Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist skewers the psychology of idealism and its contradictions

When it was published in 1985, The Good Terrorist seemed, to many of Doris Lessing’s admirers, a surprising book for her to have written. She had only recently completed her Canopus in Argos series of five science-fiction novels, published between 1979 and 1983. These were intellectually capacious novels of ideas, set in imaginary worlds and spanning future centuries. Now, here was a work of social realism, focusing on a particular, closely observed part of London, fixed in the early 1980s. It was also a surprising turn politically. Lessing had long been thought of as a writer of the Left; in The Good Terrorist, a group of left-wing political radicals is the target of her caustic satire: was this a novel of political renunciation? 

The book, the third of Lessing’s works to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, opens with Alice and Jasper – middle-class, university-educated, would-be revolutionaries in their mid-30s – arriving at a large, abandoned house, somewhere in London. Earmarked for demolition, the house is already a squat, inhabited by an assortment of dropouts, but with plenty of room for anyone else who can put up with the primitive living conditions. The local council have tried to render it uninhabitable. The electricity has been cut off, the lavatories filled with cement. There is no hot water. It is squalid beyond belief (and Lessing certainly does not flinch from exact description of the primitive sanitary arrangements). 

Alice, the book’s central character – you might say, its anti-heroine – has a head full of radical political slogans, just like her fellow squatters, and is equally forthright in denouncing all the habits of the ‘fascists’ who run British society. ‘I am a revolutionary,’ she solemnly tells anyone prepared to listen. She is dogmatic and naïve, but the novel requires us to understand her delusions. She is convinced that everything is rotten in 1980s Britain, that everything will be right after the collapse of this damned society. All unhappiness is the fault of the system. Faye, one of her housemates, is psychiatrically ill and attempts suicide. Of course, it is the because of capitalism. Alice is sure that, come the revolution, ‘there would be no more people like Faye … No more people damaged by life’. 

Alice and her comrades have started up a new political party, the Communist Centre Union, which has a few tens of members. ‘These mass parties, they lose touch with the people.’ Jasper and one of the other squatters, Bert, go off to Ireland, to try to offer their revolutionary services to the IRA (always mentioned with a kind of reverence by the ‘comrades’). Inevitably, when they do manage a meeting with someone who might be connected to the IRA, he turns them away with cold condescension. Still, when they need a raison d’être, they always have Mrs Thatcher, in her sixth year in power when the novel was published. She is the convenient incarnation of all that they hate. She even makes a fleeting appearance in the novel, when Alice and her friends travel to a demonstration outside a new university, somewhere in provincial England, which she is visiting. Briefly, they glimpse her arriving, and are roused to ecstatic fury. 

Through Alice’s head run an odd and entirely believable mixture of emotions. She despises her mother’s supposedly bourgeois values, whilst lapsing into pleasurable memories of fresh coffee in her spacious kitchen. She hates ‘bloody filthy accumulating middle-class creeps’, yet keeps returning in her head to consoling memories of her impeccably middle-class childhood. She is appalled when she finds that, out of financial necessity, her mother has sold the family home and moved into a small flat in a much less appealing part of town. For this was her original and true home. Having seen it sold off, ‘her heart whimpered and hurt her’. 

Alice, the home-maker, is imitating as well as renouncing her mother, Dorothy. Just occasionally, she can even hear herself sounding like her mother. The set-piece encounters between her and Dorothy are the only places in the book where Alice has to hear (or rather, has to try very hard not to hear) the truth about her own life choices. Dorothy, wearily lucid, at once tolerant and scornful of her daughter, is another great creation. It slowly becomes clear that she is not the reactionary that Alice would like to paint her, but a former idealist, once left-wing herself, who has grown utterly impatient with political self-righteousness. Sometimes, she feels like a spokeswoman for the author. 

When I interviewed Doris Lessing in 2007, she recalled how one particular aspect of the novel was based on her own observations. 

‘Next door to me at that particular time, just down, across the road was a house stuffed full of squatters and revolutionaries. So I saw them quite a lot. But what was really interesting about this was they never stopped talking about money. They might be revolutionaries, but money, this is what they talked about. How to get the next payment from somewhere. So that was really hilarious.’ 

Scorning bourgeois society, the main characters in Lessing’s novel are indeed money-obsessed. The insufficiently radical Philip, who has not had the benefit of higher education, does attempt to get paid work, but Alice’s other housemates scorn the very thought of getting jobs. They all collect their social security and hope for other kinds of opportunist gain. Alice steals from her parents; Jasper steals from Alice. 

Meanwhile, upstairs, a new resident, a cold-eyed girl called Jocelin, is ‘studying handbooks on how to be a good terrorist’ (the one time in the novel that the title phrase is actually used). It becomes clear that she is teaching herself how to make a bomb, and that the outcome of her self-tuition will also be disastrous climax of the narrative. We are to see where absolute conviction can lead. True to her invention, Lessing shows Alice flinching from violence, yet still imperturbably explaining it away. 

In her later comments on the novel, Doris Lessing talked of it belonging to its specific time. It is true that the particular politics that it depicts is distant from us now. Equally, the London of abandoned houses and alternative communities that it describes belongs to ancient history. But every age has its new forms of political righteousness and Lessing’s is still a bracing antidote to these. It is not a renunciation of all Lessing’s former political ideals, but a matchless depiction of the psychology of idealism, and the ways in which it can topple into intolerance and self-deception. 

John Mullan is Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London; he was a judge of the Booker Prize in 2009