The Grandmothers Doris Lessing Flamingo, 311pp, £15.99 ISBN 0007152795

The four long stories in Doris Lessing's new collection are linked by their breadth - each spans many years - and a shared tone. In her mature writing, Lessing has cultivated a briskness, an impatience with certain niceties of narrative: years pass in a single sen-tence, characters are sketched swiftly, almost hastily, and their most radical alterations are recorded in a few words. This conversational brusqueness is not displeasing. At their best these stories convey moments of human truth. But even as they dispense with some conventions of fiction, these narratives insist heavily elsewhere upon their artificiality.

"The Grandmothers" is about two women, Roz (Rozeanne) and Lil (Liliane), best friends from early childhood. Like Snow White and Rose Red, they are similar and yet opposite: "Fair, they were, with their neat gleaming ponytails, both of them, and blue-eyed, and as quick as fishes, but really, if you looked, not so alike." Lessing's syntactical inversions insist on the myth of these two girls ("Fair, they were") and their lives. Theatrical Roz marries an academic, and sporty Lil a merchant, but the husbands are swiftly dispensed with ("Then Theo was killed in a car crash, and Lil was a well-off widow"), in order that the plot might unfold. Each woman seduces her best friend's son and enters into an unharried long-term relationship with him. The implausible symmetry of this seems almost to reach for allegory. Yet it is not clear, ultimately, what we are to make of it.

More baffling still is the book's third story, "The Reason For It", a tale reminiscent of Lessing's other sci-fi ventures, such as The Memoirs of a Survivor. An archaeologist's epilogue would seem to indicate that it is set in some distant past, and yet it includes oddly contemporary language and observations such as "I saw that green was the new in-word". Narrated by "the only one left of the Twelve" - a group of elders in this alien society - it tells of a civilisation progressively dismantled by its flawed ruler, DeRod. The narrator comes to realise that DeRod is not a malicious leader, but a stupid one: "Not that he had deliberately destroyed what was good. He had never known it was good. He had never understood . . ." One might here be put in mind of George W Bush, except that DeRod's power stems from his beauty: "How potent a spell good looks do impose!" The lesson - the reason for it - seems all too clear, and the sci-fi trappings a wearying distraction.

The remaining two stories in the collection are in quite different ways more successful. "A Love Child", the longest of the four, follows a young man named James Reid through the Second World War, from his heady political involvement in socialism in 1938 through conscription and a ghastly sea crossing to India, via South Africa, into many years beyond. While briefly on leave in Cape Town, James has a passionate encounter with a married woman called Daphne, the imagined repercussions of which dominate his life ever after.

There are echoes here of Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle"; and in the story's insistence upon these stolen hours as the defining moment of Reid's life, it relies as much as "The Grandmothers" upon convention and fairy tale. But Lessing's conjuring of the shipboard horrors, like her description of Reid's Indian posting, is vividly terse, and her portrayal of Reid's stoical romanticism quite moving. The artificialities of the story seem here to serve its greater truths.

In this regard, "Victoria and the Staveneys" achieves the purest balance. From early childhood through her mid-twenties, we see Victoria, a young black girl battered by losses - the deaths of her mother and her aunt - who clings to her single remembered visit to a rich white family's house with much the same tenacity as James Reid clings to the memory of Daphne. In time, however, she exploits this fantasy and has an affair with the younger son of that household, Thomas, which results in a daughter, Mary.

Victoria later decides to turn her daughter over to the fantasy she held for so long and to allow her to be educated by her paternal relations: "Victoria was thinking, I am losing Mary to the Staveneys. She was able to contemplate this calmly. She did not believe Mary would come to despise her mother: she was relying on the child's kind heart."

Lessing captures the determination and ambiguity that fuel Victoria's decisions, the combination of toughened realism and necessary fantasy. Here, we are at once aware of and complicit in Victoria's reliance on illusion, even as we elsewhere admire her pragmatism. Thus Lessing forces us to enact, much as the stories themselves do, the tension between truth and lies that is the art of fiction.

Claire Messud's most recent book is The Hunters (Picador)

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website