Briefing for a Descent into Hell

An exploration of "inner space," Briefing for a Descent into Hell has some really nice moments. The novel centers on the recovery of a professor who has had a break from reality and remembers nothing of his previous life. His visions of shipwrecks, alien abductions, strange rituals, and celestial meetings of mythic gods hint at some Gnostic revelation that never fully arrives. In the meantime, doctors debate whether to give him shock therapy, dope him up, or kick him out of the hospital. Eventually, we find out more about the poor professor, but honestly I missed the fever dreams once they were replaced with the patchwork of his real life. The promise of the first half of the novel was never really fulfilled, and I was left feeling a show more little underwhelmed. It was refreshing to read Lessing's prose, which was of a quality rarely found in a science fiction novel. I especially enjoyed her use of doctors' notes, correspondence, and interior monologue to deliver the story piecemeal, but her narrative lacked something that I love about a lot of sci-fi: a thought provoking concept or theme that is clearly articulated and (often amateurishly) driven home. Briefing made me miss the propulsive plots and straightforward delivery of [author:Philip K. Dick|4764]'s [book:Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said|22584] and [book:Ubik|22590], contemporary novels that explored similar themes. While Lessing's prose is more consistently satisfying, PKD's stories were simply more interesting and immediate. Still, I'd recommend Briefing for anyone looking to read something atypical in the sci-fi genre. show less

How do you start a review for book that has this title? Maybe more importantly: why ever read such a book? At first I was drawn by the description on the back that promised a psychological thriller with elements of philosophy. I probably bought it because I couldn't imagine exactly what such a book would be like. About 80 pages in you start to wonder if perhaps you're reading the author's personal experiences in an insane asylum. In fact the protagonist is admitted to one in the very beginning and speaks utter nonsense. It takes quite a few pages of rambling and very disturbing imagery to arrive at anything coherent and that's where the novel starts to become very interesting indeed. Never have I read a book where as a reader you have show more to invest as much as with this novel. But it pays off.

Doctor Charles Watkins is admitted into a mental hospital because he was found wandering next to the river shouting at himself with no shoes on, to start with. When examined by two Doctors nothing can be gleaned as to the man's identity or what he is speaking of. They give him enough medication to put him in a near state of coma and most of the time Dr. Watkins is fast asleep. The moment one of the doctors finds a way to reach into the disturbed mind of his patient and asks him to explain what has happened to him the verbal sluice gates open. This is also in a sense where the book appears to really start.

Slowly the reader is drawn into a strange story in which Dr. Watkins sees his shipmates abducted by a crystal shaped entity. As the sole survivor he creates a raft and after a long voyage reaches an island where he can find some rest and food. Slowly as he explores the island the landscape changes. Although at first appearing to be completely uninhabited he notices beings resembling something in between rats and dogs who slowly take over a ruined city. A city he also did not notice before. During full moon nights he battles visions of three cannibalistic women and other obscenities which should be left to the renderings of the author. In his ruined city, now overrun by rat-dog creatures, another animal arrives: apes. After a period of peaceful co-existence the two factions come to blows for unexplained reasons and attempt to completely annihilate each other to the point of overflowing the small river that runs through the island with bodies.

Whilst reading the 'island' part of the novel I kept thinking about the dream books by Jung and Reich. Was this perhaps a symbolic story where islands, cannibalistic women and warring animal factions represent something else? It sounded plausible but Doris Lessing, the author, had a slightly different purpose in mind. In the second part of the book Dr. Watkins dreams or hallucinates that he is in fact part of what can only be described as 'an outsider'. Someone outside of human boundaries, or even natural boundaries. He hallucinates at first that he is part of the classic Greek constellation of deities but soon changes this into its own configuration of god-like beings. The beings, during a meeting have noticed that life on earth is taking a different turn than elsewhere in the universe and violent forces are at work that are not completely understood. Representatives are needed to form an inside picture of life on earth, specifically amongst humans and the being who is now Dr. Watkins was chosen as one of few to fulfill this task. My understanding is that the title of the book refers to the instructions received by the unearthly being Watkins as he is prepared for his trip to earth. After this part of the novel comes the most intriguing section. Whereas most writers start with normality and slowly move towards an insane world or description of events, this novel does the revers and the further on in the book the more plausible the story becomes.

The novel ends in a very rational way but It did not sit well after reading the hallucinatory and explanatory parts of the novel. There was more going on, more symbolism that wasn't explained away by a science fiction angle (ironically Doris Lessing later became a pure science fiction writer) I felt like I was reading a humanized version of an H.P. Lovecraft novel. In the afterword the author explains that she tried to present a feeling that there is more out there that goes beyond what humans can understand and she is very careful in saying that this has nothing to do with feelings or sensations. I believe that is why the author decided to make the protagonist a professor, who is otherwise a logical and rational being. Lessing presents 'the bigger out there' from both a sensory as well as a rational standpoint, and because of that it works.

This novel is not an easy comfortable read and like many distopian, philosophical works can't manage to attract a wide audience. It is however in my opinion an important work because it attempts the one feat we find the hardest: put to words: what else might be out there, and I feel she succeeded. show less

This novel is beautifully written. I felt like it was very demanding of my attention, because although styles and speakers vary in the course of the text, there are no full page-stop chapter breaks. In the absence of dialogue, paragraphs tend to run for multiple pages, and the prose (sometimes breaking into poetry or incantation) has an insistent restlessness in keeping with its subject matter--especially in the first half, where a narcotized sleep is an ambivalent power for desired healing or feared imprisonment.

"I never learned to live awake. I was trained for sleep. Oh let me sleep and sleep my life away. And if the pressure of true memory wakes me before I need, if the urgency of what I should be doing stabs into my sleep, then for show more God's sake doctor, for goodness sake, give me drugs and put me back to dreaming again." (139)

This waking/sleep dialectic is one of the features that insinuates a mystical subtext throughout. Others include the intimation of people destined for companionship, the foreboding of illusion in consensual phenomena, and reflections on the urge to engender praeterhumanity in our children.

There are many different levels of storytelling involved, of which the outermost is a set of clinical notes and correspondence surrounding the hospitalization of a man with what seems to be traumatic amnesia. Within that setting are conversations, and within those are dreams and memories. In one dream an entire governance of the solar system is set forth as background to the protagonist's sense of dislocation and urgency. In an unreliable memory, guerrilla warfare becomes the setting for a tragic encounter with idyllic nature.

Others have noted that this is a book worth re-reading, and I'm inclined to agree. show less

The briefing for a descent into hell is given at a conference chaired by Minna Erve, who represents the celestial Gods who have frequently in their history sent messengers down to earth to try and get humanity back on track. They are in despair at the continual backsliding into war, famine and other disasters that human kind inflict upon themselves and are bracing themselves for another attempt to sort things out. This is what a patient admitted at the Central Intake Hospital in London may believe. When he arrived he was confused, rambling, but amenable. He appeared to have been robbed because there was nothing on him to give any clue too his identity and he appeared to be suffering from acute amnesia. He rambled on about being on a show more voyage where all his shipmates had been lost and his boat was at the mercy of the currents.

This is Lessing’s eighth novel and her first that does not rely on autobiographical material. It was published in 1971 two years after she had completed her mammoth children of violence series which ended with [the Four gated City]. She had delved deep into her own life story for this undertaking, but with Briefing for a Descent into Hell she has cast herself free and is reliant on her imagination. Mental illness and its affects on people living with the condition was one of the themes of The Four Gated city and in this novel it takes centre stage. The patient at the Central Intake Hospital is a puzzle to his two doctors, one of whom (Doctor X) is reliant on drugs and shock treatment as methods of treatment. Doctor Y is more concerned in trying to understand the patient and encourages him to ramble on and then write down what is going on in his head. The first third of the book is mainly in the mind of the patient who may believe he is a messenger from one of the celestial gods. He certainly talks about alien abduction and describes vividly his dreams and fantasies. This makes the first part of the book feel like a science fiction novel, and similar in vein to Olaf Stapledon’s work in [Starmaker]. The patients stories gather in intensity and coherence as he describes a ruined stone city in the jungle inhabited by rat-dog people who battle with a tribe of monkeys while the patient attempts to keep a landing space for a crystal spaceship free from detritus. He finally succeeds in being taken off the earth and can look down at the mess that is humanity below. Is he one of the messengers of the Gods? His coherent story sounds convincing and this is Lessing’s point. Understanding and then interpreting the place where the mentally ill patient has got himself, is the surest way of treating the illness.

Lessing knew and was influenced by the theories of R D Laing, who was a practising psychiatrist and wrote extensively about mental health. (She even took LSD under his supervision and some of the patients stories feel like an LSD induced hallucinations.) R D Laing was revolutionary in valuing the content of psychotic behaviour and speech as a valid expression of distress. He believed that if you could interpret the symbolism then you might understand the cause and the treatment would be guided by what was discovered. Lessing takes R D Laings ideas further by hinting that the patients so-called psychotic ramblings may have some value not only for himself but for others: perhaps as a saviour for the human race.

The discovery by the hospital that the patient is Charles Watkins a professor who lectures on classics represents a change in emphasis in the novel. We come down to earth almost with a bump as the hospital staff communicate by letter and phone with his wife, family and colleagues. The novel becomes epistolary in form as various people write in with stories about Professor Watkins, who appears to have psychopathic tendencies. The Professer himself hallucinates, tells stories about his war experiences as he fights to regain a sense of who he is. His stay in hospital is prolonged with Doctor X putting pressure on him to undergo shock treatment. Lessing made me feel that the professor may be happier being mentally ill, which is quite some achievement.

This is not a science fiction novel, Lessing was still a little way from launching herself totally in that genre, but for the first part of this novel you could be forgiven for thinking you were reading one. The substantial passages that tell the stories inside the head of the patient/Charles Watkins feel out of kilter with the mystery of discovering who he is and whether he is going to get well, but this is probably Lessings technique in trying to portray mental illness and it works to some extent. She has a feel for describing fantasies of other worlds, whether they be utopias or dystopias and I missed some of this imaginative writing in the second half of the novel. An enjoyable novel that has nowhere near the scope of the excellent Four Gated City, but one which homes in on its themes and contains some of her most imaginative writing todate. A four star read. show less

This is another of Lessing's surrealist commentaries on society and, in particular, mental illness. Even though mental illness is a favorite topic that appears in most of her novels, I think this is the only one that explores the dust in the corners of a single psychotic episode. This was not easy reading for me. I could not remain interested in the long meanderings through the landscape of the disturbed mind. If it had not been for a few brief verbatims from physician's notes early in the book, I would not have had a curiosity sturdy enough to plow through ten or twelve pages each night. Towards the end, each time the protagonist wandered the tunnels of his illusions, I read only every other paragraph. About halfway through, my show more interest was finally piqued, and I began to care about the characters and wanted to know how their lives turned out beyond The End. Having now read some ten plus of Lessing's novels, plus two volumes of her autobiography, I wonder about her descriptions of the human mind lost in a world of delusion and illusion. She had an apparently long affair with a married psychiatrist in London and explored her own psyche in psychotherapy. I wonder about the extent of her personal experience and the borrowed experiences from her associations. show less

I'm one of the ones who found this laborious. The first third of the book, especially, felt like a slog--a pointless slog, with no promise of anything not quite sloggy to come.

There is a hint of an interesting idea in the late-middle section that didn't end up as developed as I had anticipated, but regardless the hint and the interest were not enough to compensate for the truly laborious opening sequences.

I've tried to read Lessing before (notably The Golden Notebook) and will have to conclude that her style is just not something I appreciate. In the abstract they all sound fascinating, but when I make the effort they just don't appeal. (And they aren't too hard, so to speak--I read Georges Perec, for God's sake--they just don't go show more anywhere). show less

Noble prizes in literature to my mind seem like the book Oscars and Oscar winning films are rarely enjoyable. The same in my experience applies to Noble prize books. Occasionally however there are exceptions in both cases and this is one of them.
Some gods travel to earth to warn of an impending disaster but to exist in our reality they have to play by our rules and effectively be human. Its a bit like '12 Monkeys' were the protagonist is often unsure whether they have really been sent on a mission or whether they're simply insane.
Nothing i can say can properly describe this book. All i can say is, that its got good descriptive writing perhaps a little too descriptive for some but i thought it was good and i plan on reading it again show more sometime. show less