Blind Rebellion
by Mary Baron
No one familiar with Lessing's work should be surprised by The Good Terrorist. Lessing has written parts of this book before. She wrote it as history, in the African sections of The Golden Notebook, and she wrote it as prophecy in The Memoirs of a Survivor. Now she has written it in the present tense, and this shocks us, because we have not been paying attention.
The book is set in contemporary London, a city out of control in a society that is unraveling. The bomb, ecology, the establishment, racism, sexism, unemployment--there are more causes than one can keep in mind. Lessing writes a terrifying yet cosmic scene in which her small group of revolutionaries are gathered around the kitchen table arguing over which demonstration to attend. Some opt for Greenpeace, some for Mrs. Thatcher, others for Trident; a smorgasbord of wrongs is attacked as if it were a game.
Alice Mellings, the heroine, is an imperfect rebel, despising her upbringing and its class-consciousness, yet weeping to see the destruction of its artifacts. She is outraged at a society that will tear down or render uninhabitable beautiful old houses--not that she wants to gentrify them for herself, but because she can shape them into homes for all her drifting associates. Alice is as skilled as Robinson Crusoe at creating order out of chaos. She finds a huge, old house, its toilets blocked up with cement, its wiring ripped out, its upper rooms filled with buckets of rubbish bins ("O the sinful waster!"), with flowers on the scrubbed kitchen table. She charms officials into supplying water and power, self consciously wearing blouses with pretty pink flowers when she is summoned to their offices.
Like Crusoe, Alice is a genius at salvage and recombination. And, like him, she has no vision. The best she can do is to tidy up. Neither one has the ability to envision a new order, to imagine things right. Alice cannot, in fact, imagine things not British, feeling relief at discovering that the professional terrorist she had thought to be a member of the KGB is, rather, a member of British intelligence.
It is her lack of vision that leads Alice into terrorism. She goes along unheedingly, taking the next step, and the next, at the urging of her companions, her eyes focused always on the past, and on what can be made of it now, in this new chaos. She wants to take from the rich and give to the poor, to make everybody happy, safe, warm. She wants, in other words, exactly what she had as a privileged little girl, but she wants it for everyone, all the time. She is far more earth mother than revolutionary and displays the terrifying energy and efficiency of this female force, which Lessing dissected earlier in The Summer Before the Dark. She really does not understand why her parents won't willingly support her cadre of fellow revolutionaries, or why her friends don't understand that she can't always get money from her parents. She wants to have everyone all friends together, united in hatred of the system--which she refuses to see is made up of people. She wants to live in a world of black and white.
Alice is happiest when painting slogans on public buildings and eluding the police with Jasper, her companion of many years.
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