Alfred and Emily
The first book after Doris' Nobel Prize takes her back to her childhood in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents lead. 'I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.' In this extraordinary book, the new Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor, who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital. In the first half of this book, Doris Lessing imagines the lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war at all, a story that has them meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester as children but leading separate lives.This is followed by a piercing examination of their lives as they actually came to be in the shadow of that war, their move to Rhodesia, a damaged couple squatting over Doris's childhood in a strange land.
4.4 out of 5 based on 9 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
488 |
| RRP |
£16.99 |
| Date of Publication |
May 2008 |
| ISBN |
978-0007233458 |
| Publisher |
Fourth Estate |
| |
The first book after Doris' Nobel Prize takes her back to her childhood in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents lead. 'I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.' In this extraordinary book, the new Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor, who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital. In the first half of this book, Doris Lessing imagines the lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war at all, a story that has them meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester as children but leading separate lives.This is followed by a piercing examination of their lives as they actually came to be in the shadow of that war, their move to Rhodesia, a damaged couple squatting over Doris's childhood in a strange land.
Reviews
The International Herald Tribune
Caryn James
“The book's first half is a novella about an Alfred and Emily…The second half offers the nonfiction version, exploring these unhappy characters as their daughter actually knew them. Because that daughter is Doris Lessing, she recreates them with all the anger and unsentimental clarity of her best work, yet adds qualities not often associated with her: generosity and grace… In its generosity of spirit, its shaped and contained fury, "Alfred and Emily" is also an extraordinary, unconventional addition to Lessing's autobiography.”
06/08/2008
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The Observer
Tim Adams
“...perfectly crafted book ... At the heart of this quietly extraordinary meditation on family is Lessing's hard knowledge of two things. The first is the fact that she 'hated her mother... the second, and this one took her 'years and years and years' to understand, is that her 'mother had no visible scars, no wounds, but she was as much a victim of the war as my poor father'. ...”
24/04/2009
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The Scotsman
Lucinda Byatt
“...the second half – the real story – is heartbreaking... An unintentional consequence of the book is that it is shot through with anti-war sentiment. In the alternative lives Lessing invents for her parents, the war, and everything that followed, is airbrushed from history. In this extraordinary valediction, she challenges the impossibility of escaping what "we were born with" by offering her parents more fulfilling lives. Lessing has asserted that "the story dictates the means of telling it", and the form she has chosen here conveys a resounding affirmation of her parents' lives and her own freedom.”
11/05/2008
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The Times
Paul Binding
“The compelling prose of Alfred and Emily and the subtle artistic intricacy of the work... are in themselves an act of redemption. Paradoxically, the unlikelihood of the future world imagined for Emily serves to reinforce the nobility of this double portrait... Lessing is D. H. Lawrence’s heir in the unflagging creativity of her verbal harnessing of nature... Alfred and Emily can be likened to what Lawrence himself might have written had he survived into old age to review his mother and father, the Walter and Gertrude Morel of Sons and Lovers.”
24/04/2009
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The Washington Post
Valerie Sayers
“Readers who do not know [Lessing’s] work or were not impressed by her previous forays into science fiction may be delighted to discover the Lessing of Alfred & Emily. She tells her parents' imagined lives in a gently ironic voice that uses concision and elision to sweep through time. The narrative's old-fashioned cadences call to mind many of the authors so central to its plot... By allowing her readers this insight into the connection between autobiography and fiction, between form and content, [Lessing] reaffirms fiction's powers and possibilities.”
03/08/2008
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The Guardian
Blake Morrison
“It's a bold experiment - not life writing so much as the righting of lives... Does fiction carry more authority than fact, then? It's an argument which Philip Roth has often had with himself... And Lessing, like Roth, implies there are no easy answers. Her fiction is fluent but fuzzy; her facts are awkward but vivid... Writers approaching 90 aren't supposed to write with vigour or experiment with form. But Lessing has never done the expected thing, and Alfred and Emily is one more exception in an exceptional career.”
17/05/2008
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The Independent
Susan Williams
“This difference in style between the two halves intensifies the contrast between the lives that might have been, and the sad reality – the tensions and difficulties not only of the Taylers' marriage, but of life in British Africa. The master-servant relationship... [appears] here as a matter-of-fact detail in colonial life... southern Africa has many different histories. Lessing's own, remarkable achievement is to question the inevitability of those histories. The very structure of Alfred and Emily brilliantly interrogates the shadow of empire and war – the contrast between what actually happened, and what might have been.”
16/05/2008
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The New York Times
Michiko Kakutani
“This fictional portion of the book lacks all the beautiful specificity of the memoir part of the volume, which shimmers with precisely remembered details... The fictional Alfred and Emily are curiously abstract figures, fleshed out with few psychological specifics... they are spindly line drawings, assigned a single quality or two and sent on generic social peregrinations. These characters suggest that Ms. Lessing has a hard time imagining her mother and father as people other than her parents, or, for that matter, imagining a reality in which she herself did not exist. ”
05/08/2008
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The Daily Telegraph
Caroline Moore
“There is something fiercely obsessive underlying this extremely strange book... I fully expected... to be more gripped by the first, fictional half of Alfred and Emily than by the bitty re-hash offered in the second. Yet as a work of fiction in its own right, the novella is oddly ungripping... Rewriting the past is a work of escape, an urgent but never-ending imperative, but one in which closure is always impossible. That, perhaps, is why Alfred and Emily reads both like the tail-end of an earlier work, and work-in-progress.”
11/05/2008
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