The London Observer: Doris Lessing

Abstract

To read Doris Lessing is to move into a world of change. Her realist fiction and space fiction alike take a long, broad view: ‘All history is the history of empires rising and falling.’¹ At the end of the twentieth century men and women lead lives still driven, Lessing believes, by the upheavals of the First World War and then the Second; they are the ‘children of violence’. This phrase, the title of her sequence of five novels about Martha Quest, refers to ‘children’ bred in an age of violence and inevitably damaged by that heritage.