Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Great title, isn’t it? Doris Lessing’s 1971 novel relates the inner rumblings of the disturbed mind of Charles Watkins, a classics professor from Cambridge, found wandering near the Embankment with no identification and no memory of who he is. The story is related through a slightly clunky mixture of Watkins’ internal narrative, snatches of semi-lucid conversation between him and his doctors, and letters from concerned friends and family delving into the strange events of his past.

This is a book that splits very obligingly into three sections. The first is dominated by the Professor’s delusions. He is shipwrecked after his friends are taken from their vessel by a mysterious, crystalline UFO. He survives on a beautiful island, discovering an ancient city. He sleeps amongst the deserted ruins, developing an unhealthy obsession with the moon, and awaits the return of the crystal which, he feels sure, must have simply overlooked him the first time. But before it returns the city is tarnished, invaded by dog-men and monkeys who desecrate the buildings, fight savage battles and choke the ancient streets with corpses. The crystal does not come.

Part two of the novel could be said to be the denouement (spoiler alert) as we are elevated to the heavens for a conversation amongst the gods. This is where the title comes in. They see a poor planet, wracked by meteor damage, inhabited by a race of primitive apes whose brains are choked by a poisonous atmosphere and who can barely cling to existence, despite their delusions of technological advancement. A party of gods are briefed to descend and drag this planet back from the brink, before instability spreads throughout the solar system. They are warned before they set out that, although they will be brain-printed with the knowledge of their mission and what they are, the descent and transformation into human beings will be so traumatic that there is a good chance they will have no awareness of themselves as they were before.

Charles Watkins is a god. He doesn’t know it, but the vague imprint is on his brain, like something glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye. The final third of the novel is driven by the hope that he will unearth this ancient knowledge before his doctors cure him.

My main problem with this novel (and you might not think it from that synopsis) is that not very much happens in it. For much of the time it is duty rather than interest that pulls you through. The plot is implicit, and only begins to surface when you understand what is going on above the Earth. When something does happen – the conflict in the ancient city, or a beautiful, Hemingway-esque vignette of Watkins’ wartime experience fighting with guerrillas in the mountains of Yugoslavia – it is perfectly executed, reminding you that you are in the hands of a Nobel Prize-winning novelist.

The ideas that Lessing plays with and brings to life with incredible colour and realism are the kind of ideas more often found in short stories than in novels. She takes an idea – what if some of us were once gods, descended into a corrupt world, but have no idea that this is the case? – and twists it to its logical extreme, like Calvino or Borges. Do you ever feel anxious for no discernible reason? Ever feel like your brain is straining to uncover something that you can't even guess at? These little things connect us all, but we have no idea why. 

This is a fantastic way of writing short stories, but it is a tactic that easily reaches its limit, which is probably why it doesn’t drive many novels. You can only stretch an idea so far before you run out of material, and this method seems fundamentally hostile to those tricky little things like plot and character development that make a novel tick.

That sounds like a harsh review for a novel that I really did enjoy, but I think there were many aspects of it that could have been improved. I felt all along that Lessing’s imagination and purpose were constrained by the form of this novel. The letters, the doctors’ notes, the stilted conversations – all these felt like unwise literary devices that got in the way of the beautiful idea behind the book. Clearly this was a highly experimental effort, but I think it could have been just as beautiful and far more readable if it had been a little more conventional.

Ubiquitous Cities

I read Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino a little while ago because I heard a few of my friends discussing it. Here are my thoughts.

The book is a fictional account of the travels of Marco Polo, as related by the traveller himself to Kublai Khan. His descriptions of various cities are interspersed with a dialogue with the Khan, in which it gradually becomes clear to the reader that all the cities described are really facets of a single city, Venice. I feel no compunction in spoiling this for you, because Vintage Classics, in their infinite wisdom, spoilt it for me by putting that morsel of information on the back cover.

Invisible Cities almost seems like a rough draft or a scrapbook full of ideas. Each city is unique, whether this is because of its unlikely location, bizarre architecture, or the characters and actions of its inhabitants. In one city, the citizens trail threads between themselves and all of their acquaintances, with different colours of thread symbolising different relationships; familial ties, business dealings, romantic entanglements. Finally, when there are so many threads that normal life becomes impossible, the inhabitants will abandon the city and move somewhere else, leaving their deserted, spider-webbed homes to be gradually destroyed by the elements. In another city, the residents build an exact replica of their metropolis underground in order to house the dead and make the transition from life to death less jarring. Or was it the dead who built the upper city?

Each city is a puzzling vignette, a glimpse of a different society and an entirely different way of going about one’s life. Many of them are very beautiful and thought provoking.

For me, it is precisely this that makes Invisible Cities so unsatisfying. Calvino dangles an idea in front of your eyes, and then whisks it away. Each city is given just a page or so. I’m sure the idea is to tantalise, but I found that the arrangement of the novel into single-page chapters was clunky and awkward, and many of the cities read like frustratingly abortive potential places. Somehow, they do not quite exist. Many of them cry out to be entire novels, beautiful and paradoxical ideas for societies that could be almost infinitely expanded. Why not do what Borges does, and take a philosophical trinket and stretch it to its logical conclusion? There are so many worlds that could be spun out from this book, but perhaps the elegance of these cities and ideas would be lost if they were used in this way. Their brevity and ambiguity certainly grants them a spell-like fascination.

My view of Invisible Cities is partly coloured by The Book of Dave, which I’ve nearly finished reading. Will Self calls London ‘the once and future city,’ and toys with the same kind of timelessness which Calvino does. London and Venice are both magical in the way they stretch away before and behind us, but I personally find the depth and saturation of Self’s 500-page vision of a city more enchanting than Calvino’s brief work.

This may be a little unfair though, since I’ve never been to Venice.

The Book Sponge

I have a habit, and I’m not sure whether it is good or bad. Sometimes when I’m reading, a sentence or a paragraph just leaps out at me. It’s a cliché, but some things just resonate. So I write them down somewhere. I almost highlighted something in a novel the other day, but then I thought that would make me look a bit too much like some kind of literature student.

So, why could this possibly be bad, you ask? Well, I believe that I am a sponge. I do it with music, with pop culture, and with books. I absorb things until they are pretty much a part of me. With music, this involves semi-obsessively listening to my latest crush, which tends to be reflected when I next pick up a guitar. With odd slices of pop culture, it involves internalising and then quoting with irksome frequency (I have done this one since I was a child; everyone does, to some extent). With books, this involves cutting out pieces that I particularly like and leaving them lying around on my laptop. Then I read them a few more times every now and then. It’s a sort of bluffer’s guide to knowing the whole book really well, I suppose. It means that a part of it remains lodged in memory.

Naturally, I blame my father for this. His memory is like a mutilated encyclopaedia of snatches of poetry, literary references, bad jokes and obscene limericks. I have only just realised that I am doing more or less the same thing. Witness:

There was a young man named Dave,

Who kept a dead whore in a cave,

He said, ‘I know it’s disgusting,

And she needs a good dusting,

But think of the money I’ll save.’

See?

I am a sponge, and when it comes to books I have a theory. It is a theory worthy of one of Borges’ characters. Remember Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote? It is a short story about a modern-day individual who attempts to recreate Don Quixote. Not to copy it, but to write it again from scratch. He immerses himself in the language and the culture of the period, and he writes little stumps of the story which are identical to the original, yet somehow infinitely richer and more sublime.

If I can absorb styles of writing - in my more deluded moments I sometimes think I have a gift for writing pastiches – then the logical step is to read, and absorb, as many books as possible. I won’t say all of them, because there’s a lot of tripe out there. And I won’t say that I will attempt to recreate them, as Borges’ character does. Much as I enjoy picking small holes in the boundaries between reality and fiction, I do ultimately live in the real world. But if I didn't, this would be my masterplan for literary world domination.