legacy head-on in one of her mostinvolving, most personal, most political novels. It's the morning of the1960s and it's suppertime at Freedom Hall, the most welcoming household inNorth London. Frances Lennox stands at her stove, bringing another feast toreadiness before ladling it out to the youthful crew assembled around herhospitable table -- here are her two sons, smarting at their upbringingbut beginning to absorb their mother's lessons. Around them are rangedtheir schoolfriends and girlfriends and ex-friends and new friends freshoff the street. The feast begins. Wine and talk flow. Everything is beingchanged and being challenged. But what is being tolerated? And where willit end? Over there in the corner is Frances' ex-husband, Comrade Johnny,who delivers his rousing tirades, then laps up the adolescent adulationbefore disappearing into the night to evade the clutches of hisresponsibilities. Upstairs sits Johnny's exiled mother, funding all, butfinding she can embrace only one lost little girl -- Sylvia, who has totravel to Africa, to newly independent Zimlia, to find out who she is andwhat she wants. And, yes, what of the Africans, what will they tolerate?These are the people dreaming the 1960s into being and the people who onthe morning after all that dreaming, woke to find they were the ones taxedwith clearing up and making good.