The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing

A great read, which is obviously dated from a plot point of view, but the themes that Lessing toys with are as contemporary, timeless and universal as they ever could be. Lessing offers a wonderful interplay between the idealist political aspirations of young revolutionaries and those most inconvenient things we might call human frailties. In one sense it’s a bit like Karl Marx meeting Sigmund Freud. All the leading characters have personal baggage that weighs them down no matter how politically determined they are. Much of it is related to family stuff, the mother daughter complex being the most pronounced, though the daughter-father relationship also comes in for some serious attention. And lurking behind all this Freudian interplay lurks the very real and legitimate revolutionary activities of the IRA.

Alice, the leading protagonist, tries desperately to mother every situation that crosses her path. She’s the mother figure in every squat she lives in. She’s the mother figure to every waif and stray that crosses her path, and most debilitating of all, she is trapped in a mother/son relationship with her long time male companion. The reader soon realises that each of these mothering scenarios is doomed to failure but Lessing takes the reader with Alice to the bitter end.

All of this makes for a hugely absorbing read and reminds us, least we need reminding, that no matter how noble and logical we imagine our project to be, the subjective stuff will sooner or later impose itself and drag us down. Funny to recall, that in Lenin’s Last Will and Testament he was at pains to tell his Bolshevik party that Stalin should be removed from all positions of authority because he was simply too rude. And what lay behind that accusation? Stalin had recently had a falling out with Lenin’s wife and Lenin was fuming. So here we are, two of the most influential revolutionary figures of our time, squabbling over a perceived slight to the others wife. Having dabbled in a few revolutionary left wing grouping over the years, I can testify to the fact that the personal, sooner or later, gets in the way of the more noble stuff. Like any primitive tribe, the alpha male seeks to dominate over all the other males, all the better to get the pick of the ripe young females. (Of course I was above all those sorts of immature shenanigans.)

Lessing has produced, not a biting satire on the idiocies of left wing grouplets of the kind masterly produced by Monty Python in their The Life Of Brian, but rather a highly perceptive, highly sensitive portrayal of youthful idealism and personal angst. She doesn’t ridicule her characters but they are nevertheless stripped to the bone. Nothing is spared. All of Lessing’s young revolutionaries hate the bourgeois life and they hate the bourgeoisie, but circumstances make it damn difficult to rise above it. We may sincerely attempt to change the world but we are not acting in circumstances of our own choosing. Here is a wonderful passage where Alice is torn between her hatred of all things bourgeois yet cannot prevent herself being dragged down with her own petty bourgeois considerations:

Already she could see their faces, the faces of the fucking bloody middle class, when the subject of money was on the agenda. God, how she hated them, the middle classes, penny-pinching, doling out their little bits, in their minds always the thought of saving and accumulating, saving thought Alice, her mouth full of bile, as she stood gazing up at a beam a foot across that looked grey and flaky, with whitey-yellow fibres in it the dry rot itself, which would lay its creeping arms over all the wood, if it were allowed, then creep down the walls, into the floor below, spread like a disease. She thought: I’ve been living like this for years. How many? Is it twelve now? No, fourteen no more.. The work I’ve done for other people, getting things together, making things happen, sheltering the homeless, getting them fed and as often as not, paying for it. Suppose I had put aside a little, even a little of that money, for myself, what would I have now? Even if it was only a few hundred pounds, five hundred, six, I wouldn’t be standing here sick with worry. P164

Here is Lessing at her brilliant best. Her central character torn to shreds, hypocrisy clear for all to see, yet we the reader never lose sympathy for her, not for a single moment.

The dialectic between the political and the personal will never wane, not as long as we humans stay one step ahead of our ever evolving machines. This is our human condition for better or for worse, and Doris Lessing, recently departed from this mortal coil, grasped this relentless dialectic as well as any writer might. Thank you Doris.

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