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‘A brilliant, disturbing book…her most adventurous, imaginative experiment. She allows her didactic, satirical ideas about our civilization memorable expression.’ TLS
‘Doris Lessing breaks through the semantic barrier into speculative areas of psychic geography like some returned traveller, drawing new, real maps. She is alert to more of the crucial questions than most of us and, by describing their contours so exactly, comes nearer to the slow progress towards solution.’ Observer
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An extraordinary blend of fantasy and realism, this is classic Lessing.
Penniless, rambling and incoherent, a man is found wandering at night on London’s Embankment. Taken to hospital and heavily sedated, he tells the doctors of his incredible fantastical voyage, adrift on the ocean, landing on unknown shores, flying on the back of a huge white bird.
Identified as Charles Walker, a Cambridge Classics professor, he is visited by family and friends, each revealing clues to the nature of his breakdown: both his young wife, Felicity, and his mistress, Constance, have been troubled by his cold detachment; his fellow dons are bewildered by Watkins’s recent anti-social outburst and anarchistic theories on the futility of education. As the doctors try to cure him, Watkins begins a fierce battle to hold on to his magnificent inner world, as it gradually acquires a greater reality than the everyday…
An extraordinary blend of fantasy and realism, ‘Briefing for a Descent into Hell’ is one of Doris Lessing’s most brilliantly achieved novels; it links her early work, which explored the nature of subjectivity, with her later experiments in science fiction. Its stunning indictment of the tyranny of society – one of the perennial themes of Lessing’s writing – is powerful, disturbing and, as always, magnificently rendered.
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One point that perhaps should be mentioned is that the novel has been condemned by several psychiatric professionals for its apparent glorification of mental illness. Yet, in my reading, I would argue that the sheer inventiveness and beauty of the prose alone renders the novel superior, adn that such a reading fails to take these qualities into account. However, it is possible that some readers may find their enjoyment tempered by similiar considerations. Nevertheless, I loved the book, and would highly recommend it!
I do recommend this book but for those interested in representations of mental illness, R. D. Laing's work, and inner-space fiction, rather than those looking merely for a pleasureable read.
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