Doris Lessing’s book The Summer Before the Dark is a tale of middle aged awakening. Kate’s children have left home and her husband is away for the summer when Kate is offered the opportunity to use her language skills and to interpret at a conference. She enjoys the freedom and after the work is finished she travels and sleeps with a younger man. Leaving him in Spain she returns to Britain but instead of going home she first stays in a hotel and then rents a room in a shared house where she begins to explore her character further.
Kate has always been the perfect mother and wife but she hasn’t always been happy. Her husband is almost certainly cheating on her and her children no longer need her. She takes this chance to explore herself and her world and she also takes big risks in becoming involved with people she knows nothing about and trusting them with herself and her secrets. None of it seems to make her any happier but you get the feeling all the way through the book that she is dreading returning to her usual life but that the alternative she explores isn’t any better.
All the characters in this book seem to be searching for fulfilment or happiness and none of them find it. No one stays around and Kate often finds herself isolated and vulnerable. She is troubled with dreams about a seal that she has to rescue and she feels all the way through the story that there are things that she has to do but she has no sense of purpose and drifts from one situation to another.
This is a short book but I didn’t really enjoy it. I found Kate very irritating because of her drifting purposelessly through various situations and I thought that most of the other characters were shallow and unmemorable. I am not quite sure what the author was saying in this book except that most of us are unhappy in our situations but the alternative isn’t necessarily any better. Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize and is a highly regarded literary novelist so it is possible that I just missed the point of this book and had I understood it better I would have enjoyed it more.
Anne Is Reading 