STUFF YOU SHOULD READ NOW |
• The January GQ offers a fascinating Q&A with Jimmy Carter, in which he candidly discusses religion, describes seeing a UFO and recalls when the CIA used a psychic. (gq.com). • To describe how America came to be fighting—and bungling—in Iraq, George Packer's readable new book, The Assassin's Gate ($23), moves from the think-tank cradles of the neoconservative movement to the Middle East, where the results of the neocon focus on Iraq are being painfully played out. Essential. • Sounds stodgy, but the Virginia Quarterly Review is good-looking and accessible. The fall issue, still on stands, includes such varied content as a graphic memoir by cartoonist Art Spiegelman and an innovative, two-writer travelogue of Vietnam. (vqronline.org.)
Scott Dickensheets |
For 25 years, Doris Lessing has lived in a small row house in a North London neighborhood that abuts the cemetery where Sigmund Freud is buried. Each morning, the 86-year-old author of the blockbuster The Golden Notebook rises at 5 and goes out to feed several hundred birds. She returns home, makes breakfast and is usually at her desk by 9, where she writes because, as she puts it in her plain and simple terms, "It is what I do."
On a recent, bitterly cold afternoon, Lessing spoke about her latest novel, The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. The book is set in a futuristic ice age and carries its hero forward from a previous novel, Mara & Dann (1999), in which Dann and his sister escaped a terrible drought in Africa.
It's tempting to read this novel—as with all speculative fiction—as a parable of our times. But you have resisted this instinct in the past. Do you still feel that way?
Yes. You see, I wrote a book called Mara & Dann, and I really became concerned with poor Dann. Some people hated him. He instigated such violence. But I was interested in Dann, so I wanted to write a sequel. I realized it would have to be in that semi-drowned world. I don't find it hard to imagine landscapes. See, the whole of Mara & Dann takes place during a drought, which I had just been watching in Africa. My son John and a coffee farmer had been there. Have you ever been in a drought?
No.
Well, it's hard. People are dying and their water is drying up and the trees are dead and it's absolutely horrible. I didn't have to imagine that.
The descriptions of the refugees Dann encounters reminded me of your book about visiting Afghanistan in the '80s, seeing the refugees fleeing into Peshawar.
You know, it never occurred to me until afterwards that everybody in these books is a refugee. But everyone is running from drought or flood or civil war. I do think a lot about them. You know, not far from here is a road where refugees of all kinds line the roads, and people go there to pick up a plumber or carpenter or something.
When you began publishing in the 1950s, switching between naturalistic fiction and so-called genre fiction wasn't very common, was it?
No, and now all the boundaries are blurred. When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now—where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.
You've written many novels. Are there any you wish people would read more?
My science fiction books. Canopus in Argos had a great readership way back when, and it even started a religion. Shikasta [the first in the series] was taken literally and they started up a commune in America. They wrote to me and said, "When are we going to be visited by the gods?" And I wrote back and said, "Look, this is not a cosmology, this is an invention." And they wrote back and said, "Ah, you are just testing us."
Do you believe that the cultural revolution of the '60s went too far?
Well, the hard drugs didn't reach here then. It was just marijuana. I don't think, also, the so-called sexual revolution, which I always have great difficulty in understanding—because it sounds like there wasn't a sexual revolution before that. In wartime, people screw! So I find what's wrong about the '60s is it's an aftermath of [World War II]. I think there were so many screwed-up kids. Why were they? They never had it so good. Ever. I remember one of their leaders sort of spoke up and said, rather bravely: "You think you have something special going. But you don't. You're the first market of young people in the world. That's why you are so privileged." He took a lot of abuse for saying that, but I think he was right.
Why do you think The Golden Notebook was so popular?
I think in part because it was the first book that had feminist ideas in it, but also I was writing out of enormous energy at the time. It was the late '50s, and my whole personal life was in turmoil, and communism was shredding before your eyes, and all that went into my book. The energy in that book is I'm sure why it goes on.
Well, The Story of General Dann has quite a bit of energy in it, and you are 86.
But I'm not challenging any ideas in it. Nobody is going to believe this, but when I wrote The Golden Notebook, I had no idea I was writing a feminist book. Because I had been putting into it the sort of thing women had been saying in their kitchen. But something said doesn't have the effect of something written. People behaved as if I had done something amazing, yet I just wrote down what women were saying.