The Good Terrorist

One of Britain's most celebrated novelists draws on her radical youth for inspiration. Her heroine, Alice Mellings, is the selfless facilitator of a ragtag leftist gang, which would fall apart without her tireless efforts at organization, money-raising and troubleshooting. Squatting in an abandoned building, her quixotic chums are flirting with the IRA, a step that, in their naivete, they're taking far too casually. Chirpy Nadia May seems an odd choice for the dark, ironic Lessing. She makes it sound as if Alice et al. are planning a tea party rather than a revolution, thus (inadvertently?) emphasizing the tragic foolishness of these silly people. Whether appropriate or not, her style effectively makes the narrative a suspenseful stage wait until the inevitable outcome of playing with fire. Y.R. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine

September 29, 1986
Lessing (The Golden Notebook, etc.) offers a bleak analysis of a decaying world in this tale about a group of British radicals who get mixed up in terrorist activities far beyond their level of competence. PW commented that the "compulsively readable story . . . vividly displays the full array of Lessing's superb gifts as a traditional writer.''