Mopping Up the Good Terrorist

By Paul Gray

A year ago, Doris Lessing made the startling announcement that she had recently written two novels published under the pseudonym of Jane Somers. She said that she had engineered this hoax to demonstrate how hard it is for new authors to gain an audience. She also wanted an unprejudiced response to her fiction, "to get free of that cage of associations and labels that every established writer has to learn to live inside." This may seem a rather downbeat response to a worldwide reputation, but the point is valid. Lessing's reviewers and readers, familiar with such works as The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated City, probably do expect every book bearing her name to concern itself with feminism and politics. That is why this new novel is likely to cause considerable consternation and dismay.

Women and politics, not to mention men, take a thorough drubbing in The Good Terrorist. The heroine, Alice Mellings, 36, is thick-witted, tubby and held in thrall by her "admiration and wistful love" for Jasper Willis, a loutish layabout who also happens to be a homosexual. Alice's adult life has been spent caring for this creep and setting up a succession of "squats," or communes, where they can live until Jasper wears out his welcome, which seldom takes long. After four years of staying with and sponging off Alice's divorced mother (whose class Jasper winningly calls "bourgeois pigs"), the couple is out on the streets again. Fortunately there is 43 Old Mill Road, a dilapidated London house that has been commandeered by Jasper's friend Bert as headquarters and campsite for something called the Communist Centre Union.

The horrors of this establishment bring out the best in Alice. There is no electricity, heat, water or plumbing. Plastic buckets of excrement left by previous squatters fill an upstairs room. The local borough council plans to tear the place down. Alice wheedles bureaucrats, placates the police, steals substantial sums of money from her father's house and later from his place of business. Before long, the new lodging is neat and shipshape. Her comrades, busy using their dole allowances to take taxis to picket lines and protest demonstrations, seem to appreciate the availability of hot food and the absence of stench, but not without some dissension. Jasper, demanding cash that Alice does not have, lashes out: "While you play house and gardens, pouring money away on rubbish, the Cause has to suffer, do without."

Lessing extracts a good dose of macabre humor from the dreariness of this household and the deluded egotism of its inhabitants. Jasper's manner as a public speaker, seen through the clammy mist of Alice's adoration, yields an acid portrait: "His style was to use the familiar phrases of the socialist ) lexicon, but as though he had only just that moment discovered them, so that when he began, there was often a moment when people showed a tendency to laugh." But it becomes increasingly difficult to care about Alice and her confederates. They are looking for trouble, and the novel shows them stumbling erratically into it. The only question left hanging is whether they will harm innocent bystanders.

Alice's mother, who appears only briefly, is by far the most interesting character in the book, if only because she betrays a mind of her own. When the daughter makes noises about the revolution and duty, the mother calmly responds: "You spend your life exactly as I did. Cooking and nannying for other people. An all-purpose female drudge." This assessment of Alice's labors is both accurate and staggeringly bleak. Surely another hoax is at hand? Perhaps Doris Lessing has allowed her name to be used as a pseudonym by some elderly, reactionary male? Not likely. The Good Terrorist has its share of flaws, but Lessing's intelligence and stern conscience come through loud and clear.