author recommeded by dad

I happened upon this book while browsing in the labrary shelves, and it sounded like something I would enjoy. I read Lessing's The Golden Notebook when I was still in school, and although I fail to recall many details of the book, I do remember that I thought it was a great read. This book was quite a bit below that level, but I still enjoyed reading it. I certainly was not the page turning thriller that the cover blurb pormised though. Most of it is rather unexciting, plodding even. I simple develops these interesting characters, who are so caught up in their politics that they seem to ignore the import of what they are really doing here. ( )

There is a real quality of writing in The Good Terrorist that, by my lights, is fairly difficult to miss. Lessing's storytelling is intelligent and well-crafted in a fashion indicative of a real writer's writer (just to be sententous about it). Her portrayal of Alice is expertly crafted, multifarious and engaging. The various relationships between the squat-dwellers are capable of rousing and sustaining one's attention throughout. Lessing has an ear for dialogue, and an eye for detail that makes her characters all the more engaging, real - consider Jasper's bony grasp on Alice's wrist, or the description of Faye's countenance as she snaps and snarls.

Those interested only in fast moving plot development are unlikely to be impressed. The first three-quarters of the novel builds up slowly. Much of it seems like scene-setting for the final hundred pages. The final hundred pages are almost impossible to put down. The tension that builds up as the squatters become more and more involved with various armed extremists is quite tangible.

Lessing is, of course, offering a satirical take on those extreme left. Anyone who ever flirted with these views or types as a teenager or student will notice how true to life The Good Terrorist actually is, though the details here are more cringeworthy than they are comic (that said I did laugh in a few places, even if I wasn't supposed to, especially at the frosty lesbians Roberta and Faye). But the novel can be read as a send-up of extremism in any form, as Lessing notes in the addendum to my edition, Alice et al. have probably now been totally replaced by Islamic extremists. ( )

first Doris Lessing I ever read and enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. But it reads to me like it was written by an older woman who sees everyone under 40 as 'young' or 'girls' or 'boys'. My limited experience of squats in London is that they were almost exclusively lived in by people in their teens and twenties and older men and women were rare. In this book, admittedly the crazy central characters, were in their mid thirties

This book hurts, especially from a leftist point of view. Beautifully conceived and written, but painful to read and making me observe how sheer stupidity and void ideology can be so credibly close to violence and senseless destruction. ( )