Doris Lessing Books

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The Best Literature of Contemporary Times

Dear readers, I am embarking with you on a quest to revisit the best literature of the post-modern period. Keeping this pretext in mind, the oldest person to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in this time frame was Doris Lessing. The Times ranks her the fifth in the list of 50 greatest writers of Britain since 1945. She passed away in 2013 at the grand age of 94 years spanning a long accomplished career in writing novels, poems, librettos, plays, biographies and short stories. Philip Glass lent music to two of her novels turning them into operas. Born in Iran, where her father was posted, she moved to Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) at the age of five and thereafter moved to England only when she turned 30.

Her childhood impressions of racism and the apartheid in Africa, where her father owned a farm, groomed her to look at life with skepticism. Her unsparing writings portraying the harsh landscape of English colonization and exploitation in Africa angered the British administrators no end in the Dark Continent. Diversifying to other areas of controversy, she persisted in picking out the unpalatable truths of man-woman connect, dystopian England, disillusionment with communism, politics of revolutions, drugs and the youth. The targets of her vocal ire in recent years portrayed former President George W. Bush as ‘a world calamity’ and modern women as ‘smug and self-righteous’. She also raised hackles by deeming the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States as ‘not that terrible’.

Since her writing spanned a larger part of the past century and she became the conscience of the post-modern world, it is worth having a close look at her oeuvre. Her first book ‘The Grass is Singing’ is the story of poverty and racism in a Rhodesian farm. A critique based on her first-hand experience at a farm in Africa, she uses her impressions to etch out the story of Mary Turner, an independent white woman married to an ineffectual and unsuccessful farmer. The dawning ennui and increasing poverty reaches a dangerous point with the arrival of Moses, a virile black servant. The relationship of Mary and Moses locked in the binaries of attraction and repulsion against the backdrop of racial strife climaxes to an electrifying end and showcases the troubled nature of truth.

Lessing then embarked on the first of five deeply autobiographical novels from ‘Martha Quest’ to ‘The Four-Gated City’ - works that became part of her ‘Children of Violence’ series. Although Martha’s story is not in first person, yet it is an intimate account of the 15-year-old girl’s thoughts and reactions. Sometimes the voices of her mother, father (of British descent) and an old inappropriate man appear too, but the reader is preoccupied with the feisty character of Martha exclusively. The reader is terrorized and flabbergasted by her shenanigans. But then they realize that it is a young woman’s impressionable mind trying to make sense of the world around it and come into its own. The other characters are just there to increase and evolve Martha’s experiences of life around her. That prejudice regarding the Cohens being Jews (do they really control the world? Was Hitler really an opportunist?)Their neighbors, the Rosenbergs (Dutch) and other Welsh or Irish farmers complete the picture of the colonial versus the native Banto people the kaffirs. Martha’s internalizations along with her isms - colonialism, racism, socialism and feminism slowly evolve with the leisurely pace, and a pilotless novel gives shape and form to a strong woman, at the brink of her first stepping into the adult world.

In ‘The Cleft’, which is science fiction, she begins with a utopian female world, spawned and inseminated by the sea, till it is destroyed by the birth of a monster, a boy. The monsters are killed as soon as they are born, but then the eagles save the monsters and take them to the other side of the hill. This is followed by a quasi-parody of traits generally attributed to males and females. The objective is to give us food for thought in what concerns the often troublesome relations between genders. Read it if you don’t want to take for granted the patterns of such relations. ‘Cleft’ or ‘squirt’: the only thing clear is that there can’t be one without the other – in spite of the gruesome battle of being pitted against one another.

‘Summer Before the Dark’ is a personal revolution where each woman, including the protagonist Kate Brown, defies age-old gender roles.  Kate’s anxiety over the mundane and existential fills most of the pages. Neighbor, Mary can’t help but cheat on her husband and often forgets the names of her various partners, remaining guiltless. Young Maureen simultaneously seeks stability and freedom from relationships. Happily, their journeys reject standard modes of behavior, and they all think, feel, and act in their own accord, finding moments of clarity as they do so.

‘This Was The Old Chiefs Country’ is her collection of nuanced stories on colonial Africa ‘the amorphous black mass, like tadpoles, faceless, who existed merely to serve’ the English settlers, ill at ease, the gamblers and moneylenders searching for diamonds and gold, and the presence, latent always in the blood of Africa itself, its majectic beauty and timeless landscape’, writes Lessing.

Reactions by readers to her bestselling book ‘The Golden Notebook’, hailed for its strong feminist content, upset Lessing very much. She failed to understand how readers could pigeonhole her book into one slot, and not comprehend its vast scope. It is a story of a quest to find balance through self-discovery. The process involves writing separate journals (marked by different colors) by the protagonist Anna Wulf, bringing diverse streams of her life together into one – the golden notebook. Finally, Anna goes through a nervous breakdown which delivers her into a space of clarity and self-realization. 

Doris Lessing's writings always had a leisurely in-no-hurry-to-get-anywhere pace. The day-to-day ordinariness of her stories is deceptive, for in this everydayness of life characters grow and truths are formed and destroyed.  Lessing, a self-taught person who dropped out of school at 14, grew up reading the romantics, philosophers, memoirs and biographies. Her influences could have been Virginia Woolf and Emerson who extolled intimacy of day to day living in their stories as a way out of the crises of modernity. She etched an art, unique and uncommon, with her writing and science fiction too, based on roots of existential issues facing mankind today. Let’s order our Doris Lessing reading list and take on our quest with the best literature of the times!