Lessing is alert to the capacity of some people to live, for a moment, a decade or a lifetime, inside an idea and live there with insistence enough to make the idea stand for the world. Words are not, however, the most memorable form in which images of mess and riot are projected.
The book rehearses images long congealed in our memories, and tries to make us imagine afresh what journalists and cameramen have so often delivered. Indeed, one of the problems with her new novel is that the scene it tries to evoke has already been lodged in our minds by television programs and newspaper photographs. Lessing's intuition, provisional and belated indeed, that realism isn't in a privileged relation to nature it is a convention like any other. But ''The Golden Notebook'' issued from Mrs. Normally, we think of realism as art that keeps up the pretense of being life. Lessing has variously preached, practiced and disavowed. ''The Golden Notebook'' gained critical attention by questioning the assumptions of the realism Mrs. In the process she discovers, not surprisingly, that a middle-class background is immensely helpful when you have to deal with bureaucrats. Alice and her companions call themselves the Communist Centre Union, and they plan to join the Irish Republican Army in some vague capacity as an ''England-based entity.'' But most of the novel is concerned with Alice's struggle to live in the house, at 43 Old Mill Road, and save it from demolition. While he goes out cruising, the poor baby tries to turn an abandoned house into a home fit to be inhabited by a floating group of radicals. She maintains a liaison blanche with Jasper, whose interests are resolutely homosexual. Lessing's good terrorist, otherwise soothed as ''the poor baby'' on the last page of the book, is Alice Mellings, 36, a college graduate with a degree in politics and economics, daughter of upper-middle-class parents in Hampstead. The London her new novel describes is not a place I would even want to visit.
But it is not clear whether she is here to stay or only passing through.
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$16.95.ĭORIS LESSING has returned to Earth, after years of voyaging in space in her ''Canopus in Argos'' series of novels.