The Columbia History of the British Novel

similar and, at best, equal to Sirius, but unfathomably other and better, is she ready to learn. Her program of instruction is a novelistic one, consisting of an immersion in a series of illustrative instances. To her immense frustration, Ambien II's questions are never directly answered. Rather, she is provided with experiences that enact the answers, if she has the eyes to see and the ears to hear. 'You have to know it,' Klorathy tells Ambien II. 'You are a stubborn one, Sirius. You are not one of those who can be told a thing, and absorb it.' Dispatched by her mentor to the cities of Grakconkranpatl and Lelanos, Ambien II comes to know first her own greatest weakness. Reminiscent-in their stark contrast between the heavy, the uniform, and the murderous and the light, the various, and the harmonious-of Ben Ata's masculine Zone Four and Al *Ith's feminine Zone Three as well as of the Aztec and Mayan cultures, these cities are the site of Ambien's II's temptation and fall. As Ambien II witnesses the overthrow of Lelanos by Grakconkranpatl, she is so racked by sorrow and nostalgia for the civil harmonies of the once-lovely city, for the beauties of its rule, that she succumbs to the temptation to rule Lelanos herself:

I was… full of grief on behalf of Lelanos, the deprived-the deprived of me, and my expert and benevolent guidance. But as I waited there on my little platform among the snowy and bluish cubes and spheres, the deep blue of the… sky enclosing the lovely scene, I looked down on little people far below, and it was as if I held them in my protection; as if I was promising them an eternal safety and well-being.

Ambien II's desire to serve and protect, to infuse the colonial situation with moral dignity and generosity, is too perilously close to its murder -933- ous underside, that presumption of superiority that quickly succumbs to self-aggrandizement and delusions of omnipotence.

Klorathy drives home the dangers of Ambien II's excessive selfregard by forcing her to witness the Lelannian experiments. Having absorbed its ancient enemy, Lelanos now rules with a systematic brutality and inhumanity unknown even to the dark and savage priests of Grakconkranpatl. At a central research center in Lelanos, Ambien II discovers the Lelannians testing the local tribesmen's capacities for endurance and perseverance by throwing them into a very large and slick-sided tank of water and timing how long they swim before they drown. A second experiment slowly heats the tank of water and records at what temperature each of the tribesmen succumbs. A third seeks to perfect the art of organ and limb transplantation by grafting the breasts of females to their backs, or the sexual organs of males to their faces. The Lelannians are able to conduct such experiments with a clear conscience because of their unshakable conviction of their own superiority to all other species: 'Their faces showed always the self-esteem that was their curse, the mark of their incapacity. The ground of their nature was this conviction of superiority, of innate worth over other species.'

When Klorathy asks Ambien II what she thinks they should do about this deplorable species, she retorts, 'I would call in our fleet of Flame Makers and destroy these squalid little animals.' Her state of mind is reminiscent of the one that drives Kurtz, in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, to scrawl, 'Exterminate all the brutes,' across his tract on the civilizing mission of the white man in Africa. She simply can't understand why Canopus continues to waste its time on such an inferior species. 'Sirius,' Klorathy gently replies, 'very often a great deal of time, effort, and resources are spent on 'inferior' species. Everything is relative, you know!' The inferior species to which Klorathy is referring is, of course, Ambien II's own, but she does not 'choose to 'hear' this. Not at that time.'

When Ambien II finally does choose to hear, when she absorbs the nature of the evil that attracts her and understands that subject species are to be nurtured, not used, and that she herself must act toward the populations under her control as Canopus has acted toward her, she is ready to learn the Canopean technique of containing destruction and altering history by 'occupying a mind for a brief and exact purpose.' Her first trial comes when she is dispatched to save the skills and knowledge of the intricate and affluent culture of the Arabian Queen -934- Shaz'vin from total annihilation at the hands of ravaging Mongol horsemen. Ambien II briefly enters the mind of the queen and guides her to make the decisions that preserve not her realm but the memory of it. Under Ambien II's tutelage, the queen rescues enough citizens with the skills and knowledge of their destroyed culture to pass it down to both their own descendants and those of the savage horsemen. Ambien's experience of inhabiting the mind of the queen is precisely analogous to the Sufi concept, mentioned earlier in this essay, of being in the world but not of it:

I did not lose my Sirian perspectives, the Sirian scope of time and space. But I was inside, too, this civilisations's view of itself as all there was of the known world-for on its edges were, to the north, the threatening horsemen, to the northwest, very far away, dark forests full of barbarians whom these people scarcely accounted as human at all, believing them not much more than beasts-and from their point of view, accurately-… The world as understood by this great and powerful Queen was, though it stretched from one end of the main landmass to the other, circumscribed indeed, and the stars that roofed it were understood only-and to a limited extent-by their influences on their movements… on our movements… an odd, a startling, a disturbing, clash of focusses and perspectives encompassed me; and as for the historical aspect, this queen knew the story of her own civilisation and some legends, mostly inaccurate, of a «distant» past, which to me, and my mind, was virtually contemporary with her.

This odd, startling, disturbing clash of temporal and spatial perspectives, of the passionately personal with the accurately detached, of the circumscribed with the infinite, is both the achievement of the Canopus in Argos series as a whole and Klorathy's very specific formula for saving the earth in the century of destruction from a white race whose creed will be, 'If it is there, it belongs to us. If I want it I must have it. If what I see is different from myself then it must be punished or wiped out. Anything that is not me, is primitive and bad.'

Having slept with the enemy in the ways that matter to her and to the universe, Ambien II is ready to take his place, to become herself a Klorathy to the other four members of the Sirian Five, for whom she will write her 'history of the heart,' The Sirian Experiments. The loving tutelary relationship embodied in Ambien II's candid confessions to her colleagues, in the infinite patience and long-range planning of Klorathy's guidance of his benighted pupil, in the giant's careful mentorship of creatures both smaller and immeasurably less intelligent than -935- themselves in Shikasta, in Al*Ith's reluctant but nonetheless resourceful and compassionate amatory instruction of Ben Ata in The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, in George Sherban's futile but devoted efforts to enlighten his sister Rachel in Shikasta-this relationship is the substance of Lessing's late fiction. It compels the content of her narratives, informs her relationship with her readers, and reflects her most passionate moral and imaginative commitments.

While Lessing's most recent fiction is instructive rather than about instruction, its impulse is still to shake us awake, to alert us to the extreme fragility of civilization in our time. Returning from the heady reaches of outer space to the kind of place most of us call home, Lessing shatters our faith in these safe havens we create to keep our hearts in. In The Fifth Child, for example, Harriet and David Lovatt spin round themselves the happy household and extended family they believe will keep the violence and disintegration of their society and its institutions at bay. But the center of their charmed circle cannot hold, and the lovely loving family is destroyed from within by the conception and birth of the alien child, Ben, whom the family can neither accommodate nor expel. By the end of the novel, the idea of home has been turned inside out. The pretty family is broken and gone, and home now belongs to Ben and his gang. The spacious Victorian mansion that was to be a haven from violence has become a breeding ground for it. Home is similarly invaded in The Good Terrorist by squatters, transients, and terrorists, and the happy homemaker, the tidy housekeeper, the busy and resourceful little woman, becomes herself, by the end of the novel, a devotee of violence, not as a means but as an end in itself. 'I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish,' Lessing acknowledged in an interview about The Fifth Child with Mervyn Rothstein in the New York Times.

It's a sense of disaster. I know where it comes from-my upbringing. That damn First World War, which rode my entire childhood, because my father was so damaged by it. This damn war rammed down my throat day and night, and then World War II coming, which they talked about all the time. You know, you can never get out from under this kind of upbringing, the continual obsession with this. And after all, it's true. These wars did arise, and destroyed a beautiful household, with all the loving children.