Abstract:
In her later work, Lessing refers frequently, if in passing, to Roman Catholicism, often as
part of her growing interest in spirituality, which began while she was writing The Golden
Notebook. Some of these references are in the accounts of her travels in Zimbabwe, but they are
also to be found in her autobiographies, reviews and occasional journalism. Because of their
frequency, she cannot be regarded as entirely indifferent to the church. A valid line of enquiry
into Lessing’s work asks whether her dislike for the church, formed during her traumatic four
years as a young child in the Salisbury convent, remained her dominant impression, or whether
in later life she found in Catholicism, particularly in Zimbabwe, an institution that invited
more complex responses. An answer is provided in The Sweetest Dream, her last long novel
that deals directly with Africa. The novel is partly set in Zimlia, a country that clearly suggests
Zimbabwe. It avoids representing Catholicism and traditional spirituality as antagonistic; the
complex plotting at its end rejects a confident division between the sacred and the secular, and
suggests that, although Catholicism is on the whole a force for good, its powers in Zimlia are
limited, confronted as the church is by the literal epidemic of AIDS and the power of traditional
spirituality. One possible reading suggests that this latter power prevails.
