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&#...

Doris Lessing's new novel ["Shikasta"] has this in common with its predecessors: it forces us to think about first and last things, about what we are, how we got that way and where we are going. It forces us to look into the depths of the apocalyptic tide washing around us. (p. 1) My complaint … is not that Doris Lessing's new novel (the first of a tetralogy) is a forecast of doom. She has been forecasting doom for a long time now, ever more insistently these last dozen ye...

The basic myth articulated [in Shikasta], and underlying all Doris Lessing's work since The Four-Gated City, is a very old one, which can be traced back through Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thought for two millennia: the myth of the consuming destruction of a corrupt and fallen world from which a brave new world will be born. As Frank Kermode has ably demonstrated, its most potent source, after the book of Revelation, has been the 12th-century monk Joachim of Flora, whose ideas turn up in the mos...

This extraordinarily ambitious book [Shikasta] achieves real grandeur despite attacks of silliness. Lessing builds convincingly a standard, but here necessary, indictment of Western civilisation for selfish brutal short-sightedness and then extends it to the whole of humanity…. Lessing concentrates on the West because it is after all we who will read her novel. It is perhaps surprising how comparatively perfunctory is her treatment in this novel of sexual politics; we are told that it was not thus in...