Alfred and Emily [Hardcover]

This is an interesting mix of fiction & non fiction. The first half is a fictional idea of what the lives of Lessing's parents (the Alfred & Emily of the title) could have been like if they hadn't married, and if WWI hadn't disrupted their lives. They meet, but marry other people and are fulfilled in different ways. Lessing feels that WWI blighted their lives, and had an effect on her own life as well. "That war, the Great War...squatted over my childhood...And here I still am, trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free." Her father lost his leg & met her mother when she was nursing at the Royal Free Hospital. They emigrated to Rhodesia, but it wasn't a great success. Alfred really wanted to be an English farmer in Surrey & Emily's great love was killed in the war, and her life after that was really only second best & full of regrets. The second half of the book is a memoir of Alfred & Emily's real lives. Lessing has written about her African childhood before, in her autobiographies & the Martha Quest series of novels. Here, though, she focuses more on her parents' experiences of struggle & hardship, & the result is a moving account of two people who could have been happier if world events had left them untouched.

I must declare a bias; Lessing has been my favourite writer for years, and since she has declared that this may well be her last book, I was predisposed to love 'Alfred and Emily'. Bias aside though, this is an intriguing and poignant addition to what Mrs Lessing has written about her parents - Alfred Tayler and Emily McVeigh - in previous works of biography and fiction.

The book is in two sections: a novella which opens in 1902 and explores the lives of Alfred and Emily in a world spared the misery of World War I; and a short biographical piece which tells the story of how these two people actually met and lived, their lives defined and ruined by this same event.

The novella is a character study. It is not so much concerned with the details of how the world would have been different without the Great War, but how the characters of these two people would have developed had they not been savaged by it and thrown together to live in circumstances for which they were not well suited. Alfred and Emily meet in the novella, but they do not marry each other - Lessing writes herself out of existence. Alfred lives the life of the English farmer he had always wanted to be; Emily becomes a nurse (as she did in life), marries a doctor (perhaps like the fiance she lost in the war), is widowed early and becomes a formidable educator.

The novella is really a series of sketches which skip ahead in time quickly but nevertheless create a strong sense of who these two might have been, or really were before their futures were taken from them.

The second half of the book follows the story familiar to Lessing's readers. Alfred Tayler was seriously injured in the trenches and was nursed back to health by Emily McVeigh, who had lost her fiance when his boat was sunk in the English Channel. They married, moved to Persia (as it was then), where Lessing was born in 1919, and then moved to the former Rhodesia in 1924 after having been enticed there by a stall at the Royal Exhibition in London.

With characteristically muscular prose, Lessing evokes the tragedy of her parents lives. She does this without a false note or a shred of sentimentality. She is hard on her mother and just as hard on herself. The contrast between Alfred farming in the Sussex of the novella and the African veld could not be more stark. She builds, through a series of fragments, a vivid and deeply moving work. Her recounting of a conversation with her dying brother is remarkable both for its directness and the sense she conveys of how deeply we can misunderstand our own lives and those of the people around us.

Some critics do not fully appreciate Lessing's brilliance as a stylist; they have a tendency to focus on what she says to the exclusion of how she says it. Philip Hensher disagrees. Writing in the Spectator in 2001 about the characteristic Lessing sentence (in a review of The Sweetest Dream), he had this to say:

"The Lessing sentence is blunt, quickly veering from concrete facts to abstract nouns, tempted briefly by the possibilities of rhapsody, but always turning back to the urgency of the urban demotic. It is swift to add qualifications, it startles with the frankest colloquiallisms. Its cadences are punchy, even if the clauses tend to multiply - 'she felt x, but not quite x, but rather y, as if y on longer did for her or ever really had (I pastiche). These delicate, certain distinctions between abstract states are contained with the simplest references to physical facts - she loves the grand, dramatic force of words like wisdom, and the vivid simplicity of the names of colours".

Alfred and Emily is full of writing of the type Hensher describes.

I first read Doris Lessing as a 14 year old boy in 1972. I have read her constantly over the 36 intervening years, whether she has been writing science fiction, biography or 'realist' novels. For me, she is the most intriguing of artists - she gives not the slightest nod to literary fashion, she trusts her own instincts, she pushes language and form. At almost 90, Alfred and Emily is a fine addition to almost 60 years of writing. I know I'm being greedy, but I hope it's not her last book.

Curiously, I found the opposite view entirely from one previous reviewer - I struggled with the 'fictional account' of Lessing's parents, their alternative reality if the war had never blighted their development, and gained the second, 'real' reflection with relief.

Lessing is a writer who for me has defined much of the twentieth century, with depth and profundity, charting our ways of seeing ourselves from the loss of innocence/ignorance which arose out of the First World War, the loss, in this country, of ourselves as 'Empire'. our moving out from centre stage, the rise of idealistic left wing politics, their betrayal and betraying, sexual politics, psychology, the transpersonal and spiritual quest, and much much more.

She has always used her own life and experience as a cauldron for her work, and has a fierce, sharp and knotty way of picking apart what is superficially going on, and what is really going on.

The 'imaginary' life to me felt curiously flabby, and lacking in incisiveness of vision. Perhaps it is just that I am so familiar with her 'real' family through various short stories, through the Children of Violence books, and also her own two volume autobiography, so that the real figures are solid and defined, refusing to give over their edges to the 'creations' who never quite came true for me. The various saintly generations and clusters of competent, capable women Mary Lane, Betsy, Fiona, Daisy all a bit interchangeable, and her 'father' Alfred, unremittingly noble and understanding. I wanted flesh and individuality and didn't really find it.

Her 'real' story, though with snapshots encountered in earlier writings, is full of the incisive, intense intelligence which I love about Lessing's work.