The Summer Before the Dark by Doris Lessing

(Knopf, 1973)

 

A disappointing and somewhat tedious novel from Lessing.  Perhaps it's because the main character, the dully named Kate Brown, is an unengaging and unlikable woman.  After devoting herself selflessly and tirelessly to raising her four children, coddling her selfish husband, and maintaining a charming household in suburban London, Kate finds herself at 40 with a purposeless and passionless life.  Fortunately, she is fluent in Portuguese, so when her husband and children all leave her for the summer to pursue opportunities in far-flung places abroad, she is hired at an international human rights agency, where she finds that her experience as a mother and housewife qualify her to serve as a sort of corporate den mother, solving everyone's problems and tidying up other people's messes. 

After a few months working in London as a nanny/interpreter, she is sent to manage a conference in Istanbul.  There  she meets a much younger man; they become lovers and when the conference concludes they take a holiday together to Spain where they both become gravely ill.  This is the only part of the book that is narratively engaging: Kate and her young lover unwisely travel to a remote Spanish village where no medical care is available, and Lessing potently evokes  nightmarish Sheltering Sky atmosphere of being dangerously out of one's depths in a foreign land.

Kate abandons her nearly dead lover, who is being diligently but inexpertly nursed by nuns at a nearby convent, and gets herself back to London, where she recuperates in a luxurious hotel for several (very expensive) weeks.  She recovers her health but finds herself financially compromised, and so moves into a basement flat owned by a strange kittenish young woman, with whom she forms a strong but unbelievable bond.  They live together for several tedious months of mutual healing and self-discovery and then Kate Brown abruptly decides to return to her family and her home.

This book is very much a product of its time.  The fact that it attempts to explore the difficulties of a woman searching for a rewarding and fulfilling life as something other than a mother or wife is worthy and admirable, but Kate's insufficiently imagined and evoked life prevent Lessing's novel from engaging or rewarding the reader.