Robert's Reviews > The Grandmothers

The Grandmothers by Doris Lessing is not, as the dust jacket copy states, a collection of "four short novels." It's a bound volume containing three long short stories and a concluding novella, "A Love Child." And with one exception, it's very, very good.

The opening story, "The Grandmothers," is a mischievous but persuasive piece of wickedness in which two close friends end up being the lovers of each other's sons. There's a cosy quality to this pseudo-Oedipal tale that envelops the sons totally. What could be better than a woman unhappy in her marrige whom you've known all your life, is still fairly young, and makes you feel rich and secure because she's yours without having had to go through growing up with her? The mistakes you might make as a lover are forgiven, the little things you ought to know are taught to you gently, and all in all, you're in the butter, home away from home.

Of course other young women begin to intrude and the grandmothers (because that's what the original mothers become) have a sense of realism about this. They know, or persuade one another, that the fantasy can't go on forever. And this is interesting, too: the decoupling, the way one of the younger women traps one of the boys, and then, of course, the bitter denouement, which I won't spoil.

The fact that "The Grandmothers" is set in South Africa, along the sea, helps. It's good scenery. There is (racial issues aren't a focal point) a quality of distant completeness about that world at that time; there's an underlying, unstated argument here that ambition isn't a central human need...if you're born in the right place across the street from the right woman.

The next story, "Victoria and the Steveneys", is a story about a black Londoner who falls in with a white, culturally liberal family as a child--by accident, really--and then, as time passes, gives birth to a child by one of the younger family members...and then, as time passes, reveals the existence of this child and proceeds to lose her to the better-endowed, more energetic, irresistible white family. The contrast in life styles, attitudes, prospects, and moral grounding between all these folks is acutely presented. At the same time, the "long story" form, which I enjoy a great deal, provides most of a novel's impact in more concentrated style. Time passes, scenes unfold on artfully altered premises, the impetus and inevitabilty of the narrative catches you up, and the conclusion has that pungency one expects of Lessing. She's masterful. The comparisons would be Alice Munro of today and Henry James of yesterday's yesterday.

Now I'll say something about "The Reason for It," the third story. It doesn't belong in this collection. It's one of Lessing's fantasy or other-world fables, and it's sort of no good, a clunker: renaming disappointment and cultural decay and associating it with the spirit of legends takes us tritely nowhere. Lessing is strong-willed enough to have been the one who insisted this book is where "The Reason for It" would go. Frankly, I see no other reason for it to be here.

Now, the longest piece, "A Love Child." This one is set in World War II. A young Englishman doesn't have any idea what he's being drafted into, misses all the good battles in Europe, sails wretchedly to India, and in a stopover in South Africa (Capetown), has a four day fling with a married woman who really was only trying to be a decent hostess to "the boys." He's smitten, she's more willing than she would have expected, her best friend is scandalized, and then the story goes on, as I indicated, to service in India, which is marginally better than captivity on a troop ship, but nothing like those four luminous days of shore leave in Capetown.

This is where the genius of the "long story" or "novella" operates so wonderfully. Things happen to James that aren't really relevant to his passion for Daphne,but they become a kind of container for his passion, and we sense he'll return to it, and the novella permits this in stages: first, he makes his way back to England, then he arranges to marry someone he can't love as much as he loves Daphne (surprise, surprise), then he tells his fiance about Daphne and the child he's deduced emerged from their encounter (bigger surprise), then he goes to South Africa looking for Daphne, then, years later, he takes his wife (Helen) to South Africa looking more for his son than for his long-lost love. In summarizing the plot, I'm not doing justice to it. Again, you need the weight of events, distractions, irrelevancies, and time to explore its fullness.

I'd recommend The Grandmothers as strongly as I'd suggest skipping the third tale. What a book this could be if it were a modest three tales. Lessing's insight into human psychology, her mastery of pace and plot, and her knowledge of the world are all of the first order. You live to love, you survive to hold onto that love, but you can't live or love forever: there's always some undertow dragging you out to sea, into war, into old age, or into a life, as Lessing proposes at a key point in "A Love Child," that isn't really yours. Yours is something altogether private and apart with its distinctive quotient of pain.



For more of my comments on contemporary fiction, see Tuppence Reviews (Kindle).