SOURCE: Hensher, Philip. “A Brave Journey in Thought.” Spectator 287, no. 9030 (1 September 2001): 33-4.

In the following review, Hensher compares The Sweetest Dream to the style and narration of Lessing's previous works.

Every great novelist makes a characteristic noise: every great novelist is, in the end, a stylist: and there is always something telling about a novelist's most characteristic means of expression. What Doris Lessing's novels have had to say, over the last 50 years, has been so consistently interesting that it is tempting to regard them as contributions to a debate, and neglect what is deepest in her, her ways of saying it. But these novels are not treatises. They are works of art, and the thing which tempts me, writing about this original and alarming mind, is to try to isolate a characteristic Lessing sentence. Themes may be willed, but style, if it is good, is speech, and is...