Briefing for a Descent Into Hell

Briefing for a Descent Into Hell
Doris Lessing

A study of a man beyond the verge of a nervous breakdown, this is a brilliant and disturbing novel by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.Penniless, rambling and incoherent, a man is found wandering at night on London’s Embankment. Taken to hospital and heavily sedated, he tells the doctors of his incredible fantastical voyage, adrift on the ocean, landing on unknown shores, flying on the back of a huge white bird.Identified as Charles Watkins, a Cambridge Classics professor, he is visited by family and friends, each revealing clues to the nature of his breakdown. As the doctors try to cure him, Watkins begins a fierce battle to hold on to his magnificent inner world, as it gradually acquires a greater reality than the everyday…‘Briefing for a Descent into Hell’ is one of Doris Lessing’s most brilliantly achieved novels, linking her early work, which explored the nature of subjectivity, with her later experiments in science fiction. Its indictment of the tyranny of society is powerful, disturbing and, as always, magnificently rendered.

MODERN CLASSIC

DORIS LESSING

Briefing for a

Descent Into Hell

this is for my son John,

the sea-loving man

If yonder raindrop should its heart disclose,

Behold therein a hundred seas displayed.

In every atom, if thou gaze aright,

Thousands of reasoning beings are contained.

The gnat in limbs doth match the elephant.

In name is yonder drop as Nile’s broad flood.

In every grain a thousand harvests dwell.

The world within a grain of millet’s heart.

The universe in the mosquito’s wing contained.

Within that point in space the heavens roll.

Upon one little spot within the heart

Resteth the Lord and Master of the worlds.

Therein two worlds commingled may be seen …

The Sage Mahmoud Shabistari, in the fourteenth century

(The Secret Garden)

… this minuscule world of the sand grains is also the world of inconceivably minute beings, which swim through the liquid film around a grain of sand as fish would swim through the ocean covering the sphere of the earth. Among this fauna and flora of the capillary water are single-celled animals and plants, water mites, shrimplike crustacea, insects, and the larvae of infinitely small worms—all living, dying, swimming, feeding, breathing, reproducing in a world so small that our human senses cannot grasp its scale, a world in which the microdroplet of water separating one grain of sand from another is like a vast, dark sea.

The marine biologist, Rachel Carson, twentieth century

(The Edge of the Sea)

Contents

Cover (#ue6ebe5c4-6d07-5992-ae34-acc605259efd)

Title Page (#u9292b7ca-34d0-5a1f-9097-8a30762db374)

Epigraph (#uc48800a8-4b47-5a3b-aa53-d61e3497eb5d)

Briefing for a Descent Into Hell

Afterword

Read On (#litres_trial_promo)

The Grass is Singing (#litres_trial_promo)

The Golden Notebook (#litres_trial_promo)

The Good Terrorist (#litres_trial_promo)

Love, Again (#litres_trial_promo)

The Fifth Child (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (#u66e35fdf-5a8c-5050-84c4-28e1837065d3)

Category:

Inner-space fiction

For there is never anywhere to go but in.

CENTRAL INTAKE HOSPITAL

General Remarks

… At midnight the police found Patient wandering on the Embankment near Waterloo Bridge. They took him into the station thinking he was drunk or drugged. They describe him as Rambling, Confused and Amenable. Brought him to us at 3 a.m. by ambulance. During admittance Patient attempted several times to lie down on the desk. He seemed to think it was a boat or a raft. Police are checking ports, ships, etc. Patient was well-dressed but had not changed his clothes for some time. He did not seem very hungry or thirsty. He was wearing trousers and a sweater, but he had no papers or wallet or money or marks of identity. Police think he was robbed. He is an educated man. He was given two Libriums but did not sleep. He was talking loudly. Patient was moved into the small Observation ward as he was disturbing the other Patients.

NIGHT NURSE 6 a.m.