ABSTRACT
The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) does not step over into speculative fiction any more decisively than Briefing for a Descent into Hell or The Four-Gated City, but it does locate the threshold between Lessing’s worlds a lot more persuasively. Here, her shift in ideas is a shift in perception: the narrative has an illusionist, teasing quality that questions the ‘real’ with a new expertise. It is, in several ways, and for all its brevity, a stock-taking book. She described it, on the dustjacket, as ‘an attempt at autobiography’, doubtless because it reconnects her with some of her oldest material (the family scenario, for instance); but it also takes stock of certain of her resources as a writer, and in this its function resembles that of The Golden Notebook – very distantly, of course, since now a great deal (about role-playing, about inner space) is taken for granted. And she is not, this time, precipitating a crisis, but rather mulling over what turns out to have happened to her. Her tone is calm, almost elegiac: she’s writing from the other side of the mirror, as it were, chronicling the processes of dissolution with a lucid patience that is itself shocking, almost witty.
