Book description
An extraordinary blend of fantasy and realism, this is classic Lessing.
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 fiction. Its stunning indictment of the
tyranny of society - one of the perennial themes of Lessing's writing -
is powerful, disturbing and, as always, magnificently rendered. 'A
brilliant, disturbing book…her most adventurous, imaginative experiment.
She allows her didactic, satirical ideas about our civilization
memorable expression.' TLS
'Doris Lessing breaks through the semantic barrier into speculative
areas of psychic geography like some returned traveller, drawing new,
real maps. She is alert to more of the crucial questions than most of us
and, by describing their contours so exactly, comes nearer to the slow
progress towards solution.' Observer Doris Lessing was the winner of
the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature and is one of the most important
writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Her first novel,
'The Grass is Singing' was published in 1950, and since then her
international reputation has flourished. Among her other celebrated
novels are 'The Golden Notebook', 'The Summer Before the Dark', and
'Memoirs of a Survivor'. Her most recent works include two volumes of
autobiography, 'Under my Skin' and 'Walking in the Shade', her most
recent novel is 'The Cleft'.
