Bad Choices

...Lessing makes it difficult to like or identify with any of these characters, even her presumed protagonist Alice, who becomes housemother to them all...

...Doris Lessing's Alice is a sentimental thirty-six-year-old member of an unsavory little group in London calling itself the Communist Centre Union...

...Alice and her frail comrade Philip do put in a lot of real work o the house itself while Jasper and Bert thee rize, Roberta placates her lover Faye's ant male, anti-bourgeois outbursts and suic dal impulses, and Jocelin makes explc sives in the attic...

...1 backfires tragically (I won't spoil the end ing by saying how), and the commune dis solves as its tenuous members had plannet anyway, though Alice's bourgeois nestin inclinations balk a bit at leaving the hous she had put so much energy into...

...Other comrades join them, including Pat and Bert, whose coupling Alice and Jasper must suffer hearing through the wall as they lie chastely in their separate sleeping bags...

...To the people wh< really run this world, you are a joke...

...No wonder Lessing has taken up writing, in her Canopus series, about other worlds...

...Despite the repulsion Lessing seems t< feel for her characters, and her chopp) awkward sentences that appear to resul more from carelessness than deliberat style, it is possible to get caught up in thes people's shallow existences to some ex tent—at least to find out what happens t soggy, maternal, masochistic, and foul mouthed Alice...

...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon is a free-lance writer and peace activist...

...This is both painful and seductive for Jasper, who is hot for Bert but also goes cruising when he isn't sitting around talking revolution...

...But Lessing leaves no spac for solid humanistic motives, compassion ate concerns, nonviolent actions that migh make real changes...

...I believe Lessing intend for us to care about her enough to sho\ us how misled such a well-meaning bour geois "revolutionary" (perhaps her forme self) can be...

...As Lewis Carroll's wiser Alice might have said: dismaler and dismaler...

...With her gay comrade Jasper, an alternately indifferent and cruel "revolutionary" whom she doggedly adores, Alice moves into an abandoned building, one of the many "squats" she has occupied and helped rehabilitate...

...Although Alice gets rid of them, by som osmotic process her leechy brood decide to take its own violent action against th "fascist imperialist" establishment...

...The Good Terrorist is a kind of Alice in Wonderland without the common-sense wit of Lewis Carroll's heroine...

...For Alice and he comrades, blowing things up becomes tht way to be taken seriously...

...Lumped together wit...

...All you people," Alice's disillusions mother tells a friend, "marching up an< down and waving banners and singing pa thetic little songs—'All You Need Is Love'-you are just a joke...

...an "Alice's Restaurant" of the 1980s without the humorous self-awareness and gentle lawbreaking of Arlo Guthrie's genial world...

...Alice is constantly exuding tears, sometimes through her very pores (at several points she feels herself "swelling and oozing...

...Cement poured into toilets to render them unusable for squatters makes her cry with anger and want to blow things up, but she resorts to bourgeois wiles to obtain a squatters' permit...

...All the while she is making healthful stews for her motley squatters or cleaning up after them or stealing money from her "fascist imperialist" father for house repairs and to supplement the government doles most of them live on (except Mary and Reggie, a bourgeois liberal couple who move in for a while and are contemptuously tolerated...

...Lessing seems to end up not in Alice' head, though Alice is her main character but rather in her mother's...

...these ineffective violent "revolutionaries' are the Greenham Common women Greenpeace activists, antinuclear groups and feminists...

...When he mother's friend says, "The next thing you'l be supporting Reagan's and Thatcher' foreign policies," Alice's mother replies "I've been wondering whether I shouldn't After all, forty years ago it wasn't fascisi to fight for the bad against the worse...

...Especially if the only choices, as Lessing seems to present them, are blowing up cars with the "good terrorists" or threatening to blow up the world with the "fascist imperialists...

...Jasper and Bert try to hook up with th IRA and then the KGB but are rejectee There are mysterious comings and going in the squat next door, where comrade Ar drew (an American or a Russian, Alic can't decide which) seems to reign, an mysterious strangers turn up at the doo to leave packages that turn out to be gun...

...Wh) is it now...

...Conservatives will happily find their worst suspicions and stereotypes of radicals confirmed in this bitter new novel by Doris Lessing...

...watch you at it and think Good, that' keeping them busy...