Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Briefing for a Descent into Hell by Doris Lessing

This was a tricky read for me.  One might have thought it would have stirred up some ghosts as it relates to a mental illness, a breakdown and how it was dealt with by the medical profession and by the protagonists friends and family.  But it wasn't a matter of stirring up the muddy waters of my protracted bout of anxiety with depression, it was the burden of getting into the book and being engaged by it.  The opening section of the novel is lengthy and I found this rather heavy-going, turgid to get through.  Once the unrelenting narrative of the protagonist's dream whilst he spent the early weeks of his illness sleeping had been accounted for, the novel opened up into some sort of 'action' in terms of interaction between Professor Charles Watkins and the doctors into whose care he had been placed and with the people who visited him.  Exchanges of letters are interspersed as well as accounts of episodes in Watkins' past.  In the end three letters suggest he has made a complete recovery but whether this is because the advice of one doctor that the patient should be administered with EST or not is not made clear.

Here is a synopsis

A study of a man beyond the verge of a nervous breakdown, this is a brilliant and disturbing novel by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Penniless, rambling and incoherent, a man is found wandering at night on London's Embankment.

Taken to hospital and heavily sedated, he tells the doctors of his incredible fantastical voyage, adrift on the ocean, landing on unknown shores, flying on the back of a huge white bird.  Identified as Charles Watkins, a Cambridge Classics professor, he is visited by family and friends, each revealing clues to the nature of his breakdown.

As the doctors try to cure him, Watkins begins a fierce battle to hold on to his magnificent inner world, as it gradually acquires a greater reality than the everyday...`Briefing for a Descent into Hell' is one of Doris Lessing's most brilliantly achieved novels, linking her early work, which explored the nature of subjectivity, with her later experiments in science fiction.

Its indictment of the tyranny of society is powerful, disturbing and, as always, magnificently rendered.

And this is what appears on the dust jacket of the first edition in 1971:

Doris Lessing's new novel - which she defines as inner space fiction - is an incomparably exciting voyage into the marvellous, terrifying, unexplored, yet sometimes glimpsed territory of the inner man.

Professor Charles Watkins (Classics), doomed to spin endlessly in the currents of the Atlantic, makes a landfall at last on a tropical shore. He discovers a reined stone city, participates - moon-dazed - in bloody rituals in the paradisiacal forest, witnesses the savage war of the Rat-dogs and is borne on the back of the lordly White Bird across the sea of the dead. Finally, the Crystal claims him, whirling him out into space on a breathtaking cosmic journey.

Yet this most exotic of trips is as firmly rooted in the reality of a mental breakdown as De Quinceys fantasies were in the chemistry of opium. Watkins is a patient of Central Intake Hospital, an enigma to the doctors who try with ever more powerful drugs to subdue his minds adventure, a candidate for electric shock treatment. In a series of extraordinary letters - brilliantly illuminating both the writers and their subject - Watkins is reconstructed by those who have known him: the forgotten women who have loved him, or been awakened by him; the pendant, incensed by his intellectual anarchy; the wartime colleague around whose exploits with the Yugoslav partisans Watkins builds an astonishing fantasy.

Doris Lessing believes that society's treatment of the mentally ill is civilizations biggest and blackest blind spot, and that it is through the minds of the broken-down that truths we choose to shut out enter like the disguised messengers in myths and fairy tales. Developing themes central to The Golden Notebook and The Four Gated City, this book is her most astounding imaginative achievement - a rare work which explores new areas of thought.

There is much to learn about Doris Lessing from her website:  http://www.dorislessing.org/

In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/

I am fascinated to discover this Prize has been going since 1901.

Orkney

Orkney by Amy Sackville

I saw this book and liked the title, because I have been there, and the cover looked interesting.  It showed promise of things marine, maybe mermaids.  But, what a strange reading experience this was.  Once I got into it and worked out what I thought was 'going on' I read it as one sort of story to find that most other people (reviewers) have taken the narrative, as it were, at face value.

On a remote island in Orkney, a curiously matched couple arrive on their honeymoon. He is an eminent literature professor; she was his pale, enigmatic star pupil as much as forty years his junior.

Alone beneath the shifting skies of this untethered landscape, the professor realises how little he knows about his new bride and yet, as the days go by and his mind turns obsessively upon the creature who has so beguiled him, she seems to slip ever further from his yearning grasp. Where does she come from? Why did she ask him to bring her north? What is it that constantly draws her to the sea?

Here I thought was a novel about the professor's imagination, his fantasy, his delusion.  There he was in the rented cottage and everything that transpired was a dream born of an infatuation he had developed for his student.

I quite expected this to be revealed to the reader, in some very subtle way but unless I am rather dense, the ending resolved with the disappearance of the young woman, with no hint of explanation as to where, how, why.  The ending was very unsatisfactory indeed.

What I could commend the book for is a narrative frequently interwoven with evocative descriptions of the maritime beauty of the setting for the novel, the ever-changing faces of the beach, the shore, above all the sea.  That is a milieu in which I have spent many many hours pursuing my passion for conchology.  Sackville has received appreciative review of her lyrical use of language but as a novel I could neither believe in it as a fantasy, nor as a poetic and enigmatic account of a honeymoon on a remote island.

Published reviews:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/review-orkney-by-amy-sackville-8498004.html

https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/2013/01/oxygen-by-amy-sackville/