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A review by daja57
The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing
5.0
It's 1985ish. Alice and her friend Jasper join a squat; it's an old house with no plumbing facilities (so there are buckets full of shit on the top floor), no water, no gas or electricity. The squat is run by fellow comrades in a communist group who want to affiliate to the IRA.
Alice, despite her rabid denunciations of her fascist parents (on whom she sponges, from whom she steals), is, at heart, a nest-maker and one-by-one she solves the problems of the house, taking on the council and the police and burying the shit in a pit in the garden. Some of her comrades help her, others take advantage. Meanwhile she has a complicated non-sexual relationship with her boyfriend (who takes money from her so he can go cruising). Gradually the story evolves from a manual on how to run a squat into a novel chronicling the manoeuvres of splintered extreme left wing groups and how they are used by foreign governments. The climax of the book is the planning of an act of terrorism.
It is a brilliant read. It evokes the political atmosphere of the 1980s when there were (usually IRA-inspired) acts of terrorism on Britain's streets and when the Soviet Union still existed so that it was possible to believe in the leftist rhetoric of proletarian revolution and fascist reaction. But most of all, the characters in the squat are so well-drawn in all their complexities: the hysterical Faye and her lesbian partner Roberta (who is fundamentally Faye's keeper), the physically and psychologically fragile Philip, Jim who is always so happy except when he is utterly depressed, and, of course, Alice, whose complex relationship with her parents provides a compelling backdrop to her fundamental innocence.
But it is also a portrait of inadequacy and hopelessness.
It is written as a more-or-less continuous narrative, unchaptered (but it is paced perfectly, with the major turning-point almost exactly half way through), in the third person but almost entirely from Alice's point of view (though she is very good at reading the verbal cues and body language of others and inferring motives).
Alice, despite her rabid denunciations of her fascist parents (on whom she sponges, from whom she steals), is, at heart, a nest-maker and one-by-one she solves the problems of the house, taking on the council and the police and burying the shit in a pit in the garden. Some of her comrades help her, others take advantage. Meanwhile she has a complicated non-sexual relationship with her boyfriend (who takes money from her so he can go cruising). Gradually the story evolves from a manual on how to run a squat into a novel chronicling the manoeuvres of splintered extreme left wing groups and how they are used by foreign governments. The climax of the book is the planning of an act of terrorism.
It is a brilliant read. It evokes the political atmosphere of the 1980s when there were (usually IRA-inspired) acts of terrorism on Britain's streets and when the Soviet Union still existed so that it was possible to believe in the leftist rhetoric of proletarian revolution and fascist reaction. But most of all, the characters in the squat are so well-drawn in all their complexities: the hysterical Faye and her lesbian partner Roberta (who is fundamentally Faye's keeper), the physically and psychologically fragile Philip, Jim who is always so happy except when he is utterly depressed, and, of course, Alice, whose complex relationship with her parents provides a compelling backdrop to her fundamental innocence.
But it is also a portrait of inadequacy and hopelessness.
It is written as a more-or-less continuous narrative, unchaptered (but it is paced perfectly, with the major turning-point almost exactly half way through), in the third person but almost entirely from Alice's point of view (though she is very good at reading the verbal cues and body language of others and inferring motives).