Briefing for a descent into hell - Hardcover

Lessing, Doris May

3.73

2,223 ratings by Goodreads

9780224005074: Briefing for a descent into hell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224005073 ISBN 13: 9780224005074

Publisher: Cape, 1971

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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.

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From the Inside Flap:

A fascinating look inside the mind of a man who is supposedly "mad."

About the Author:

Doris Lessing was born of British parents in Persia in 1919 and taken to South Africa at the age of five. She spent the rest of her childhood on a large farm in Southern Rhodesia. At the age of eighteen, she became a telephone operator in Salisbury where she had, she says, 'the kind of compulsive good time described in Martha Quest'. In 1949 she came to London bringing with her the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing. Published the following year, the book was an outstanding success in Britain, in America and in ten European countires. Her subsequent novels have inlcuded the five-volume Children of Violence series (1952-69) and The Golden Notebook (1962). Reviewing this last book, the Sunday Times called Doris Lessing 'not only the best woman novelist we have but one of the most serious, intelligent and honest writers of the whole post-war generation'. She is also the author of such short story collections as The Habit of Loving (1957) and of non-fiction books ranging from Going Home (1957) to Particularly Cats (1967). The Observer wrote of her: 'There can't, I suppose, be anyone left who reads modern fiction at all and isn't aware of the importance of Doris Lessing's work, with its strenth, its sobriety, its fine integrity.'

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