Doris Lessing [in Shikasta] retells the story of the Bible, incorporating along the way elements from other Middle East religious traditions. The specifically modern part, and the nearest in feel to science fiction, is the description of the end of our civilization—which is indeed central. And I think it is more than mere coincidence that it is from British writers these days that we get these fantasies about history and how different it might have been—from Kingsley Amis and William Golding—and something equivalent from British critics. The main fact in modern English consciousness, though it surfaces obliquely and intermittently, is the end of the empire, and it is easy to take the imaginative step which translates that into 'the end of the world.' (p. 22)
I don't mean to suggest that it is intellectually slack or imaginatively dull, for in fact I found it moving, but its dominant mood is 'wisdom,' that mode of consciousness which is born in, though it rises above, non-participatory resignation. The book is not, I mean, intellectually brilliant in the mode of Thomas Pynchon; nor do all the sentences ring artistically true, in the mode of Philip Roth. The form is elaborate, without its elaboration giving any special pleasure (which was of course true of her finest novel, The Golden Notebook). After a twenty-page wind-in, which mainly bewilders, the 'story' may be said not really to begin until p. 210. Even the most potent fictional ideas, like a Mock-Trial of the white races, in which they are indicted by the dark-skinned, are merely introduced, and not fully developed.
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