The travails of the lovelorn

THERE is no weapon more brutal than love, particularly is no more than an expression of ego and self interest. Several of the characters in Doris Lessing's unconvincing new novel Love, Again (Flamingo, £15.99 in UK), her first in eight years, all suffer from the most juvenile form of love sickness. Another writer might have taken Lessing's thesis and turned it into a frothy, Noel Cowardesque farce. But with someone as humourless as Lessing, comedy is unlikely to thrive. And doesn't.

A clumsily written, 300 page report on the sexual frustration of a conceited, ageing woman, which loosely masquerades as a novel, should test the patience of many readers. Very early in this long, long narrative, it becomes obvious that the characters are not only utterly unsympathetic, they are not even interesting. Many of them might have escaped from the pages of an Iris Murdoch novel - any Iris Murdoch novel.

The tragic life and work of a beautiful young woman crushed by 19th century social convention forms the structure, or in this case skeleton, on which Lessing drapes the fragile fabric of a weak story. Julie Vairon, a talented musician, composer and artist, finds her gifts and beauty will not attract lovers worthy enough to stand by her. Two passionate romances with men who weaken when faced with having to choose between society and her leave her with one more chance. This comes in the form of a man she likes but knows she can never love. She kills herself rather than compromise.

Tragic heroines doomed by love are appealing subjects, particularly to Hollywood movie makers. Lessing's cynics are slightly more civilised, though. She places Julie's story in the hands of the Green Bird, a London theatre group. The four members become interested when an unsolicited play arrives, written by an amateur whose only qualification for the job is that he is desperately in love with the dead Julie. The script is a mess, so Lessing's feisty central character, Sarah Durham, the aged but once strongly sexually attractive woman, adapts the story and revives Vairon's haunting music.

What follows is as self conscious as a master class in weeping. Sarah and her colleagues engage in Lessing's version of smart theatre talk. Once the casting begins, everyone converses in a slick shorthand drawing heavily on lines from pop songs. Before most of the male characters begin falling in love with Sarah, who was widowed young and raised her two children alone, we are treated to a large helping of her on going debate about the loss of youth and beauty and the unfairness of love being lavished only on the young:

"She was thinking of Aschenbach's passion as an elderly man for the boy in Venice. Is it that we all have to suffer the fate of falling in love, when old, with someone young and beautiful, and if so, why? What was it all about?"

Sarah falls in love with Bill, the preeningly obnoxious young male star of the play within the novel. Her common sense makes a feeble attempt at rationalising these feelings - Lessing rationalises throughout the book. Trudging through the debris of the plot and its graceless prose, the reader looks for an explanation beyond Sarah's uninteresting crisis. How could Lessing's rational self possibly have allowed her to publish this novel?

When Sarah is not examining her body, recalling its former glories and deciding that it is still not too bad - ..... her body had been a pretty good one, and it held its shape (more or less) till she moved, when a subtle disintegration set in, and areas shapely enough were surfaced with the fine velvety wrinkles of an elderly peach" - and not resenting the merciless beauty of young women, she feasts greedily on Bill's banal charms. Cursed with an ego the size of Mount Everest, and a pea sized brain, Bill defies caricature. Meanwhile, Sarah's tedious internal monologue continues: "When I was young - and not so young - men were always falling in love with me and I took it for granted ... When a man looked at me in that particular way, the burning accusing eyes, the aggression, the body that made the single flagrant assertion, I want you, did I then give him a single compassionate thought? Yet I knew what a terrible thing love is, and there is no excuse. There is a terrible arrogance that goes with physical attractiveness, and far from criticising it, we even admire it."

Sarah at 65 appears to be discovering the reality that most people encounter by thirty - youth and beauty are not immortal. Does Lessing believe she is presenting new discoveries? She may have forgotten that centuries of world literature testify to the fact that Sarah's revelations are as old as man. Lessing has previously explored ageing, in Diary of a Good Neighbour and in If the Old Could. in this novel, a confused man is dying of love for a woman he never met, and a woman of 65 is tormented by lust inspired by a calculating young man; meanwhile the characters make such comments such as: "I didn't say I wasn't finding literature useful. But it's come down to Proust. He's the only one I can keep my attention on", and while the lovelorn Stephen is sighing over his dead heroine, Sarah asks: "Have you read The Sorrows of Werther recently?"

This self satisfied novel, with its cargo of one dimensional egomaniacs, has no life, no love, no vulnerability, no passion, no art, no grace, and ultimately no point. The disgruntled Sarah's sentimental education is more about wounded pride and thwarted appetite than love at any level.