Only the most clairvoyant of readers could have predicted the next step in her career. From Journal of a Descent into Hell, much of the 1970s and early 1980s was spent in a visionary exploration of fantasy and science fiction, culminating in another quintet of novels, the to me perfectly astonishing Canopus in Argos: Archives. The loathing these wonderful novels inspired and go on inspiring is, frankly, a puzzle, for an engagement with the pleasures of reading at the highest possible level is nowhere more highly apparent in Lessing’s work. The last pages of Shikasta come at the reader in great musical waves, full of energy and passionate inquiry. Some readers simply could not believe it, and responded to The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire as if to a personal insult. But they are tremendous novels, and Lessing is not as eccentric as she is made to sound when she singles them out among her work. With A. S. Byatt’s novels of the period, they are the best argument against the idea that the 1970s was a barren and unambitious period for the English novel.
That gift for provocation, intellectual and aesthetic, has never left her. Many readers and reviewers were frankly outraged by her latest novel, The Cleft, and its views of the prehistoric incapacities of men and women. I recently gave her superb collection of novellas, The Grandmothers, published in 2003, to a class of intelligent postgraduates. I was struck by its technical daring, the way in which narrated time seems to have no natural relationship in it to the passage of prose. My students were absolutely horrified by its confident technical liberties, as well as the boldness of its chosen subjects.
But these provocations have the knack of acquiring truth and wisdom over time, or perhaps merely revealing it. The Good Terrorist, so alarming a book on its publication in 1985, is another of those tremendous Lessing-esque sweeps of pure narrative, and one which presents an unanswerable case against the general situation while remaining extraordinarily committed to the particular story. It was her return to realist settings in her own name after the Canopus cycle and the experiment of the two ‘Jane Somers’ novels, published and indeed submitted in manuscript under a pseudonym, and a great surge of renewed creative energy is unmistakably present.
That creative energy has continued unabated to her newest novels; she has remained a presence in contemporary fictional life over 60 years, and though she has suggested that her next novel might be her last, saying ‘enough is enough’, I wouldn’t place a bet on that being the case. She seems undiminished, unwearied, and full of new thoughts.
‘I have written in so many different ways, with never a thought that I didn’t have the right to,’ she told an interviewer last week. ‘It is an impressive list.’ Indeed it is, and, since she has, it seems, no illusions, least of all about the quality of her own achievement, she has the right to say so. No one would seriously question that impressiveness, or the acclaim and critical weight she has rightly accepted as no more than her due.
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