Four tales in search of their author

For 55 years, in nearly as many books, since she left Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) for England, Doris Lessing has written with passion about class conflicts, gender relations, political ideals and the great upheavals caused by the major wars of the 20th century. At 84, just two years after “The Sweetest Dream,” her impressive paean to the dashed idealism of the 1960s, she has produced a volume of four novellas collected under the alluring but misleading title “The Grandmothers.”

Two of the four novellas, “Victoria and the Staveneys” and “A Love Child,” are solid, absorbing fictions that return to Lessing’s pet themes of social inequities and the disruptions of war. The title story, however, is a peculiar, flatly told tale about two lifelong friends who fall in love with each other’s sons. “The Reason for It” offers a negligible, schematic fantasy about the demise of an ancient civilization. None of these novellas breaks new ground for Lessing; even the stronger two feel like the flowers of bulbs that have been in cold storage for many winters.

Readers looking for autobiographical clues to what keeps Lessing ticking in her ninth decade will have to search elsewhere. Only “The Reason for It,” which shares more with Lessing’s “Shikasta” and “Memoirs of a Survivor” than with “The Golden Notebook,” offers any insights into what life is like from the vantage point of seniority. Its aged narrator, the sole survivor of his civilization’s ruling oligarchy, comments, “I do sometimes wonder why old people bother to keep alive, it is such an effort. Being old is a tedious business.” The narrator’s main epiphany is that his once rich society crumbled because its leaders chose a war-besotted, feeble-minded idiot as their ruler. This packs little oomph even if applied as a cautionary reflection on contemporary U.S. politics.

Like Shirley Hazzard’s recent National Book Award-winning novel, “The Great Fire,” “A Love Child” (the longest and most richly realized story here) returns to that yawning chasm in the middle of the 20th century, World War II, and its indelible effect on a young British soldier’s life. But whereas Hazzard’s prose is lapidary and elliptical, Lessing’s is chattily reportorial, with a strong narrative drive that conveys the boring, disruptive, entrapping aspects of war. She writes, “War is not a continuum, but long periods of inaction and boredom interrupted by fits of intensive activity; that is to say, fighting, danger, death, and then boredom and quiescence again.”

Her account of a British regiment’s terrible sea journey to India, where they are posted to defend the Raj against Japanese invaders, is nauseatingly vivid and fresh. She captures in searing detail the relentless, debilitating seasickness, suppurating sun blisters, insanity-inducing claustrophobia and alarming water shortages that plague the 5,000 soldiers crammed into what was once a luxury ship equipped for 780.

As always, Lessing is attuned to Britain’s ever-important class striations. In describing the converted ocean liner, she writes: “She stood in her tiers, or decks, a neat symbol of the society they were defending, the two top layers, the best, where their officers would go, with the ship’s officers, then down, down, down, deck after deck, until a mass of soldiers would fill the worst parts of the ship. Just like the world, if it comes to that -- to be tedious.”

Nothing is tedious about Lessing’s well-nuanced depiction of her protagonist, a callow young administrator with the brooding soul of a poet. After being traumatized by his crossing, the life preserver to which James Reid clings is Daphne Wright. He falls in love with her while billeted at her Simonstown house during the troops’ four-day mid-journey break in Cape Town. Although she is married, they leap into a tortured, ill-advised brief affair. By the time he reaches the unbearable heat and dust of India, he dreams of Daphne “with an intensity that was like an illness.” His frustration crescendos when he learns circuitously that Daphne has borne a son, which he is convinced is his. Her marriage and the war prevent him from attempting to contact her for years. “A Love Child” is about war losses that go beyond fatalities.

In “Victoria and the Staveneys,” Lessing again demonstrates her remarkable social ventriloquism, an ability to convincingly project her voice into a disparate range of milieus and characters. Victoria is a poor orphaned black girl whose chance encounter with the wealthy white Staveneys has as lasting an effect on her life as James Reid’s brief wartime romance has on his in “A Love Child.” The Staveneys are one of Lessing’s signature chaotic, liberal households. Lessing’s ear for liberal pieties remains sharp: “I have always wanted a black grandchild,” the Staveney matriarch exclaims awkwardly when she learns about Victoria’s daughter.

The collection’s title story, “The Grandmothers,” creates a stagy scenario with stagy, unconvincing dialogue, a domestic dilemma worthy of Woody Allen: Two women carry on their affairs with each other’s sons even after wives and children enter the picture. Its sole consolation is the indication that Lessing, one of our most outspokenly ideological writers, is still interested in exploring the limits of social and moral conventions. One can only hope that Lessing’s prodigious productivity will yield another fresh, bold volume in her provocative oeuvre.

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From A Love Child

Then, at last, the ship that was blistering with heat, its camouflage paint fading, was sliding towards Freetown, and every soul on board listened for the thud of a torpedo. But they made it, they got safely in. The soldiers were not granted shore leave, but they watched batches of officers going ashore, borne by bare-footed blacks in clothes not far off rags. Water. Inexhaustible water from the taps and in barrels standing on the deck. They drank, could not stop drinking, and some, trying not to be seen, poured this fresh water over their heads, or their sore and blistering bodies, and, particularly, hot and inflamed crotches that did not like sea water at all. Two days in Freetown.... And now they would run the gauntlet again: they were leaving Freetown and would be on their last leg, the thousands of miles still to go, to Cape Town.