Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Lessing, Doris

ISBN 10: 0224005073 / ISBN 13: 9780224005074

Published by Jonathan Cape, London, 1971

About this Item

Near Fine Book in a Near Fine Pictorial Dust Jacket, Price Clipped. Signed by Author to the half title page. Book is lightly rubbed to extremities and has some moderate foxing to text block. Rear free endpaper has some soiling. Binding is tight and square and text is clean internally. Dust jacket has a trade sticker shadow to front inside flap. Lightly shelf worn with some pronounced bumping and whitening to corners. Jacket designed by Alan Tunbridge. Hardcover. Octavo. 251pp. Publisher's Brown Cloth with Gilt Detailing. Seller Inventory # 87

Bibliographic Details

Title: Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, London

Publication Date: 1971

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Near Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: First British Edition, First Impression.

About this title

Synopsis:

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.

From the Inside Flap:

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