The Good Terrorist

The Good Terrorist

Front cover of the first UK edition of The Good Terrorist showing the author's name and book title, and a heavily pixelated picture of a woman's face

Cover of first UK edition
Author Doris Lessing
Country United Kingdom
Genre Political novel
Publisher Jonathan Cape (UK)
Knopf (US)
Publication date
 1985
ISBN 0-224-02323-3
OCLC 466286852

The Good Terrorist is a 1985 political novel by Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing. It was first published in the United Kingdom in January 1985 by Jonathan Cape, and in the United States in September 1985 by Alfred A. Knopf. The story examines events in the life of Alice, a naïve and well-intentioned squatter, who moves in with a group of radicals in London, and is drawn into their terrorist activities.

Lessing was inspired to write the book by the 1983 Harrods bombing in London by the IRA. She had been a member of the British Communist Party in the early 1950s, but later grew disillusioned with communism. Several commentators have labelled The Good Terrorist a satire, while Lessing called it "quite a funny book".[1] Some critics have called the novel's title an oxymoron, stating that it highlights Alice's ambivalent nature, and that she is not a good person, nor a good revolutionary.

The Good Terrorist divided critics. Some reviewers were impressed by the book's insight and characterization, while others complained about the novel's style and the character's lack of depth. The Good Terrorist was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and won the Mondello Prize and the WH Smith Literary Award.

Plot summary

The Good Terrorist is written in the third person from the point of view of Alice, an unemployed politics and economics graduate in her mid-thirties who drifts from commune to commune. She considers herself a "revolutionary", fighting against "fascist imperialism", and, in the early-1980s, joins a squat of like-minded "comrades" in a derelict house in London.[2] Accompanying Alice is Jasper, a graduate she took in at a student commune she lived in fifteen years ago. Jasper became dependent on Alice and followed her from squat to squat, while Alice fell in love with him, only to become frustrated later by his aloofness and homosexual preferences.

The abandoned house is in a state of disrepair and is earmarked by the City Council for demolition. To the indifference of the other comrades, Alice takes it upon herself to clean up and renovate the house, and convinces the Council that it is worth saving. She also persuades the authorities to restore the electricity and water. Alice becomes the house's "mother", cooking for everyone, and dealing with the local police, who are trying to evict them.

The members of the squat belong to the Communist Centre Union (CCU), and attend demonstrations and pickets. Alice involves herself in some of these activities, but spends most of her time working on the house. To be more useful to the struggle, Jasper and Bert travel to Ireland to persuade the IRA to let the CCU join them, but they are rejected. They also take a trip to the Soviet Union to offer their services, but are turned down. The IRA and KGB, however, have begun taking notice of them and start using the house as a conduit for propaganda material and other "matériel", including guns.[3] Packages start arriving in the middle of the night, and Alice, to avoid attracting the attention of the police, raises objections. This results in visits to the house by unidentified "professionals", who question the squat's decision making.[4] After this, the comrades decide to ignore orders from any foreign body and to act on their own as "Freeborn British Communists".[5]

Going it alone now, they start experimenting with explosives, and build a car bomb. Alice does not fully support this action, but accepts the majority decision. They target an upmarket hotel in Knightsbridge, but their inexperience results in the premature detonation of the bomb, which kills Faye, one of their members, and several passers-by. The remaining comrades, shaken by what they have done, decide to leave the squat and go their own way. Alice, disillusioned by Jasper, chooses not to follow him and remains behind because she can't bear to abandon the house she has put so much effort into. Despite her initial reservations about the bombing, Alice feels a need to justify their actions to others, but realises it would be fruitless because "[o]rdinary people simply didn't understand".[6] She acknowledges that she is a terrorist now, though she cannot remember when the change happened.[7]

Background

A head-and-shoulders photograph of an elderly woman
Doris Lessing speaking at a Cologne literature festival in Germany, 2006

Doris Lessing's interest in politics began in the 1940s while she was living in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). She was attracted to a group of "quasi-Communist[s]" and joined their Left Book Club in Salisbury (now Harare).[8] Later, prompted by the conflicts arising from racial segregation that was prominent in Rhodesia at the time, she also joined the Southern Rhodesian Labour Party.[9] Lessing moved to London in 1949 and began her writing career there. She became a member of the British Communist Party in the early 1950s, and was an active campaigner against the use of nuclear weapons.[9]

By 1964 Lessing had published six novels, but grew disillusioned with Communism and, after reading The Sufis by Idries Shah, turned her attention to Sufism, an Islamic belief system.[10][11] This prompted her to write her "space fiction" series, Canopus in Argos: Archives, which drew on Sufi concepts. The series was not well received by some of her readers,[10] who felt she had abandoned her "rational worldview".[12]

The Good Terrorist was Lessing's first book to be published after the Canopus in Argos series, which prompted several retorts from reviewers, including, "Lessing has returned to Earth",[13] and "Lessing returns to reality".[14] Several commentators have labelled The Good Terrorist a satire,[15][16][17] while Lessing called it "quite a funny book".[1] She said:

[I]t's not a book with a political statement. It's ... about a certain kind of political person, a kind of self-styled revolutionary that can only be produced by affluent societies. There's a great deal of playacting that I don't think you'd find in extreme left revolutionaries in societies where they have an immediate challenge.[13]

Lessing said she was inspired to write the novel by the 1983 Harrods bombing in London by the IRA.[1] "[T]he media reported it to sound as if it was the work of amateurs. I started to think, what kind of amateurs could they be?"[13] She realised "how easy it would be for a kid, not really knowing what he or she was doing, to drift into a terrorist group."[13] Lessing already had Alice in mind as the central character: "I know several people like Alice—this mixture of ... maternal caring, ... and who can contemplate killing large numbers of people without a moment's bother."[1] She described Alice as "quietly comic[al]" because she is so full of contradictions.[13] She said she also knew who Alice's "boyfriend", Jasper, would be, but was surprised how some of the other characters developed, like the pill-popping and fragile Faye,[18] who turned out to be a "destroyed person".[1]

Genre

The Good Terrorist has been labelled a "political novel",[19][20] but several commentators have pointed out that it is more a novel about politics than political fiction.[21] In From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Louise Yelin called it "a political novel or, more precise, a novel about politics that calls into question the authenticity of political beliefs".[22] William H. Pritchard took a harder line and questioned Alison Lurie's decision to label the book a "political novel" in her review of it in The New York Review of Books.[23]

The Good Terrorist has also been called a satire. In her book Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change, Gayle Greene called it a "satire of a group of revolutionaries",[15] and Susan Watkins, writing in Doris Lessing: Border Crossings, described it as a "dry and satirical examination of a woman's involvement with a left-wing splinter group".[16] A biography of Lessing for the Swedish Academy on the occasion of her winning the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature described the book as "a satirical picture of the need of the contemporary left for total control and the female protagonist's misdirected martyrdom and subjugation".[9] Yelin said the novel "oscillat[ed] between satire and nostalgia".[17] Academic Robert E. Kuehn, however, felt that it is not satire at all. He stated while the book could have been a "satire of the blackest and most hilarious kind", in his opinion Lessing "has no sense of humor, and instead of lashing [the characters] with the satirist's whip, she treats them with unremitting and belittling irony".[24]

Virginia Scott called the novel a fantasy. Drawing on Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in The International Fiction Review, she wrote that "[Lessing's] Alice with her group of political revolutionaries can be seen as a serious fantasy which has striking parallels to ... Carroll's Alice".[25] Scott noted that at one point in The Good Terrorist, Faye refers to Alice as "Alice the Wonder, the wondrous Alice",[26] alluding to Carroll's Alice.[25]

Themes

A photograph of a multi-storey department store
Harrods department store, the 1983 bombing of which inspired Lessing to write The Good Terrorist

The novelist American Judith Freeman wrote that one of Lessing's common themes present in The Good Terrorist is that of keeping one's identity in a collective. This theme suggests that problems occur when we are "pressed into conformity".[27] Freeman said that Alice is a "quintessential good woman", but turns bad under peer pressure.[27]

Another theme present is the symbolic nature of the house. Margaret Scanlan stated that as in books like Mansfield Park and Jane Eyre, The Good Terrorist "defines a woman in terms of her house".[28] Writing in the journal Studies in the Novel, Katherine Fishburn said that Lessing often uses a house to symbolise "psychological or ontological change", and that here, "the house ... symbolizes Alice's function in the story".[29] Yelin described The Good Terrorist as "an urban, dystopian updating of the house-as-England genre, [where] ... England is represented by a house in London".[22] Writing in "Politics of Feminine Abuse: Political Oppression and Masculine Obstinacy in Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist", Lalbakhsh and Yahya suggest that the house and the "oppressive relations" in it reflect the similarly oppressive relationships in the society it resides in.[30]

Several critics have focused on the theme of motherhood. In "Mothers and Daughters/Aging and Dying", Claire Sprague wrote "Mothers ... forever function as mirrors for their daughters. The complex circularity of daughters fighting mothers and then becoming mothers themselves both repeats and advances Lessing's themes and patterns".[31] The British novelist Jane Rogers said that The Good Terrorist "is as unsparing and incisive about motherhood as it is about the extreme left".[4] She stated that motherhood here "is terrible": Alice's mother is reduced to despair continually yielding to her selfish daughter's demands; Alice mothers Jasper, and has a similar despairing relationship with him.[4] Motherhood is depicted here as "an obsessive need to love and protect those who seem weaker and less adequate than yourself, and yet who reject and hurt you".[4]

Feminist themes and the subjugation of women have also been associated with The Good Terrorist. Scanlan indicated that while many of the comrades in the book are women, they find that political activity does not elevate their position, and that they are "trapped in the patriarchy they despise".[28] Yelin suggested that while Lessing ridicules the male members of the CCU and their role playing, she is also critical of the female members "who collude in male-dominant political organizations and thus in their own oppression".[32] But with the book's allusions to Jasper's homosexuality, Yelin added that Lessing's "critique of women's infatuation with patriarchal misogyny and their emotional dependence on misogynist men" is muted by homophobia and the "misogyny pervasive in patriarchal constructions of (male) heterosexuality".[32] Lalbakhsh and Yahya noted that Lessing depicts Alice as a "typical housewife" who cares for her family, in this case, the squat, but is "ignored and neglected".[33] They concluded that Alice's fate is sealed because, according to the British socialist feminist Juliet Mitchell, women are "fundamental to the human condition", yet "their economic, social, and political roles ... are marginal".[34]

Critical opinion

Several critics have called the novel's title an oxymoron. Robert Boschman suggested it is indicative of Alice's "contradictory personality" – "torn between 'doing good' and terrorizing her family and society, between rebuilding [their] vandalized house ... and tearing down the social order".[35] In The Hudson Review George Kearns wrote that the title "hovers above the novel with ... irony".[36] The reader assumes that Alice is the "good terrorist", who "shines with middle-class values of decency, fair play, cleanliness and domestic order", but that while she may be a good person, she is "rotten at being a terrorist".[36] Writing in World Literature Today, Mona Knapp concluded that Lessing's heroine, the "good terrorist", is not a good person, nor a good revolutionary.[37] She knows how to renovate houses and manipulate people to her advantage, but she is unemployed and steals money from her parents.[37] When real revolutionaries start using the squat to ship arms to, she panics,[37] and going behind her comrades's backs, she makes a telephone call to the authorities to warn them of their bomb.[29] Knapp called Alice "a bad terrorist and a stunted human being".[37] Fishburn suggested that it is Lessing herself who is the "good terrorist", symbolised here by Alice, but that hers is "political terrorism of a literary kind", where she frequently disguises her ideas in "very domestic-looking fiction", and "direct[ly] challenge[s] ... our sense of reality".[29]

Kuehn described Alice as "well-intentioned, canny and sometimes lovable", but who "simply stopped developing, sexually and socially" and, at 36, is still dependent on her parents.[24] Yelin said Alice is "emotionally arrested in a state of perpetual adolescence",[22] and her need to "mother everyone" is "an extreme case of psychological regression or failure to thrive".[38] Greene wrote that Alice's "humanitarianism is ludicrous in her world",[39] and described her as "a figure so furiously at odds with herself that ... her efforts are at best fertile and at worst, lethal: for [she] is incapable of understanding what is going on around her, let alone doing anyone any good."[40]

Boschman called Lessing's narrative "ironic" because it "not only consistently portrays the gap between what Alice is and what she purports to be, it also demonstrates how Alice tries to conceal this disparity from herself."[41] Alice refuses to acknowledge that her "maternal activities" stem from her desire to win her mother's approval, and believing that her mother has "betrayed and abandoned" her, Alice turns to Jasper as a way to "continue to sustain her beliefs about herself and the world".[42] Even though Jasper takes advantage of her adoration of him by mistreating her, Alice still clings to him because her self-image "vigorously qualifies her perception of [him], and thus proliferates the denial and self-deception".[43] The fact that Jasper has turned to homosexuality, which Alice dismisses as "his emotional life",[44] "suits her own repressed desires".[45] Kuehn called Alice's obsession with the "hapless" and "repellent" Jasper "just comprehensible", adding that she feels safe with his gayness, even though she has to endure his abuse.[24]

Knapp stated that while Lessing exposes "selfproclaimed revolutionaries" as "spoiled and immature products of the middle class", she also "scorns their incompetence" at affecting any meaningful change.[37] Lessing is critical of the state which "feeds the very hand that terrorizes it", yet she also condemns those institutions that exploits the working class and ignores the homeless.[37] Knapp remarks that Lessing does not resolve these ambiguities, but instead "reports" on the "rottenness of both the state's supporters and its enemies".[37] Scanlan compared Lessing's comrades to Richard E. Rubenstein's terrorists in his book Alchemists of Revolution: Terrorism in the Modern World. Rubenstein wrote that when "ambitious idealists" have no "creative ruling class to follow or a rebellious lower class to lead [they] have often taken upon themselves the burden of representative action", which he said "is a formula for disaster".[46][47]

Reception

Critics have been divided on The Good Terrorist. Elizabeth Lowry highlighted this in the London Review of Books: "[Lessing] has been sharply criticised for the pedestrian quality of her prose, and as vigorously defended".[48] The Irish literary critic Denis Donoghue complained that the style of the novel is "insistently drab",[13] and Kuehn referred to Lessing's text as "surprisingly bland".[24] Lowry noted that the English academic Clare Hanson defended the book by saying that it is "a grey and textureless novel because it ... speaks a grey and textureless language".[48]

Freeman on the other hand called the book a "graceful and accomplished story", and a "brilliant account of the types of individuals who commit terrorist acts".[27] Writing in the Los Angeles Times Freeman said Lessing is "one of our most valuable writers" who "has an uncanny grasp of human relationships".[27] In a review in the Sun-Sentinel, Bonnie Gross described the novel as "rewarding reading" and Lessing's "most accessible" book to date.[49] She said it is the author's "strong descriptive prose and her precise and realistic characterizations" that makes this book "remarkable".[49] Gross felt that while some of the male characters are not that strong, the female characters are much better developed, particularly Alice, whom she found memorable.[49]

Amanda Sebestyen wrote in The Women's Review of Books that at first glance the ideas in The Good Terrorist appear deceptively simple, and the "plot-clinchers come almost insultingly pat".[50] But she added that Lessing's strength is her "stoic narrat[ion] of the daily effort of living", which excels in the way she describes day-to-day life in a squat.[50] Sebestyen also liked the book's depiction of Alice, who "speak[s] to me most disquietingly about myself and my generation".[50] In a review in off our backs, an American feminist publication, Vickie Leonard called The Good Terrorist a "fascinating book" that is "extremely well written".[51] She said the characters are "exciting" and "realistic", and that Lessing "accurately portrays the way political ideas both rule one's life and, at the same time, disappear in the minutiae of daily living".[51] Leonard added that even though Alice is not a feminist, the book illustrates the author's "strong admiration for women and their accomplishments while being uncomfortable with feminist ideology".[51]

Writing in The Guardian, Rogers described The Good Terrorist as "a novel in unsparing close-up" that examines society through the eyes of individuals.[4] She said it is "witty and ... angry at human stupidity and destructiveness, both within the system and without".[4] She liked the book's "compulsive power of the story-telling", and said that in the context of recent terrorist attacks in London, it is an example of "fiction going where factual writing cannot".[4] A critic in Kirkus Reviews wrote that Alice's story is "an extraordinary tour de force—a psychological portrait that's realistic with a vengeance".[14] The reviewer added that while Alice is "self-deluding" and "not an easy character to spend time with", the novel "is strong as a diagnostic study of political motivation", and "stronger still as an uncannily authentic character-study".[14]

Donoghue wrote in The New York Times that he did not care much about what happened to Alice and her comrades. He felt that the characters "have only the life of borrowed routine and inherited whim", and that Lessing presents Alice as "an unquestioned rigmarole of reactions and prejudices", which leaves no room for any further interest.[13] Donoghue complained that Lessing "hasn't worked her imagination or played it to the point of deciding whether Alice and her friends are the salt of the earth or its scum".[13] In a review in the Chicago Tribune, Kuehn felt that the work "creates almost no effect ... the climax fails to shock the reader and the book never reverberates in the mind".[24] He said Lessing's real interest here are her characters, but complained that they are too "trivial or two-dimensional or crippled by self-delusions" to be interesting.[24]

The Good Terrorist was shortlisted for the 1985 Booker Prize,[52] and in 1986 won the Mondello Prize[53] and the WH Smith Literary Award.[54]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Frick, Thomas (1988). "Interview: Doris Lessing, The Art of Fiction No. 102". The Paris Review. Retrieved 7 November 2014.
  2. ↑ Lessing 2013, pp. 8–9, 58.
  3. ↑ Lessing 2013, p. 304.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 Rogers, Jane (3 December 2005). "Dark times". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 November 2014.
  5. ↑ Lessing 2013, p. 376.
  6. ↑ Lessing 2013, p. 392.
  7. ↑ Lessing 2013, p. 393.
  8. ↑ Lessing, Doris May; Pickering, Jean (2003). "Doris Lessing: A Brief Chronology". A Home for the Highland Cattle and The Antheap. Broadview Press. p. 27. ISBN 1-55111-363-5.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 "Doris Lessing: Biobibliographical Notes". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 7 November 2014.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Hazelton, Lesley (25 July 1982). "Doris Lessing on Feminism, Communism and 'Space Fiction'". The New York Times. Retrieved 7 November 2014.
  11. ↑ Lessing, Doris (7 December 1996). "Idries Shah". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 15 September 1999. Retrieved 7 November 2014.
  12. ↑ Galin, Müge (1997). Between East and West: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. p. 21. ISBN 0-7914-3383-8.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7 Donoghue, Denis (22 September 1985). "Alice, The Radical Homemaker". The New York Times. Retrieved 7 November 2014.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 "The Good Terrorist". Kirkus Reviews. 15 August 1985. Retrieved 7 November 2014.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Greene 1997, p. 208.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Watkins, Susan (20 October 2011). "The 'Jane Somers' Hoax: Aging, Gender and the Literary Marketplace". In Ridout, Alice; Watkins, Susan. Doris Lessing: Border Crossings. A&C Black. p. 160. ISBN 978-1-4411-9264-6.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Yelin 1998, p. 94.
  18. ↑ Scanlan 1990, p. 190.
  19. ↑ "The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing". HarperCollins. Retrieved 18 March 2015.
  20. ↑ Lurie, Alison (19 December 1985). "Bad Housekeeping". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 18 March 2015. (subscription required)
  21. ↑ Janik, Del Ivan (1 January 2002). "Doris Lessing 1919–". In Janik, Vicki K.; Janik, Del Ivan; Nelson, Emmanuel Sampath. Modern British Women Writers: An A-to-Z Guide. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 202. ISBN 978-0-313-31030-0.
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 22.2 Yelin 1998, p. 92.
  23. ↑ Pritchard, William H. (1985). "Looking Back at Lessing". The Hudson Review (The Hudson Review, Inc) 48 (2): 323. JSTOR 3851830. (subscription required)
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 24.2 24.3 24.4 24.5 Kuehn, Robert E. (29 September 1985). "Doris Lessing 'Terrorist' Fails in the Execution". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 7 November 2014.
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 Scott, Virginia (1989). "Doris Lessing's Modern Alice in Wonderland: The Good Terrorist as Fantasy". The International Fiction Review 16 (2).
  26. ↑ Lessing 2013, p. 87.
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 27.2 27.3 Freeman, Judith (13 October 1985). "The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 7 November 2014.
  28. ↑ 28.0 28.1 Scanlan 1990, p. 193.
  29. ↑ 29.0 29.1 29.2 Fishburn 1988, p. 199.
  30. ↑ Lalbakhsh 2012, p. 54.
  31. ↑ Sprague, Claire (January 2003). "Mothers and Daughters/Aging and Dying". In Bloom, Harold. Doris Lessing. Infobase Publishing. p. 173. ISBN 978-0-7910-7441-1.
  32. ↑ 32.0 32.1 Yelin 1998, p. 96.
  33. ↑ Lalbakhsh 2012, pp. 55–56.
  34. ↑ Lalbakhsh 2012, pp. 56–57.
  35. ↑ Boschman 2003, p. 95.
  36. ↑ 36.0 36.1 Kearns 1986, p. 122.
  37. ↑ 37.0 37.1 37.2 37.3 37.4 37.5 37.6 Knapp, Mona (1986). "The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing". World Literature Today (University of Oklahoma) 60 (3): 470–471. doi:10.2307/40142299. JSTOR 40142299. (subscription required)
  38. ↑ Yelin 1998, p. 97.
  39. ↑ Greene 1997, p. 211.
  40. ↑ Greene 1997, p. 205.
  41. ↑ Boschman 2003, p. 101.
  42. ↑ Boschman 2003, pp. 102–103.
  43. ↑ Boschman 2003, p. 103.
  44. ↑ Lessing 2013, p. 34.
  45. ↑ Boschman 2003, p. 104.
  46. ↑ Scanlan 1990, p. 185.
  47. ↑ Rubenstein, Richard E. (1987). Alchemists of Revolution: Terrorism in the Modern World. Basic Books. p. 79. ISBN 978-0-465-00095-1.
  48. ↑ 48.0 48.1 Lowry, Elizabeth (22 March 2001). "Yeti". London Review of Books 23 (6): 29–30.
  49. ↑ 49.0 49.1 49.2 Gross, Bonnie (29 September 1985). "'Terrorist' Broadens Lessing's Appeal". Sun-Sentinel. Retrieved 7 November 2014.
  50. ↑ 50.0 50.1 50.2 Sebestyen, Amanda (1986). "Mixed Lessing". The Women's Review of Books (Old City Publishing, Inc.) 3 (5): 14–15. doi:10.2307/4019871. JSTOR 4019871. (subscription required)
  51. ↑ 51.0 51.1 51.2 Leonard, Vickie (1987). "The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing". off our backs (off our backs, inc.) 17 (3): 20. JSTOR 25795599. (subscription required)
  52. ↑ "The Booker Prize 1985". Man Booker Prize. Retrieved 7 November 2014.
  53. ↑ "Doris Lessing". Man Booker Prize. Retrieved 7 November 2014.
  54. ↑ Bloom, Harold (January 2003). Doris Lessing. Infobase Publishing. p. 258. ISBN 978-0-7910-7441-1.

Works cited

External links