This is a very readable novel, though there are many characters in it so it can be slightly hard to recall who is who. And there isn’t so much about communism in it, as in some of Lessing’s books.

Frances is the main character. She is an actress, writes articles and is also at one point an “agony aunt”.

She lives in Julia’s big house. Julia, a German who escaped Nazi Germany, is the mother of Frances’s ex-husband, Johnny, who is a fanatical communist, always trying to convert people, and who is thus extremely boring.

Frances has two sons, Andrew and Colin.

What is special about the house is that it is filled with youngsters, who come from goodness knows where. Frances makes nutritious meals for them. The youngsters mostly can’t live with their parents for some reason or another, some being neglected by them.

Julia has money and pays for some of he youngsters’ upkeep, if Frances does not.

One child in particular, Sylvia, who at the start goes by the name of Tilly because, when a litle girl, she couldn’t pronounce Sylvia properly, is particularly prominent.

Sylvia was looked after by Julia. She hardly ate anything until Andrew began to encourage her to do so.

There was a rather unpleasant girl called Rose.

Later, Sylvia becomes a doctor and goes to Africa to help at a so-called hospital. This is one of the most interesting parts of the book.

Rose becomes a journalist but is still nasty and only writes articles attacking people, including Sylvia and her hospital, though Sylvia is a wonderful doctor and saves many of the natives’ lives. The “hospital” has no beds, and patients, no matter how ill, have to lie outside, even when it rains.

I can highly recommend this book. ( )

Much of this book takes place in a three-story house, with a basement too, in London. This house belongs to julia, the matriarch of the family.
She was from germany, and she met her future husband philip, who was from england, before world war I. He went away to war, and then he came back, and they were married. They had a son named Jolyon.
Jolyon, or johnny, as he likes to call himself, was a communist, or at least he said he was. He met a young woman named Frances, and they had a love affair. He said he was going away to fight in the Spanish civil war.
In that week they married and Andrew was conceived, and that was the end of her good times,

"Now here she was, and it was a final capitulation:
Johnny had snapped at her, ‘I don’t think I’ve managed to teach you anything, Frances, you are unteachable.’ ‘Yes, I know, I’m stupid.’

Johnny would never stay at home, but went traipsing around the world, supported by communist communities. She would stay at home, now with two children. Johnny would ask Julia to visit her. Julia would try to give her money, but Frances would not allow it. Julia:
‘I would say that you have more reality than you can cope with.’

Frances eventually comes to Julia's house to live with her two sons, on the Middle floor, with Julia above her.
This book seems to be about, at first people living in that house, many of them just taking up space and being supported by Frances and julia.
There are some despicable characters in here. I don't know how the character Frances was able to tolerate, for example, Rose.
She's always cooking, and putting out great loads of food on a gigantic table.

Frances works at a newspaper, at first being an "aunt agnes," something like Dear Abby. Later on she starts writing articles about women's plight. She gets to know one of her work colleagues.
‘This is our chief politico, Rupert Boland. He’s an egghead but he’s not a bad sort of person, even if he is a man.’

As when I was in high school, and my contemporaries would talk about what they wanted to be when they were quote grown up, Many of the teenagers that stayed in Julia's house, had dreams of going off to different places, and doing unreal things. For example, one of the young men said he was going to East africa,
"Frances understood that there was no need to say anything as crass as, Have you got a passport? A visa? How are you going to pay for it? And you are only seventeen."

Rose, one of the despicable teenagers that took up space in the basement, claimed that Frances's son Andrew had made her pregnant. Frances had to play the parent for Rose, as she had to for many of the other teenagers, who stayed in Julia's house.
She signed Rose up for a class course in a college. She let Rose's parents know.
"But they would not pay for Rose’s board and keep. They allowed it to be understood that it was Andrew’s responsibility to pay for her. That meant Frances, in effect.
"Perhaps she could be asked to do something in return, like housework–for there were always problems with keeping the place clean, in spite of Julia’s Mrs Philby, who would never do much more than vacuum floors. ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Andrew. ‘Can you imagine Rose lifting a finger?’ "

Johnny is disillusioned by the Vietnam war, and the lies of the so-called communism, of the USSR.
" ‘It was all . . . lies and nonsense.’ She could hear the tears in his voice. ‘What a waste. All that effort . . . people killed for nothing. Good people. No one is going to tell me they weren’t.’ A silence. ‘I don’t want to make a thing of it, but I did make such sacrifices for the Party.' "

Later on, Johnny gets married, and then leaves his second wife, and of course Frances is responsible for supporting her. Frances ends up getting together with her colleague from the newspaper, Rupert.
I really can't stand sex scenes, it makes me feel like throwing up. These are triggers for me, Because of my abuse...
"The sweet warm weight of a man sleeping in her arms, his mouth on her cheek, the tender heaviness of a man’s balls in her hand, the delicious slipperiness of. ."

The character from this book who I loved was Tilly, but that was just her nickname. Her real name was Sylvia.
When she first came to Julia's house, she was anorexic, and had extreme trauma from her mother's treatment of her. She was Johnny stepdaughter. When she said this, I communed with her character:
" 'But I must confess I’d be happy to spend my life lying on my bed and reading.’ "

I also like the character of Frances a lot. Except for when she was describing lying around in bed with Rupert:
"...a piece by Frances where she mocked the current fad for alien excitements like Yoga, and I-Ching, the Maharishi, Subud.
One of the young people who stayed at Frances and Julia's house, later turned out to be a minister in the country they called zimlia which was a thinly disguised Zimbabwe.
"They are all so privileged, they have everything, they have more than any of us ever had..."
These were the thoughts he had, when he came to stay in london, and began a student life there
"It’s not fair, it’s not right, why do you have so much and you take it all for granted. It was that which ached in him, hurt, stung: they had no idea at all of their good fortune."

It is hard, very, for the older ones, world-whipped, when they have to listen while the idealistic young demand explanations for the sadness of the world.

In the Eighties, at the behest of another ideological imperative, all the mental hospitals and asylums were closed, and their inmates turned out to sink or swim.

Julia: "If you were dead, Sylvia, then you’d not be missing much, you’ll only end up like me, an old woman with my life behind me, dwindling into a mess of memories, that hurt."

‘Don’t you think it is strange that stupid people should have such power?’

A piece of a poem of an author Julia liked:
"I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent ."

Frances: "Lord, just imagine, if there had been no Rupert she would have gone on in the same dull willed routine of duty, and without love, sex, intimacy."
This, though she has to support Rupert's ex-wife, and take in his two spoiled brat children.
And here we go again:
"Frances and Rupert lay side by side in the dark, her head on his right shoulder, his right hand on her right breast. Her hand lay on his inner thigh, her knuckles against his balls, a soft but self-respecting weight that was giving her confidence."
( )

The characters and central focus of this book (life moves, times change, ideologies corrupt) are brilliant, and it is cleverly and carefully written. At times the berating of ideology seems a bit too heavy-handed, even if it is easy to agree with the criticisms from the perspective of the novel. Recommended to politicos (like myself) as a worthy criticism of the danger of collective ideas versus the reality of life. ( )

I initially got this book to read for The Dead Writers Society Literary Birthday. But it took forever for me to get, and by the time I started/finished October was over. So unfortunately it doesn't count.

That said, I wish I had skipped this book. It was all over the place with too many characters/motivations and just horrible choices of all concerned.

I really don't want to even get too into this book besides the basics. A man named Johnny Lennox raised in the lap of luxury for his times and place eventually rebels against his family and becomes a communist. He marries a woman named Frances and they have two sons. Because of communist teachings, Johnny is loathe to take anything from his father or his mother Julia. The whole book really is about all of these people, Johnny's second or maybe third wife, his wife's daughter Sylvia, and the two sons (Andrew and Colin) friends who end up all descending on Julia's home through the years.

The whole book felt very scattered to me and I honestly was bored. I didn't really like anyone save for Julia. A German woman moving to England with her husband and having to deal with the fact that her son becomes a selfish stranger.

I assume there's a larger point to this story, about how those who once were all for communist after World War II eventually fell way to the god of capitalism or something. But seriously, these people felt like cartoon characters after a while. ( )

I found this perhaps the most purely enjoyable of all of Lessing's books. It covers familiar territory, but does it with a sweep and warmth that is less familiar - it feels looser and less rigorous than some of her books, but is never anything other than sharp and perceptive - she skewers tabloid journalists, the international aid juggernaut, the posturing intellectual superstar and venal African leaders - she writes about AIDS in Africa with truth, love and terribleness - and comes in the end back to a table in a kitchen with a family, interconnected by blood, love, habit or happenstance.