BRIEFING FOR A DESCENT INTO HELL - Softcover

Lessing

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006548083 ISBN 13: 9780006548089

Publisher: Flamingo, 2002

Synopsis

A study of a man beyond the verge of a nervous breakdown, this is a brilliant and disturbing novel by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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 Watkins, a Cambridge Classics professor, he is visited by family and friends, each revealing clues to the nature of his breakdown. 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...

‘Briefing for a Descent into Hell’ is one of Doris Lessing’s most brilliantly achieved novels, linking her early work, which explored the nature of subjectivity, with her later experiments in science fiction. Its indictment of the tyranny of society is powerful, disturbing and, as always, magnificently rendered.

About this title

Review

‘A brilliant, disturbing book...her most adventurous, imaginative experiment. She allows her didactic, satirical ideas about our civilization memorable expression.’ TLS

‘Doris Lessing breaks through the semantic barrier into speculative areas of psychic geography like some returned traveller, drawing new, real maps. She is alert to more of the crucial questions than most of us and, by describing their contours so exactly, comes nearer to the slow progress towards solution.’ Observer

Synopsis

An extraordinary blend of fantasy and realism, this is classic Lessing, reissued here with a stunning new cover design. 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 tryanny of society -- one of the perennial themes of Lessing's writing -- is powerful, disturbing and, as always, magnificently rendered.

Edition details

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0006548083
• ISBN 13: 9780006548089
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256