A FAMILY AT WAR

In Alfred and Emily, a vital reimagining of the lot of her parents, Doris Lessing finally makes her peace, says Tim Adams

The Observer, Sunday May 11, 2008

Buy Alfred & Emily at the Guardian bookshop

Alfred and Emily
by Doris Lessing
4th Estate £16.99, pp274

Has childhood happiness ever produced a Nobel laureate? Doris Lessing, you might say, has spent a lifetime restlessly discovering the answer to that question. Forty-two books of fiction, seven collections of essays, two memorable memoirs have led her to this, another examination of the writer's DNA, another decisive distillation of all that has gone before.

Alfred Tayler and Emily McVeagh are the writer's parents and this is a book of two halves - the first section is a novelist's game of might-have-beens: Lessing removes all the frustrations that circumscribed her growing up in Rhodesia, and gives Alfred and Emily the lives they wanted for themselves. The second section is another honest excavation of the lives they were all actually dealt. The gap is the one in which the writer has always lived. The might-have-beens remove at a stroke the first obstacle to all of the last century's unhappiness. Lessing imagines a world without the Great War; Alfred, her father, lost a leg to shrapnel in the trenches and, in her mind, and probably his, that fact hobbled everything that went after. What if his leg had never received that shrapnel, what if a generation had not been destroyed, what if Edwardian prosperity had gone on and Britain had remained at peace?

For a start, Alfred would not have stopped playing cricket with the farmers' boys on the green in Essex. It's there that Lessing begins - the idyll, Alfred at the crease, 16 years old, a gifted boy among men, Emily watching from the boundary, the long, hot summer of 1902 and all their lives laid out before them. Lessing knows those lives, as she knows her own. And she knows the germ of insatiable defiance that would, in any case, have formed each of them... [article continues]