When Doris Lessing published the first volume of her autobiography in 1994, it could be said that she was a reluctant chronicler of her own life. "Why an autobiography at all?" she queried. "Self-defence: biographies are being written. It is a jumpy business, as if you were walking along a flat and often tedious road in an agreeable half-dark but you know a searchlight may be switched on at any minute."
One of her main motivations for embarking on autobiography (of which she has written two volumes) was that there were several others - less qualified in her estimation - planning biographies of her life, so she might as well get in first.
Lessing starts her latest novel with a similar caveat, as if she has now turned into a reluctant novelist. She declares that she has decided not to publish a third volume of autobiography, but she warns the hapless reader not to see The Sweetest Dream as novelised autobiography.
"There are no parallels here to actual people, except for one, a very minor character." This seems an odd health warning from a novelist of Lessing's stature. The defensive air of it produces the same suspicions as a politician's emphatic denial. Does the lady protest too much?
Regardless of such authorial injunctions (and it begs the question why they should be there in the first place), if a book is billed as a novel, that is how it should be read. And as a novel, this one fails.
The Sweetest Dream could be seen as an alternative family saga. Frances and Johnny are 1960s rebels who marry and then separate. She is a part-time actress and freelance journalist left alone to raise Johnny's two sons.
Her mother-in-law, Julia, invites her to share the large family home in Hampstead. Frances and the children move in.
As the years go by, the house attracts various other hangers-on, a number of disaffected teenage drop-outs, Johnny's daughter by his second marriage, then his second wife, plus eventually Frances's new partner and his children, and then his ex-wife, and finally in old age, Johnny himself.
The novel initially follows the fortunes of Frances and Julia, but it is really their children and grandchildren who dominate the narrative. A sort of "Lessing, The Second Generation".
Their stories take us into the realms of politics, media, high finance and aid organisations, and shift the locus of the novel from London to a thinly disguised AIDS-ravaged Zimbabwe as the 1970s and 1980s whizz by.
Lessing adopts a lofty narrative tone which creates an alienating distance from her characters as she shifts them around a chessboard of pre-set historical situations. There are great chunks of undigested sociological information in which the author intrudes, hectoring and finger-wagging.
"Just ahead lay the 1970s, which from one end of the world to the other (the non-communist world) bred a race of Che Guevara clones, and the universities, particularly the London ones, were an almost continuous celebration of Revolution, with demonstrations, riots, sit-ins lock-outs, battles of all kinds. Everywhere you looked were these young heroes, and Johnny had become a grand old man, and the fact that he was an almost entirely unrepentant Stalinist had a certain limited chic among these youngsters who mostly believed that if Trotsky had won the battle for power with Stalin, then communism would have worn a beatific face."
The characters in The Sweetest Dream have to battle punily against this authorial overview, which denies them any fictional autonomy or emotional veracity.
Lessing says she tried to capture the spirit of the 1960s with this novel, and she has done this: the impoverishment of post-war London in the early parts of the book, the appetite for food after years of rationing (Lessing is particularly good on the look of food - the "rank and barbarous magnificence" of freshly cut tomatoes), the earnestness of competing ideologies, the simplicity of the pre-materialistic world - all of this rings true.
But the people never seem to be more than types - Johnny Lennox, evergreen revolutionary, the boy who never grows up; Frances, put-upon Earth mother, opening her kitchen to one and all while longing for a room of her own; Sylvia, anorexic teenager who swaps self-starvation for Third World do-gooding.
The characters remain, despite their travails at the hands of late 20th-century history, Lessing's chess pieces. Perhaps this is her intention - highlighting how the individual is eclipsed by history - but it makes for dull reading. The end result is a suffocating determinism, in which both the characters and, ultimately, the reader are stickily trapped.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist. Her most recent novel is The Pretender