BOOKS
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Amer icans fleeing the Vietnam War draft a re part of a restless genera–
tion that resents, often justifiably, the demands that family and nation
ma ke on thei r loya Iti es . They joi n young European men and women
who move from country ro country and family ro family, fOfming a new
global commun ity as they go. Some attach themselves for weeks and
months to the Lennox house, a nd to the familiar issues of progressive
politics are added astrology, auras, and the I-Ching. Sylvia greets this
mishmash of spirituality with the eagerness possible only in someone
raised in the comp lacent rationality of a secu lar wor ld . When these first
stirrings of New Age spiritua lity become roo sha ll ow for her, she con–
vens to Cat holi cism.
Throughout the first half of the novel, Africa is one of several back–
grounds for the ideological confrontations of the Cold War; the conti–
nent's first substantial presence in the novel is through johnny's
comrades, representatives of the numerous liberation movements in col–
onized Africa. By the end of the novel, co lonization has made way for the
often dubious freedom of Africa's new nation-states, sometimes led by
people who sa t at Frances's table. That Lessing once again has used an
African country as the setting of a novel is not surpr ising. A previous
book,
African Lallghter,
records her trips ro Zimbabwe in the '980s, and
the first vo luIll e of her autobiography is largely about the thirty years she
spent in Rhodesia. Yet it is unexpected that we experience the fictitious
Zimlia through the na·,·vete of Sylvia, newly qualified as a docror, and the
African place we get
to
know best is the Catholic mission at Kwadere.
By the late ,,;)80s Africa's destiny is no longer manipulated by Soviet
and Western rivalries, and were it not for the international aid agencies,
it would have disappeared from international agendas.
If
the second
generation knows Africa through Marxist solidarity groups, the third
enco unters it through the public philanthropy of Europe and orth
AIllerica. At a conference in Senga, the cap ital of Zim li a, the represen–
tatives of organizations with names like Globa l Money and Caring
International resume "conversations that might have been interrupted
in Bogota or Benares." Several of the delegates are Lennoxes-or some–
how associated with the family. The conference is on "The Ethics of
International Aid," and Andrew Lennox, the star of Caring Interna–
tional, does nor hear the sardonic remark of Sister Molly, a nUll who has
worked for many years in Ziml ia. "They get paid to travel to some
beauty spot and talk nonsense you'd nor believe," she says. "IAlnd I
don't th ink tha t they notice tha t the la nd is perish ing from the drought."
That global visions blind people
to
what has a significant existence
only in the local is a seminal idea in the novel. .Johnny'S certainty of the
