ALFRED & EMILY
Doris Lessing
Harper
Memoir
ISBN: 9780060834883
ALFRED & EMILY is the moving story of three different lives: the marriage of the author’s parents, the lives they might have led had there never been the Great War, and the impact that the repercussions of their difficulties had on their daughter, Doris Lessing. Told with her usual straightforward method of storytelling, it is a revealing portrait of life in another time and of a difficult and diffident literary personality.
Alfred wanted to be a gentleman farmer. The life he led --- having suffered the loss of a leg during the war, he had a wooden leg for the rest of his life, which made his physical existence dull and slow --- was quite different from the one of his dreams. When he meets Emily at a cricket match in Colchester, his life takes an unexpected turn, which leads the family to Africa and then causes great uproar in each of their lives. Emily spent the war helping the walking wounded while suffering heartbreak after her true love --- a young doctor whom she hoped to marry --- drowned in the English Channel.
Lessing tells the start of their story as if she is writing a young adult novel, filled with the specter of damning things to come while two restless and hopeful individuals suffer the slings and arrows of their burgeoning independent lives as adults out in the cold, cruel world. That world, replete with wartime distress, crawls up and into their everyday existence in physical and emotional ways that impact their daughter's life to this day. This is the quiet half of the book.
The second half is the part that bites you, infecting you with a full-blown case of melancholia at the pain and anguish that the family could not escape. It is fascinating to hear a daughter, particularly someone as intellectual and unemotional an author as Lessing, to wax poetic about the whys and wherefores of the emotional behaviors and consequences of her parents' lives together. The fact that she, in her advanced age, has not been able to come out from under these issues is a revealing and moving story about tribulations that go far beyond the tabloid concerns of our day and culture.
It is not usual that a memoir by someone so far removed from the initial situation discussed should be so acid-toned. Sometimes the second part reads a little like someone's transcripts from a bad therapy session. But the dramatic resonance of the author's tough tone and her fans' knowledge of her hard-edged literary style gives the piece a sharp effect. After all, this is the woman who responded to her Nobel Prize announcement with a comment about how she has won so many awards that she can't keep track of them all. Yikes!
If you're looking for a squishy, rainbow-colored look at the past, this isn’t the book for you. But if you want a pointed look at how a child is affected, decades later, by her parents' pasts and their mistakes, ALFRED & EMILY will not be a disappointment.
--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
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