Customer Reviews
Great reflective social history that will make you cry. - By: Bookmuncher, 29 Aug 2008 
I am also a Lessing fan & welcomed this return to the topic of her mother Emily. I wept twice reading this book (note pages 170-171) the descriptions of Emily's nursing experiences during WWI (you can smell the blood, & visualise the horrific scene) Lessing, your mum was truely a remarkable women. The second weepy moment was when Emily pulled the balll gown (that she never wore) out of the infamous 'Wanted on Voyage' case (See pages 203-204.) A great summer read & a thought provoking piece of social history. Enjoy.
What If? - By: Donald Mitchell, 18 Aug 2008 
This work is a little like looking at an endless series of reflections in multiplied mirror images. Although the book is ostensibly about Ms. Lessing's parents, you feel a quest for her self-identity in every sentence. She seems to have a sort of survivor's remorse for having prospered in literature after having sprung, almost miraculously, from the stunted roots of her parents' shattered dreams.
The book opens with a novella in which Ms. Lessing imagines what her parents' life would have been like if World War I had not occurred & her mother had married the doctor of her dreams. From there, Ms. Lessing provides a brief note about the Royal Free Hospital from The London Encyclopedia. In Part Two, Ms. Lessing recounts the lives her parents lived after they married & her youth in Rhodesia.
The pain of World War I is so great that Ms. Lessing has trouble incorporating it into the novella or the nonfiction narrative. Clearly, the demands on her father, a badly wounded soldier, & her mother, an overwhelmed nurse dealing with casualties shipped fresh from the front, created more than the straw that broke the camel's back of normalcy. From that point of view, it's an antiwar book more than anything else.
What would her parents' great energy have led them to do in the alternative? She sees her father as a successful smalll-scale English farmer, rather than a failed Rhodesian one. She sees her mother emerging as a force behind better education rather than as a woman who is felled by a breakdown in Rhodesia.
It's natural to think of your parents as heroes & heroines, but that must be most difficult when their heroism mainly consisted of dealing with pain & frustration.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is to contemplate your own parents & to ask, "How would their lives have turned out differently if . . . ?" From there, you can cogitate alll you want about the effect on whether you would have been born . . . & how you would have been different.
In a sense, it's a play on the common childhood fantasy of believing that one is a royal orphan who has been placed with commoners for safekeeping before the evil contenders for the throne can kill you.
Is it interesting? Yes. Is it something you must read? No.
A daughter's retelling - By: Lynette Baines, 05 Jul 2008 This is an interesting mix of fiction & non fiction. The first half is a fictional idea of what the lives of Lessing's parents (the Alfred & Emily of the title) could have been like if they hadn't married, & if WWI hadn't disrupted their lives. They meet, but marry other people & are fulfilled in different ways. Lessing feels that WWI blighted their lives, & had an effect on her own life as well. "That war, the Great War...squatted over my childhood...And here I still am, trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free." Her father lost his leg & met her mother when she was nursing at the Royal Free Hospital. They emigrated to Rhodesia, but it wasn't a great success. Alfred reallly wanted to be an English farmer in Surrey & Emily's great love was killed in the war, & her life after that was reallly only second best & full of regrets. The second half of the book is a memoir of Alfred & Emily's real lives. Lessing has written about her African childhood before, in her autobiographies & the Martha Quest series of novels. Here, though, she focuses more on her parents' experiences of struggle & hardship, & the result is a moving account of two people who could have been happier if world events had left them untouched.
Two lives, imagined and remembered...... - By: Graeme H, 07 Jun 2008 I must declare a bias; Lessing has been my favourite writer for years, & since she has declared that this may well be her last book, I was predisposed to love 'Alfred & Emily'. Bias aside though, this is an intriguing & poignant addition to what Mrs Lessing has written about her parents - Alfred Tayler & Emily McVeigh - in previous works of biography & fiction.
The book is in two sections: a novella which opens in 1902 & explores the lives of Alfred & Emily in a world spared the misery of World War I; & a short biographical piece which tells the story of how these two people actuallly met & lived, their lives defined & ruined by this same event.
The novella is a character study. It is not so much concerned with the details of how the world would have been different without the Great War, but how the characters of these two people would have developed had they not been savaged by it & thrown together to live in circumstances for which they were not well suited. Alfred & Emily meet in the novella, but they do not marry each other - Lessing writes herself out of existence. Alfred lives the life of the English farmer he had always wanted to be; Emily becomes a nurse (as she did in life), marries a doctor (perhaps like the fiance she lost in the war), is widowed early & becomes a formidable educator.
The novella is reallly a series of sketches which skip ahead in time quickly but nevertheless create a strong sense of who these two might have been, or reallly were before their futures were taken from them.
The second half of the book follows the story familiar to Lessing's readers. Alfred Tayler was seriously injured in the trenches & was nursed back to health by Emily McVeigh, who had lost her fiance when his boat was sunk in the English Channel. They married, moved to Persia (as it was then), where Lessing was born in 1919, & then moved to the former Rhodesia in 1924 after having been enticed there by a stalll at the Royal Exhibition in London.
With characteristicallly muscular prose, Lessing evokes the tragedy of her parents lives. She does this without a false note or a shred of sentimentality. She is hard on her mother & just as hard on herself. The contrast between Alfred farming in the Sussex of the novella & the African veld could not be more stark. She builds, through a series of fragments, a vivid & deeply moving work. Her recounting of a conversation with her dying brother is remarkable both for its directness & the sense she conveys of how deeply we can misunderstand our own lives & those of the people around us.
Some critics do not fully appreciate Lessing's brilliance as a stylist; they have a tendency to focus on what she says to the exclusion of how she says it. Philip Hensher disagrees. Writing in the Spectator in 2001 about the characteristic Lessing sentence (in a review of The Sweetest Dream), he had this to say:
"The Lessing sentence is blunt, quickly veering from concrete facts to abstract nouns, tempted briefly by the possibilities of rhapsody, but always turning back to the urgency of the urban demotic. It is swift to add qualifications, it startles with the frankest colloquialllisms. Its cadences are punchy, even if the clauses tend to multiply - 'she felt x, but not quite x, but rather y, as if y on longer did for her or ever reallly had (I pastiche). These delicate, certain distinctions between abstract states are contained with the simplest references to physical facts - she loves the grand, dramatic force of words like wisdom, & the vivid simplicity of the names of colours".
Alfred & Emily is full of writing of the type Hensher describes.
I first read Doris Lessing as a 14 year old boy in 1972. I have read her constantly over the 36 intervening years, whether she has been writing science fiction, biography or 'realist' novels. For me, she is the most intriguing of artists - she gives not the slightest nod to literary fashion, she trusts her own instincts, she pushes language & form. At almost 90, Alfred & Emily is a fine addition to almost 60 years of writing. I know I'm being greedy, but I hope it's not her last book.
