Doris Lessing: Five Selections

SPEAKING VOLUMES

"Oh, Christ!" Doris Lessing is reported to have said when told she'd won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. The 87-year-old author has been a favourite for the Nobel for at least three decades now "" her collected works would fill an entire bookshelf, and she is still widely read and discussed. Her oeuvre is so vast that it's hard to capture the full impact of her writing, but here's a look at some of her work.

The Grass is Singing: (1950)
Doris Lessing's first novel was set in the Rhodesia of her adolescent years. Some of the sexual neurosis of that time can be seen in the 1952 Bantam cover, which features the towering, King Kong-like figure of a black man armed with a sword, watched by a shrunken, doll-like white woman.

There was little distance between an Indian reader, even in 1980s India, and Lessing's world. The immutable laws that governed white Africa and that Mary Turner broke were in place, if in slightly different form, in our time; a relationship between memsahib and servant was just as unthinkable as it was then. The novel captured the slow disintegration of a young woman whose confidence and sense of self is slowly eroded by a bad marriage and her inability to handle the natives, the heat, the farm, the house or anything about the reality of Africa. The interracial relationship between Mary and the servant Moses was one of the reasons why Rhodesia banned Lessing from entering the country in 1956.

The Golden Notebook: (1962)
For at least three, and perhaps four, generations of women, The Golden Notebook was as iconic a text as Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex or Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Lessing called it her albatross: the continuing success of The Golden Notebook often threatened to cast the rest of her formidable oeuvre in the shade, and she ruffled feminist feathers when she said bluntly that she didn't see herself as a feminist.

Lessing broke several rules of form when she wrote the story of Anna Wulf, author of a very successful novel, who keeps four notebooks of different colours. The black records her early years in Africa; the blue is a record of her personal life; the red of her political life and her growing disenchantment with communism; the yellow contains a novel based on personal experience. As Anna Wulf grapples with a love affair and with possible insanity, she brings these all together in The Golden Notebook. It should be read today, if only as a reminder that there was a time when feminism meant not just sexual liberation, but political and artistic freedom as well.

Children of Violence: (1952-1969)
This five-book series, following the life of Martha Quest, is still remarkable, to any serious fan of Lessing's writing. She would write two volumes of autobiography in later years, ducking away from the third on the grounds that it might hurt peoples' feelings, but the 'Martha Quest' books is where she explored her life in Rhodesia, her uneasy relationship with domestic life and her break with the communist party. It's also where she explored science fiction, imagining what it would be to grow old in a post-nuclear Britain, as a legitimate branch of literature. The Four-Gated City ranks as a classic work of SF, and Lessing's insight that madness is only our reaction to seeing the future clearly remains chilling.

Canopus in Argos: (1979-1983)
Perhaps the best-remembered of Lessing's SF novels are Shikasta: Re Colonised Planet 5 and The Sirian Experiments, part of the Canopus in Argos series. Today, reading them can be a difficult exercise "" they come off as stodgy and wooden, and the initial refreshing shock of the ideas Lessing was trying to convey has worn off. Lessing, who was born in Persia, had been studying Sufism, and that influence shows in Shikasta, with its grand theme of millions of years of evolution compressed into the pages of a novel. Shikasta spawned a cult who believe fervently in Lessing's imaginary worlds; when the writer tried to explain that these worlds didn't exist, they set it down as an attempt by their 'creator' to test them.

The Diaries of Jane Somers: 1984
The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could, novels by a "well-known journalist" called Jane Somers, were rejected by Doris Lessing's publisher, had poor sales when finally published and only became a cause celebre when Lessing announced herself as the author. "If the books had come out in my name, they would have sold a lot of copies and reviewers would have said, 'Oh, Doris, how wonderful'," she said. She sparked off a furious debate: were the Somers books really as good as the rest of Lessing's novels, what was she trying to prove? I found both 'Somers' books tedious, but then I find some of Lessing's writing tedious too, so at least there was consistency.

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