Product Description

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. 'Here I still am,' says Doris Lessing, 'trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.' With the publication of Alfred and Emily she has done just that.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19912 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
'Writers approaching 90 aren't supposed to write with vigour or experiment with form. But Lessing has never done the expected thing and "Alfred & Emily" is one more exception in an exceptional career.' The Guardian 'Powerful!a page-turning narrative...a remarkable achievement!he very structure of Alfred & Emily brilliantly interrogates the shadow of empire and war -- the contrast between what actually happened, and what might have been.' The Independent 'Triumphant...heartbreaking...in this extraordinary valediction, she challenges the impossibility of escaping what we were born with.' Scotland on Sunday 'Simply the book that Lessing, 90 next year, was compelled to write next...in Alfred & Emily Lessing has found her way to an old and difficult truth. People are what they are, but what they are is also, at least in part, what they might have been.' Daily Telegraph 'Has the freshness, clarity and emotional acuity that made her first novel "The Grass is Singing" so outstanding!a tribute to a remakrable childhood, and a poignant memoir of the mother whose greatest legacy to her daughter was an invaluable gift for storytelling.' Literary Review 'One of the strangest books you will ever read.' Mail on Sunday 'This tale has a quality at once dreamy and wooden, like beautifully carved wooden dolls!vividly and urgently written!makes us think!about the moral and emotional power of different ways of telling a story.' Financial Times 'Vivid, turbulent, raw with emotion.' Sunday Telegraph 'Quietly extraordinary!this perfectly crafted book is, as Lessing knows, the latest instalment of a remarkable payback.' The Observer 'This tale has a quality at once dreamy and wooden, like beautifully carved wooden dolls...vividly and urgently written...makes us think...about the moral and emotional power of different ways of telling a story.' Financial Times 'Lessing's vivid, ambivalent memories of what is now Zimbabwe are fascinating.' Evening Standard 'Engaging, sympathetic and wise!offers a vivid and often charming picture of Lessing's childhood on a farm in Southern Rhodesia!he memoir is a gem, full of keen observation, vivid memories comment and reflections!read it yourself; you will find it very rewarding; a delight also.' The Scotsman 'Powerful!it is fascinating to see (Lessing) focus so sharply in her new book on what must be for us all, the most intimate of personal narratives: our parents' lives, what they were, or might have been.' The Times 'Intriguing!the first part!has many fascinating features!the second part!burns into vivd being as it re-examines Lessing's African childhood.' Sunday Times 'Vivid, turbulent, raw with emotion.' Sunday Telegraph Praise for Doris Lessing: 'She's up there in the pantheon with Balzac and George Eliot. We're lucky she's still writing.' Lisa Appignanesi, Independent 'She has an extraordinary feeling for the peculiar vulnerabilities of the young and the elderly. And her portraits of human relationships are of quite staggering beauty.' Ruth Scurr, The Times 'Doris Lessing has changed the way we think about the world.' Blake Morrison Praise for 'The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog': 'Lessing pierces the heart with the half quotations that Dann's scribes scribble down as the books fall to dust in their hands ! Lessing has much wisdom to impart although she is astute enough not to preach but to pose some unsettling questions.' Maggie Gee, Sunday Times

Scotsman
'Full of keen observation, vivid memories comment and reflections...read it yourself; you will find it very rewarding; a delight also.'

Observer
'Quietly extraordinary...this perfectly crafted book is, as Lessing knows, the latest instalment of a remarkable payback.'

Customer Reviews

Great reflective social history that will make you cry.
I am also a Lessing fan and welcomed this return to the topic of her mother Emily. I wept twice reading this book (note pages 170-171) the descriptions of Emily's nursing experiences during WWI (you can smell the blood, and visualise the horrific scene) Lessing, your mum was truely a remarkable women. The second weepy moment was when Emily pulled the ball gown (that she never wore) out of the infamous 'Wanted on Voyage' case (See pages 203-204.) A great summer read and a thought provoking piece of social history. Enjoy.

What If?

This work is a little like looking at an endless series of reflections in multiplied mirror images. Although the book is ostensibly about Ms. Lessing's parents, you feel a quest for her self-identity in every sentence. She seems to have a sort of survivor's remorse for having prospered in literature after having sprung, almost miraculously, from the stunted roots of her parents' shattered dreams.

The book opens with a novella in which Ms. Lessing imagines what her parents' life would have been like if World War I had not occurred and her mother had married the doctor of her dreams. From there, Ms. Lessing provides a brief note about the Royal Free Hospital from The London Encyclopedia. In Part Two, Ms. Lessing recounts the lives her parents lived after they married and her youth in Rhodesia.

The pain of World War I is so great that Ms. Lessing has trouble incorporating it into the novella or the nonfiction narrative. Clearly, the demands on her father, a badly wounded soldier, and her mother, an overwhelmed nurse dealing with casualties shipped fresh from the front, created more than the straw that broke the camel's back of normalcy. From that point of view, it's an antiwar book more than anything else.

What would her parents' great energy have led them to do in the alternative? She sees her father as a successful small-scale English farmer, rather than a failed Rhodesian one. She sees her mother emerging as a force behind better education rather than as a woman who is felled by a breakdown in Rhodesia.

It's natural to think of your parents as heroes and heroines, but that must be most difficult when their heroism mainly consisted of dealing with pain and frustration.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is to contemplate your own parents and to ask, "How would their lives have turned out differently if . . . ?" From there, you can cogitate all you want about the effect on whether you would have been born . . . and how you would have been different.

In a sense, it's a play on the common childhood fantasy of believing that one is a royal orphan who has been placed with commoners for safekeeping before the evil contenders for the throne can kill you.

Is it interesting? Yes. Is it something you must read? No.

A daughter's retelling
This is an interesting mix of fiction & non fiction. The first half is a fictional idea of what the lives of Lessing's parents (the Alfred & Emily of the title) could have been like if they hadn't married, and if WWI hadn't disrupted their lives. They meet, but marry other people and are fulfilled in different ways. Lessing feels that WWI blighted their lives, and had an effect on her own life as well. "That war, the Great War...squatted over my childhood...And here I still am, trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free." Her father lost his leg & met her mother when she was nursing at the Royal Free Hospital. They emigrated to Rhodesia, but it wasn't a great success. Alfred really wanted to be an English farmer in Surrey & Emily's great love was killed in the war, and her life after that was really only second best & full of regrets. The second half of the book is a memoir of Alfred & Emily's real lives. Lessing has written about her African childhood before, in her autobiographies & the Martha Quest series of novels. Here, though, she focuses more on her parents' experiences of struggle & hardship, & the result is a moving account of two people who could have been happier if world events had left them untouched.