The briefing, one of a very few fixed points in Miss Lessing's
self-styled "inner space fiction," takes place well above the
clouds at a conference where Minna Err and Merk Ury (oh dear)
decide to send some delegates to Hell, or Earth, to reclaim the
planet from aggressiveness and irrationality and "separativeness."
(The latter is an important contention in this driven polemic
namely to the effect that it should not be "I.I.I.I." but We.)
Those sent will be totally disassociated and will struggle and
struggle to wake up, if at all. Like the at first unidentified man
in Central Intake Hospital who is totally amnestic and spends the
first third of this book cycling around and around and in and out
and in and through a prismatic primordial world (from a raft at sea
to the land to the ruins of a stone city). Eventually he will be
enclosed in a "bell of light" where everything is fused and
influenced by the pull of galactic forces. All of this section is
accomplished in a violent blaze of lyricism. In the second half of
the book the patient has been subdued and there are the attempts to
bring him back - he's a professor - via his wife and friends and
the diametrically opposed efforts of attending Drs. Y. & Z.
Readers of The Four-Gated City will remember Miss Lessing's earlier
projection of madness and strong attack against psychiatric
techniques and resources. When last seen the professor has been
returned to his work and family and one never knows whether or not
he will retrieve what he has been trying to remember in these weeks
of vertiginous submersion. As for the reader (this time certainly a
more reluctant reader than Doris Lessing usually attracts), what
will he remember from this imaginative spin-off of cosmic
abstractions and sometimes arbitrary judgments? Perhaps only the
primary message of the book that the individual is only a small
part of humanity which is in turn only a small part of that grand
design. (Kirkus Reviews)
An extraordinary blend of fantasy and realism, this is classic
Lessing, reissued here with a stunning new cover design. Penniless,
rambling and incoherent, a man is found wandering at night on
London's Embankment. Taken to hospital and heavily sedated, he
tells the doctors of his incredible fantastical voyage, adrift on
the ocean, landing on unknown shores, flying on the back of a huge
white bird. Identified as Charles Walker, a Cambridge Classics
professor, he is visited by family and friends, each revealing
clues to the nature of his breakdown: both his young wife,
Felicity, and his mistress, Constance, have been troubled by his
cold detachment; his fellow dons are bewildered by Watkins's recent
anti-social outburst and anarchistic theories on the futility of
education. As the doctors try to cure him, Watkins begins a fierce
battle to hold on to his magnificent inner world, as it gradually
acquires a greater reality than the everyday... An extraordinary
blend of fantasy and realism, Briefing for a Descent into Hell is
one of Doris Lessing's most brilliantly achieved novels; it links
her early work, which explored the nature of subjectivity, with her
later experiments in science f
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