This brief fable, the second work in the science-fiction series
begun with Shikasta (1979), is bound to be read as a return to the
portrayals of sexual politics responsible for Lessing's initial
vogue. And indeed she has again taken up a favorite theme: the
story of a chosen one's painful and humiliating struggle to obey an
imperfectly understood summons, the redemption of a world meanwhile
hanging in the balance. In the past, Lessing's thorny presentations
of this motif - something like a modern Paradise Regained - have
generated confusion, even annoyance. But this version, though
superficially only an arid schema in which the queen of a serene
matriarchy marries the king of a neighboring warrior state, is in
fact Lessing's most humane and loving variation on the theme. The
states in question are two of the levels of being mentioned in the
first novel as lying around Shikasta (Earth) in six concentric
shells progressively more open to the illumination of the lofty
colonizing world, Canopus. Al??Ith, queen of the sane, civilized,
and radiant Zone Three, is commanded by the unseen "Providers"
(presumably the Canopeans) to descend to the stultifying air of
Zone Four, there to marry the arrogant Ben Ata. As her own people
see it, her marriage gradually corrupts her to the sexual serfdom
and emotional crudities of a lower existence. But in the devious
ways of the oppressed Zone Four women, Al??Ith eventually discovers
a treasury of spiritual aspirations ironically forgotten in the
bright and well-conducted "higher" world. At last she is ready to
pass beyond both realms of being to a condition that surpasses
either, while Zone Four has glimpsed enough of the truth shining
through all conditions to disband its army and set about civilizing
the desert marauders on the border of Zone Five. True, Lessing is
not the writer to carry off improving parables with flawless
elegance. The gracelessness of her prose style has never been more
conspicuous, and her impatience with uncongenial detail makes the
war economy of Zone Four a silly cartoon sketch. But there is a
sweetness and generosity about this work not quite like anything
she has done; like the difficult but moving Shikasta, it seems to
encompass and summarize dozens of her previous concerns with a sort
of piercing magnanimity. (Kirkus Reviews)
From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this
is the second instalment in the visionary novel cycle 'Canopus in
Argos: Archives'. This is the story of the kindly Queen of Zone
Three, who rules a land free of all harshness, and her forced
marriage with the soldier-king of Zone Four, which is hierarchic,
disciplined, inflexible, dutiful. This apparently difficult
marriage, unwanted by both, requires a compromise between impulse
and reason, between instinct and logic. Ben Ata learns to accept
and then to love the ruler of Zone Three and her alien ways; and
she learns to love and to need him. But when the Queen is commanded
by the Providers to return to her own realm, she must obey,
shattering though it is to leave her husband and child. Ben Ata, in
turn, is ordered to marry the savage beauty who rules Zone Five, a
land that both unites and reverses the other two Zones. In 'The
Marriages ...' Doris Lessing uses science-fiction brilliantly to
investigate the conflict between men and women. Once again,
invented planets allow her to deploy her unillusioned knowledge of
the real world of the reader.
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