Briefing for a Descent into Hell Book

The idea that there is sanity in insanity, sounds insane, but could truthful lucidity really lie somewhere on the far side of madness?. No, this is not an experiment with hallucinogens, as most of Lessing's thoughts about the cultural definition of mental illness and insanity reflect or run parallel to those of scottish Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing who wrote on chemical and electroshock methods. But this is not a paper on psychopathological phenomena, thank God, it's a novel. I say it's a novel, but not in the traditional sense, more along the lines of an imaginative experiment, rather than a flowing, smooth narrative. As entering the disturbed mind of one who has indeed gone cuckoo, this was always going to be somewhat different.

This is a story almost entirely made up of ideas, not a novel about the play of ideas in the lives of certain characters, but a novel in which the characters exist only as markers in the presentation of an idea. What gets the ball rolling is simply this: a well dressed but disheveled middle-age man is found wandering on the embankment near the Waterloo Bridge in London. He appears an amnesiac, and is taken by the police to a psychiatric hospital where, in the fact of total indifference on his part, attempts are made to identify him. He tells a crazy story in a deranged state where he is marooned on an island that is inhabited by strange creatures. He has no memories of his real life, and even believes he fell in love with a partisan fighter in the former Yugoslavia. The man in question, we find out is Charles Watkins, a professor of classics at Cambridge. Husband to Felicity, once his student. And father of two sons.

The reality Charles Watkins describes is familiar to anyone who has ever had a clammy high fever, or been exhausted to the point of collapse. Your mind starts behaving oddly, weird thoughts occur, memories become distorted. He is delusional, and spends most of the time on the verge of remembering things, before being overcome by the stories he believes are real. Lessing apparently thought the content of 'Briefing for a Descent Into Hell' so startling, that she was impelled to add an explanatory afterword, a two‐page parable about the ignorance of certain psychiatrists at large London teaching hospitals.

The blend of fantasy and realism utilized by Doris Lessing, worked well, but I felt the ending came too soon, and was clearly obvious. The early parts in the novel where Charles describes his incredible fantastical voyage, where he gets to fly on the back of a huge white bird and witness the appearance of 'rat-dogs', were enjoyable enough, and weather dealing with the real or the unreal it's all powerfully written. It may have lacked coherence in places, but some extremely long epistles concerning the subject's history to do with friends and relations fill us in on who Charles is, thus making him a character you start to feel for. Some of his narrative is actually quite moving. You just hope he will pull through his crazy episode.

Though this wasn't great, and maybe not the best place to start with Lessing, I will say I was never bored, and there is tangible evidence she is a writer I will definitely be returning to. With many positive things heard about some of her other novels, I look forward to her company again, hopefully, next time with better results.