The Good Terrorist
Ochs, Robert
Misfits tell a lot THE GOOD TERRORIST Doris Leasing Knopf, $16.95, 375 pp. Robert Ochs IT IS an indication of a writer's scope and richness to be claimed by many disparate groups of people as...
...You work and you work, and most of these people aren't worth it...
...And among Mrs...
...She barely registers these warnings somewhere inside, before they are overwhelmed by the next call on her attention...
...Lessing's own work has been about this human tendency to categorize and to think in terms of either/or...
...Another (almost buried) part is philosophical, assessing her life as it unfolds...
...by "Jane Somers...
...Though not a satire, it presents its exasperating heroine and her predicament in a distinctly lively tone which invites the reader to find her behavior more comic than deplorable...
...The heroine's mind recovers when these opposites are seen to merge and coincide, when the barriers between them dissolve...
...Alice is a shifting assembly of conflicting voices and selves which never sort themselves out...
...Lessing draws us into her own fascination with this type of contradictory person who cannot, for example, imagine how anyone could obey an order to destroy a condemned but habitable house, or stop other people from living, and yet who eventually takes part in a bombing that does both...
...Her space fiction is a liberating device permitting the examination of 1 November 1985: 613 human history with fresh eyes...
...Doris Lessing's claimants have come from the ranks of feminists, the political left, radical psychiatry, and recently the enthusiasts of space fiction and fantastic literature...
...It is about the breakdown of a mind agonized by the oppositions of modern civilization between politics and artistic integrity...
...The Good Terrorist belongs to a genre she has described as an outpost of journalism, the documenting of "an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness...
...To her complete amazement...
...She is Alice, a thirty-six-year-old idealistic woman who is cook, manager, purse, nanny, and ombudsperson for a commune of amateur radicals yearning to be tested and accepted for more dangerous tasks...
...Doris Lessing has worked often in this more ambitious form, but here seems to be taking a holiday...
...The Good Terrorist is probably the least startling new Lessing appearance in a long time...
...This quotation from an unknown author stands at the head of Doris Lessing's first novel, The Grass Is Singing...
...The functioning of Alice's mind depends on the absolute opposition between the world of her parents and that of her radical companions...
...What is described is how our broken planet ("shikasta" is Persian for broken) appears to these messengers or warners...
...Alice requires that the ambience of her childhood remain just as it was, while she goes about her rebellion...
...She is no misfit, but that other Lessing favorite, the survivor...
...Much of Mrs...
...Her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook, even in its structure (of black, red, yellow, and blue notebooks being subsumed by the golden one) is devoted to this idea...
...Most contemporary novels are of this type, in contrast to the works of "writers in the old sense, who used the novel for philosophical statements about life...
...Commonweal: 616...
...But again, it would be foolish to speak too much in terms of either/or...
...As such, it is kin to her new book, The Good Terrorist, set in contemporary London...
...Her realistic fiction had mystical and dream elements from the start, while the spiritual Doris Lessing is tough-minded indeed...
...To them we are blind, self-deceived, in desperate need of patient and very elementary instruction...
...On the not infrequent occasions when her shrewder comrades analyze the world with the very voice her mother uses, she gets confused...
...As a first step toward her becoming seriously professional, he advises a holiday...
...Because we can side sympathetically with this reflective part of Alice, the story gains an added dimension of dramatic suspense...
...Their view is decidedly unflattering...
...Her misfortunes have provided leverage for considerable stock-taking...
...And not just in the metaphorical sense of an adult with lingering infantile dependencies...
...A style in the service of a compassionate but unsentimental exploration of human life...
...Alice dutifully runs the house while the others theorize about the revolution and take part in demonstrations...
...It comes after the astonishingly varied Canopus fantasies and the hoax of publishing a pair of books under Commonweal: 614 a pseudonym (The Diary of a Good Neighbor and // the Old Could...
...We wonder if Alice will heed the urgent, instinctive voices that warn her she is nearly lost...
...It is by the failures and misfits of a civilization that one can best judge its weaknesses...
...Alice is still very much a child...
...Shikasta, the first of these books that go by the name of the "Canopus" series is an almost biblical story about visitors from a more substantial and saner world, which itself is never described...
...Comrade Andrew, a KGB recruiter who sees how she has turned the commune (the "squat") into a palace, thinks he sees potential in her, while he dismisses the two male leaders of the commune as "Enrol Flynns...
...Is it that the normal people who fit comfortably into a society ignore or repress the society's contradictions, while the misfits bear the full brunt...
...Of all the sharply conceived minor characters, Alice's mother Dorothy is most remarkable, and an ironic counterpoint to Alice...
...The notion of Doris Lessing as a former realistic novelist gone mystical is another unfortunate stereotype...
...Mrs...
...She is evidently still interested in misfits, and still analyzing them to get a reading on our culture...
...Her new book gives more than a taste of the contemplative Doris Les/ November 1985: 615 sing...
...It has the distinctive Lessing style (which many understandably wish were more elegant), with its flavor of being businesslike in the quest for understanding, choosing to take more pains to be lucid than to enchant...
...One part is very canny in dealing with people — with bureaucrats, the police, fellow squatters, even with some of the real professionals, the KGB and British intelligence types who scout the group...
...Robert Ochs IT IS an indication of a writer's scope and richness to be claimed by many disparate groups of people as their own...
...Lessing's space fiction novels, the lyrical Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five continued the theme even in its title...
...The latest of the series, The Sentimental Agents, laid in some distant galactic empire, is a satire on the sentimentality and corrosiveness of political rhetoric...
...You are tired, Comrade Alice...
...Each of these groups tends to ignore or be disconcerted by "the other'' Doris Lessing...
...In the argument where she breaks with an old friend from her marching, singing, and demonstrating days, she delivers the results of her thinking, in some of the most crackling passages in the book...
...She cannot understand why he is always wanting her to do such middleclass things...
...She takes it as a personal affront that her mother sells her childhood home, or breaks off with old friends Alice misses, or even that she grows old...
Vol. 112 • November 1985 • No. 19
