One of the most enduring debates in literature is that of the serious versus the good. Throughout this century, many novelists and poets became writers of protest. Some were later abandoned by history - consider Alexander Solzhenitsyn - others were simply left behind by political change. The South African Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer is an interesting example of a writer whose work, even at its most stylistically limited, is invariably powerful and enduring. When writing about post-apartheid South Africa, Gordimer has continued to chronicle the story of a changing society.
Doris Lessing is another writer long accustomed to wearing the mantle of profundity. Novels such as The Golden Notebook (1962) and the "Children of Violence" sequence are acknowledged classics. Lessing, who was born in 1919, has amassed a vast body of work. Yet the best of it is probably contained in her non-fiction, where she has proved herself an astute observer. Much of her more recent fiction has been disappointing and aside from The Fifth Child (1988), none of it stands equal to that of her middle period. As time has passed, Lessing's fiction has been increasingly overshadowed by a self-conscious moral weight. It is as if she has now come to view herself as a seer, reducing fiction to a mere vehicle for her visionary status.
Prophets apparently move far beyond the basic requirements of fiction: Lessing's Love, Again (1995) was ponderous, self-absorbed and frankly embarrassing, and her turgid new book, Mara and Dann, subtitled An Adventure, is far from exciting. Set in a future in which society has been devastated by endless wars, it is as if she set out to write an apocalyptic odyssey but lacked sufficient interest and imagination to try. Surviving humans wander about in battered groups, wary and mutually suspicious. From the outset this novel is locked in the world of those offbeat, inanely-scripted television shows in which characters dressed in rags shaped out of animal skins attempt to reconstruct images of a lost world in which history, civilisation and memory mattered.
Added to the menace lurking is the return of the Ice Age. Even if Lessing had not announced, as she does in the preface, "it is set in the future, in Africa, called Ifrik because of how often we may hear how the short a becomes a short i", this is obvious.
Lessing has long viewed science fiction or space fiction as often containing "the most prophetic criticisms of the societies we live in". She is right, but that does not mean that her work is always as prophetic as she appears to think. There is nothing original about Mara and Dann, but it is mesmerisingly predictable and humourless.
At the outset of the book, the young eponymous heroine is presented with new names for herself and her brother. In an unconvincing, atmosphere-less setting dominated by dust, with half-hearted flurries of terror and chaos alternating with the occasional oasis of ease, their previous identities have fittingly disappeared. Mara and her brother endure a monotonous sequence of arrests, escapes, separations, reunions and dialogue which could only be spoken by robots.
In the course of the action Mara is transformed from a starving waif to a beauty. Central to the story, which is admittedly thin as Lessing's concerns are more polemical than plot-related, are the low fertility rates affecting the characters. Women are recruited to breeding programmes and men are assessed as potential stud animals. "Ida sent for Mara, and begged her to have a baby."
Much of what passes for conversations between Mara and Dann is compliments. Mara does notice her brother's volatile temperament, and most of her observations concern his looks. By the end, the characters may well be on their way to creating a Brave New World, the problem is who could possibly care?
