Shikasta
Green, Martin
Books: SYNTHETIC MYTH THIS IS, we are told, the first of three science fiction narratives which Doris Lessing has written, under the general title of Canopus in Argos: Archives. They were...
...This is some of Doris Lessing's finest writing...
...As that comparison will show, I am now using 'religious' in a different sense...
...Another source of strength is the way this book echoes and takes up the themes of Lessing's earlier work...
...There are characters and situations from The 4-Gated City and Briefing for a Descent into Hell: There are echoes of The Summer Before the Dark in the interest in international experts, and in generational conflicts among the elite...
...They were originally intended to be all one volume...
...The Devil, I expect...
...Works of this kind are so transparent to the truth they tell (a truth about a public crisis we are all involved in) and their art is so dedicated to that truth, that their effect can only be compared with that of "Everyman" during the Middle Ages...
...But it is a point worth dwelling on, because Lessing seems to be becoming a religious novelist...
...Even the most potent fictional ideas, like a Mock-Trial of the white races, in which they are indicted by the dark-skinned, are merely introduced, and not fully developed...
...Nevertheless, the book does not seem inadequate to its soaring theme...
...And I think it is more than mere coincidence that it is from British writers these days that we get these fantasies about history and how different it might have been—from Kingsley Amis and William Golding—and something equivalent from British critics...
...The form is elaborate, Commonweal: 22 without its elaboration giving any special pleasure (which was of course true of her finest novel, The Golden Notebook...
...nor do all the sentences ring artistically true, in the mode of Philip Roth...
...The character who seems most to represent the author explains "There is somebody or something that needs all this savagery and blood...
...For my father, who used to sit, hour after hour, night after night, outside our house in Africa, watching the stars...
...After a twenty-page wind-in, which mainly bewilders, the 'story' may be said not really to begin until p. 210...
...The main fact in modern English consciousness, though it surfaces obliquely and intermittently, is the end of the empire, and it is easy to take the imaginative step which translates that into 'the end of the world.' Such a step is in a way implied in this book's dedication...
...Thus the mass of her previous work is organized to support this new and different venture...
...He sits dreaming, giving up on life, letting down the women in his family...
...The book is not, I mean, intellectually brilliant in the mode of Thomas Pynchon...
...This is historical and mythological fantasy—as is, of course, much science fiction in the loose sense...
...But above all, what gives weight to this book is the 'religious' truth it tells—what it shares with the film, The China Syndrome...
...The subject is of course Jungian in its stress on synthetic myth and race memory...
...It manifests no scientific or technological imagination...
...18 January 1980: 23...
...In this way, her science fiction can be compared with C.S...
...Martin Green part, and the nearest in feel to science fiction, is the description of the end of our civilization—which is indeed central...
...They are the kind of thing Tolstoy was asking for in What Is Art?, because they arouse the consciousness proper to us here today, the feelings that unite us...
...We are asked to recognize, as the narrative proceeds, transformed fragments of long familiar stories, poems, religious traditions...
...Well,' he would say, 'if we blow ourselves up, there's plenty more where we came from.' '' For Doris Lessing's admirers, that figure and that kind of remark will be very familiar, from Chapter I of Martha Quest on...
...And in this book, for the first time, she suggests that there is an active principle of evil...
...But as I wrote I was invaded with ideas for other books, other stories, and the exhilaration that comes from being set free into a larger scope, with more capacious possibilities and themes...
...and so on...
...star ships come and go and we find out nothing about them except that they shine...
...I feel as if I have suddenly found a key in my hand...
...One of the most successful formal devices of the novel is the way she makes cities (our cities) all seem like the cities of the plain...
...The specifically modern SMKASTA Doris Lessing Knopf, $10.95, 365 pp...
...I don't mean to suggest that it is intellectually slack or imaginatively dull, for in fact I found it moving, but its dominant mood is 'wisdom,' that mode of consciousness which is born in, though it rises above, non-participatory resignation...
...The plot functions well enough to allow the author to develop her brooding images of the human predicament...
...It was clear I had made—or found—a new world for myself...
...And the literary pleasures she offers in this volume are parallel with her father's remark...
...Creatures infinitely damaged, reduced, and dwindled from their origins, degenerate, almost lost—animals far removed from what was first envisaged for them by their designers...
...The subject of the fantasy is the history of the human race, including its end, set in the more faintly pictured history of other races, its precursors and tutors...
...In effect Doris Lessing retells the story of the Bible, incorporating along the way elements from other Middle East religious traditions...
...But by now, by 1979, that daughter too is sitting watching the stars, because it isn't only the Empire that has ended, but the world...
...Around those beds where lovers lie obsessed, what accomplished beings hover, savouring each caress, each long drunken look, each kiss—of all the intoxicants, this is the most powerful...
...Lewis's—someone we would never have compared Martha Quest to...
...viii) Strictly speaking, this is not science fiction...
...Her father is always presented as an incarnation of the England left behind after the break-up of Empire—the man becalmed and marooned in a world to which none of his gifts or ideas are adjusted, and against whom his daughter rebels in the name of life...
...The planet Shammat sends its envoys to Shikasta (Earth) and they are responsible for the plague of greed which ruins human nature...
Vol. 107 • January 1980 • No. 1
