Dave's Book Blog: "The Good Terrorist" by Doris Lessing

Thursday, 6 January 2022

"The Good Terrorist" by Doris Lessing

It's 1985ish. Alice and her friend Jasper join a squat; it's an old house with no plumbing facilities (so there are buckets full of shit on the top floor), no water, no gas or electricity. The squat is run by fellow comrades in a communist group who want to affiliate to the IRA.

Alice, despite her rabid denunciations of her fascist parents (on whom she sponges, from whom she steals), is, at heart, a nest-maker and one-by-one she solves the problems of the house, taking on the council and the police and burying the shit in a pit in the garden. Some of her comrades help her, others take advantage. Meanwhile she has a complicated non-sexual relationship with her boyfriend (who takes money from her so he can go cruising). Gradually the story evolves from a manual on how to run a squat into a novel chronicling the manoeuvres of splintered extreme left wing groups and how they are used by foreign governments. The climax of the book is the planning of an act of terrorism.

It is a brilliant read. It evokes the political atmosphere of the 1980s when there were (usually IRA-inspired) acts of terrorism on Britain's streets and when the Soviet Union still existed so that it was possible to believe in the leftist rhetoric of proletarian revolution and fascist reaction. But most of all, the characters in the squat are so well-drawn in all their complexities: the hysterical Faye and her lesbian partner Roberta (who is fundamentally Faye's keeper), the physically and psychologically fragile Philip, Jim who is always so happy except when he is utterly depressed, and, of course, Alice, whose complex relationship with her parents provides a compelling backdrop to her fundamental innocence.

But it is also a portrait of inadequacy and hopelessness.

It is written as a more-or-less continuous narrative, unchaptered (but it is paced perfectly, with the major turning-point almost exactly half way through), in the third person but almost entirely from Alice's point of view (though she is very good at reading the verbal cues and body language of others and inferring motives).

Selected quotes:

"Against - stupidity - the gods - themselves - contend - in vain." (p 58) This is a quote from The Maid of Orleans Act III, Scene 6, written in 1801 by Frederick Schiller who also wrote Don Carlos.
"Communes. Squats. If you don't take care that's what they become - people sitting around discussing their shitty childhoods. ... Or is that what you want? A sort of permanent encounter group. Everything turns into that, if you let it." (p 130)
"It was a thin papery kiss, but she understood that; understood when - rarely - she simply had to put her arms around him in an exuberance of love, the instinctive shrinking, as though she held a wraith, something cold and wailing, a lost child." (p 158)
"He was white with his hatred. His thin pink lips, which normally she loved for their delicacy and sensitivity, were stretched in a colourless line, and between them showed sharp discoloured teeth. He looked like a rat." (p 160)
"Affectionate impulses kept attacking her arms; they yearned to embrace him." (p 251)
"All you people, marching up and down and waving banners and singing pathetic little songs ... To the people who really run this world, you are a joke. They watch you at it and think: Good, that's keeping them busy." (p 360)