Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Rating:
Summary: "Time is the whole point."
Review: "Sometimes when you read a book or story, the words are dead, you struggle to end it or put it down, your attention is distracted. Another time, with exactly the same book or story, it is full of meaning, every sentence or phrase or even word seems to vibrate with messages and ideas, reading is like being pumped full of adrenalin." (p.155) You don't say, Doris. The title alone should be enough to tell you that Lessing's 1971 novel isn't going to be an easy read, and the first 100 pages are a very hard slog indeed. But it's worth the effort. This self-declared "inner-space fiction" narrates the gradual "recovery" of amnesiac Charles Watkins, a Cambridge Classics Professor who is hospitalized after being found wandering along the London Embankment. The narrative alternates between Watkins' inner world and the efforts of his doctors and friends to revive him. Lessing has been accused of trivializing mental illness here, but the charge carries no weight. She isn't attempting to articulate the experience of amnesia, nor of delusional psychosis. Her aim is philosophical. The further we go into the novel, the more we come to realise that Watkins may not, in fact, be ill at all - rather, the human condition may be his illness and his breakdown is actually a kind of waking up. What emerges is a view of the world in which identity is conditional, all matter is a unified system, and "time is the whole point". The "Hell" of the title may not be mental illness - it may be life as it is lived in the supposedly real world. Of course, Lessing can give no definitive answer to such philosophical questions, but her exploration is powerful and increasingly sharp. Once we leave Watkins' inner world and he is asked to write about his experiences, Lessing's narrative elevates to a level of startling lucidity. The stories Watkins writes about his apparent wartime experience in Yugoslavia, and what he can see from the window of his Cambridge study, are both beautiful and profound. They make the philosophical point far better than any academic essay ever could. And what is the point? It's a particular understanding of reality. As Lessing's epigraphs - one from a fourteenth-century Sufi mystic, the other from a twentieth-century marine biologist - neatly show, we tend to think of religion and science as heading in precisely opposite directions, but they are in fact inching ever closer together. No, the conclusion is not that God actually exists as some old man sitting up there in heaven, but rather that the ancients' intuitive understanding of the nature of reality is startlingly similar to what quantum physics is telling us about space-time today. Much of human suffering may stem from an inability to look at our world and ourselves in the right way. Readers engaged by this kind of thinking might also enjoy "Valis" by Philip K. Dick.

Rating:
Summary: Waste of time
Review: Maybe I just didn't get it. Or maybe trudging through the first part of the book (50 pages or so of stream of consciousness ramblings) put a bad taste in my mouth and prevented me from enjoying the rest...regardless, I found this book to be excruciatingly boring and lacking any sort of insight. What the plot/story was missing was not made up for in Lessing's writing style.
It seems that the jury is out on this book, either the reviewer hates it or praises it as a mind-blower. I fall into the "hated it" category, as I was not interested in this one at all. Those that enjoyed it praise it as an original work of sci-fi/fantasy or as a thought-provoking exploration of insanity. I found it to be neither.

Rating:
Summary: Tough Duty
Review: The amnesiac patient, Charles Watkins, seems at first to be the textbook paranoid schizophrenic; his detailed delusions the products of various therapeutic drug trials. However, if the reader willingly plows through the richly written stream-of-consciousness travelogue, there awaits a startling revelation: Professor Watkins may be "going sane" as he wakes from the sleep of conditioning into his true self. He is an alien emissary.

At some point, readers must align themselves with one theory or the other. Is Lessing simply trying to show that madness is the response to the Self's repressed attempts to emerge (see R.D. Laing), or has she delved into the delicious speculation of science fiction? Either way, this book, which preceded both X-Files and much of what we know of psychosis, falls just short of what could have been a literary wallop. Lessing's prose teeters between lush and poetic and merely self-indulgent. Her characterization of the protagonist, too, is incomplete, since she allows him to be revealed through characters who are never developed. All in all, it's a tough book to wade through.

A better look at the possible future of human culture--again with a sci-fi twist--is offered in Lessing's novel entitled The Memoirs of a Survivor.