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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 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.
Frances Lennox finds herself living with her mother-in-law, Julia after her husband Johnny, a communist leader has abandoned her and his two sons, Andrew and Colin to continue an affair with a glamorous "comrade". The arrangement is difficult owing to the natures of both women, Frances is independent-minded and Julia betrays her German background and is more rigid.
However both women are united in their disapproval of Johnny. Rather than working, Johnny's priorities are travelling and staying at hotels in communist countries and all the while continuing with his affairs. Frances later gives up her theater ambitions for a more lucrative position on a liberal newspaper.
The Lennox household becomes filled with the classmates and dropout friends of her two sons now in secondary school. Frances acts as an earth-mother figure to the adolescents, offering a communal atmosphere so different from their strict family homes.
Johnny maintains a presence in the household, occasionally appearing to the benefits of free meals and the captive audience that the estranged adolescents provide at the kitchen table. Communist member, Rose Trimble is also a regular addition until she turns gutter-press journalist and attacks Frances and Julia, branding them "imperialists". Other colourful characters that abound in the household include Johnny's anorexic daughter, two of Johnny's wives; political refugees as well as a newly arrived young black boy Franklin, from Zimlia, Africa.
Meanwhile, Colin and Andrew make their transition into adulthood.
Colin becomes a novelist and Andrew, a graduate of the London School of Economics , becomes an illustrious international finance figure, working with the corrupt African leaders and other Third World countries in order to help funnel money to their poverty-stricken nations. However Andrew is blind to the scale of the leaders' corruption and misuse of funding. Sylvia becomes a doctor, and finds herself at a mission in Zimlia where the locals live in dire poverty and are crippled by the spread of AIDS.
The new black leader of Zimlia and his wife are immensely wealthy, and his ministers, as are his ministers such as the adult Franklin. These ministers continue to line their pockets as farms are expropriated from the nation's white farmers.