[Briefing For a Descent Into Hell] seems to me to be an important synthesis of central aspects of The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated City and in some ways to constitute [Lessing's] most mature vision thus far of the ultimate nature of human experience. (p. 193)

To center initially on the question of mental disturbance is natural enough for both reviewer and reader; after all, Charles is a patient at a mental hospital throughout the novel. But to remain centered on this aspect of it, or on the related needs for understanding, compassion, and reform is, it seems to me, to miss the central import of the novel and the position it occupies in Lessing's major fiction.

Her own cryptic description of the book may have been misleading. In an interview while she was at work on it, she described it as "a mad, dreamlike book, completely different from...