Doris Lessing - Canopus in Argos: Archives (five novels)


Re: Colonised Planet 5
Shikasta (1979)

"With her most recent fiction, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Memoirs of a Survivor, and the latter part of The Four-Gated City, Doris Lessing stepped forward into the fabulous, the marvelous, but it is in this new novel that she makes her true break with traditional realism. Here she begins a series of novels, Canopus in Argos: Archives, set in some future time; novels transcending realism altogether, yet reinstating it within a space-age setting. She has created what she calls "a new world for myself," self-consistent and with infinite possibilities, "a realm where the petty fates of planets, let alone individuals, are only aspects of the rivalries and interactions of the greater galactic empires: Canopus, Sirius, and their enemy, the Empire Puttoria with its criminal planet Shammat."

The first novel, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta, encompasses millions of years of Earth's evolution and uses several contrasting styles and manners to do it, from the manic stupidities of "the Devil," to the lofty ruminations of "the Gods," but Lessing is also able to write the simple and sorrowful story of a single teen-age girl, whirled out of her little limitations by the world's cataclysms.

This book is completely different from anything she has written before. The second novel in the series (to be published shortly) - The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five - is again different, resembling a fable, a legend of the simplest and even the most classic sort. The third novel in the sequence, The Sirian Experiments, makes the most radical departure. It is told in the voice of a female official of the Empire of Sirius, a bureaucrat by nature and by thousands of years of experience, whose personal odyssey carries her into a new understanding of cosmic evolution.

Doris Lessing, at a point in her career when many writers are content to recast earlier themes, has simply put her past behind her and taken the risk of going on to an entirely new beginning. However this attempt will be judged, one thing is clear the cycle of novels beginning with Shikasta will reveal her largest vision of our world and our time."

The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980)

"This is a tale of love - and of the ancient war between men and women - that beguiles and charms like a true fable. It follows Shikasta, which Time magazine hailed as Dazzling. . . . At once a brief history of the world, a tract against human destructiveness, an ode to the natural beauties of this earth, and a hymn to the music of the spheres.
This second book brings us into the territory of legend, of myth. It is the story of the lovely and amiable Queen of the benign Zone Three and of her forced marriage to the soldier King of the martial and hierarchic Zone Four.

The military ruler - surprisingly - learns to accept and then to love the ruler of Zone Three and her unfamiliar and distrusted ways. The Queen, in turn, learns to love and need him. But even great rulers must know how to obey - they too live under the ordinance of the Providers who rule all things. And when the Queen is commanded to return to her own realm, where she is now a stranger and an exile, she must do so, though to leave her husband and her child seems to kill her heart. And the King, Ben Ata, doing as he is told, marries the savage beauty who rules Zone Five - an unexpected land that mirrors the manners and modes of the other two zones, uniting and reversing them.

Doris Lessing has written a great deal about the war between men and women, sometimes abrasively, But this tale is a distillation, a summing up - as fables and myths must be. There is a tender and humorous acceptance, all bitterness long spent. It is if every posture or cliché about male-female confrontation has been set in a brilliant, clean landscape where it appears heightened; dramatized, yet lightened. It is filled with Doris Lessing's profound knowledge of what happens - and what is possible - between men and women."


The Sirian Experiments(1980)

"This is the story, told by herself, of the education of a woman named Ambien II, an official, one of the Five - the highest level of the Sirian Colonial Service and the hidden rulers of the Sirian Empire for thousands of years. She is a competent, skilled administrator with an elegant, mater-of-fact mind - a brilliant performer of the great tasks of moving populations and controlling events - and she has lived for centuries with the serene conviction that her Empire, Sirius, is the crown of the galaxy.

Through the long stages of her Empire's history, we follow the profound changes in this woman as she is brought to discover that the rival Canopean Empire, which she once despised, is actually in advance of Sirius in every way, is the real - the truer - ruler of the galaxy. She begins to perceive, understand, and accept the subtlety, the irrefutable superiority of this other realm and gradually realizes that her odyssey and her fate consist in the use of her by her Canopean opposites - whom she at first distrusts, then slowly comes to honor and love - to herald their wisdom to her own people, whose resistance to so total a change of vision and approach is as fierce and determined as her own had previously been.

The battle for Ambien's mind - and perhaps for the fate of a universe - is fought our primarily on the planet Shikasta, which both Canopus and Sirius have colonised for purposes of experimentation. Once again, Doris Lessing uses this planet - our planet - as the focus of her audacious and searching view of mankind and history, of her conviction that to survive, we must learn to open our minds to ways of feeling and thinking not our own."


The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982)

BOOK FOUR: "This is the story of Planet 8 of the Canopean Empire, a prosperous and contented little planet inhabited by handsome, vibrant, intelligent people, as told to us by one of the planet's fifty Representatives. Planet 8 is verdant and peaceful, its well-being secure, its weather consistently nurturing, never harsh. The people live long, fruitful lives, each on assuming a role essential to the continuity of the race. There is no crime, no strife, and no doubt. The people understand - almost inherently - that the benevolent Canopean rule they live under is based on necessity, and that they play a part in "a long, slow progress upwards in civilisation."

Until: the time of The Ice begins, the alignments of the planet shift, ice and snow come to cover its surface, and the people are forced to alter their lives in previously unthinkable ways. What keep them going - as they watch their crops and animals die off, as they are forced inside layers of clothing and crass shelter, as their lives wind down to little more than numbing sleep - is the promise made by Canopus that, in time, they will be taken off Planet 8 to Rohanda, the favored planet of the Empire. But the ice continues to thicken, morale and hope decline to a state of virtual nonexistence, and when the Canopean ambassador, Johor, finally arrives, the people are hardly surprised that he brings only devastating news: Rohanda is no longer fit to receive them, and they are destined to perish with their planet.

But what, at first, they do not realize they are capable of, and what they eventually accomplish through Johor's patient, empathic instruction, is the forging from themselves of one Representative who is both one and many, who is able to rescue from the doomed planet that which can and must be saved: their essential selves. Ultimately, the people of Planet 8 are able to transcend the grim, unbearably sad trappings of their corporeal lives to an understanding of the real "dance and dazzle" of their existence.

In this volume of the Canopus series, Doris Lessing gives us a microcosm of our emotional - our metaphysical - universe. Hers is a frightening, yet, finally a consummately hopeful vision, a profound novelist's contribution to the questions that are being asked so frequently and restlessly by scientists in that recently discovered area where the new physics meets traditional mysticism."

The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983)

"In the previous Canopus novel, Doris Lessing has proffered her extraordinarily powerful vision of humankind by combining historical analogy and allegory, myth and augury. With this new volume, in the tradition of Voltaire and Swift, she adds social and political satire to her armory.

This fifth book brings us to the Volyen Empire - small, in rapid decline, and a vortex of chaos - as the empires of Sirius and Shammat vie for its control with their favorite weapons, rhetoric and false sentiment. Canopus, alone in its knowledge of the unchangeable nature of history and, thus, of the outcome of this struggle, keeps agents on hand to covertly help the Volyens survive the turmoil. But there are unseasoned Canopean agents in Volyen who prove to be less than impervious to the temptations at hand. Incent, a young agent of some promise, succumbs to a "stubborn condition of Undulant Rhetoric" after years of sporadic attacks of simple Rhetoric. Agent Klorathy is sent to Volyen to supervise him and make sure that he eventually realizes the madness and hollow promise of the words that now have him hypnotized.

The book is comprised of Klorathy's reports to his superior, and, though Klorathy himself has occasional bouts of "Shammatis" (his stays in "Restorative Detention" always bring him around), his largely disinterested account of Incent's rhetoric-induced delusion, and of the Volyens' rhetoric-induced downfall, allows us to see how man can be seduced by his own "sentimentality" - his love of grand ideas which signify little but the sound of the words that announce them - and gives us, as well, a high-spirited and farcical treatment of everything from petty bureaucracy to the next great food source: Rocknosh.

Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire is an indictment of the ways in which man misuses his powers of speech (and the power of speeches) and of this self-flattering sentiments about emotion. But the indictment is tempered - and enhanced - by the brilliantly acute insight into human behavior that Doris Lessing brings to all her work, and by a broad humor that adds a new dimension to her Canopus series."