Author: By Andrew Biswell

Date: SUNDAY, January 10, 1999

Page: D1

Section: Books

"Mara and Dann: An Adventure,'' Doris Lessing's 21st novel, develops some of the preoccupations first aired in her four-novel science fiction sequence, which went under the collective title of ``Canopus in Argos: Archives'' (1979-1983). Set a few hundred years in the future, this new novel is the story of a young brother and sister who are fleeing political violence during the next (and, in Lessing's view, long overdue) ice age. The action takes place in Africa, much of the Northern Hemisphere -- including Europe and North America -- having been destroyed by the descent of the ice.

Mara and Dann are the only survivors of the royal house of the Mahondi tribe, who formerly ruled the city of Rustam in South Africa (though the continent has now been renamed ``Ifrik''). First the children are instructed to forget their real names, then they are smuggled away to a drought-stricken village made of rock. Dann runs away with some passing travelers, but Mara is brought up and educated by a benevolent Mahondi woman named Daima, a ``Memory,'' whose job is to pass on the knowledge of the tribe by word of mouth. As Mara begins to mature physically, she is threatened by the sexual attentions of Kulik, a villainous local thug who has previously attempted to kill Dann by drowning him during a rare cloudburst.

A few years elapse, the water dries up, and the villagers go north. Dann, now fully grown, returns to save Mara, and they travel to Chelops, where they become slaves of the Hadron people. The Chelopian economy depends on ganja and opium, and Dann, who has become the sex-slave of opium smokers in a ruined part of the city, must be rescued by Mara. Fortunately, Daima has left them enough gold coins to pay for their escape northward by riverboat, on a hazardous journey up the River Congo. Mara, weakened by pregnancy, is forced to arrange an illegal abortion: Her loss is intensified by the mass infertility she has witnessed. As they make their way through a country divided by civil war, the siblings are separated and find themselves serving in opposing armies. Reunited again, Mara and Dann push on to the southern shores of the frozen Mediterranean Sea, where a final, decisive encounter with Kulik takes place.

One of the surprising things about Doris Lessing's critical reception is how quick British reviewers have been to dismiss her futuristic novels. ``Self-exiled in the subgenre of speculative fiction,'' wrote one otherwise sympathetic critic, ``she has, it seems, finally confirmed her marginality.'' Another critic announced that, in writing science fiction, Lessing was ``plainly evading her duty.'' Yet there is a serious case to be made for placing Lessing's science fiction at the center of her oeuvre, and I would argue that such novels represent a sustained attempt to write about her experience as a cultural alien. Born in Persia (now Iran) in 1919, Lessing grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and was twice married before moving to London to begin her literary career in 1949. Even after 50 years in England, she still regards herself as a Commonwealth writer who is not fully at home there. ``My parents were quite excessively British,'' she has said. ``But I also have the other eye because I was brought up outside England.'' Later on, as her reputation grew, Lessing chose a dissident role for herself, keeping company with prominent British communists. (She has written about these years in Volume 2 of her autobiography, ``Walking in the Shade'' [1997].) Perhaps this unorthodox personal history helps to explain why the perspective of her fiction is usually so skeptical, critical, and (in a good sense) uncompromising.

Lessing has described in her earlier novels how our planet is not on its correct axis, and her apocalyptic imagination is forcefully unleashed toward the end of ``Mara and Dann,'' where she gives an account of the end of European and North American civilization: ``These were peoples who had no interest in the results of their actions. They killed out the animals. They poisoned the fish in the sea. They cut down forests, so that country after country, once forested, became arid or desert. They spoiled everything they touched. . . . There are many historians who believe that these ancients richly deserved the punishment of the Ice.''

Lessing's big idea, which will already be familiar to readers of ``The Making of the Representative for Planet 8,'' is that, from a geological point of view, human history is a process of transience, flux, and uncertainty: ``There was nothing that did not move and change. When we looked at a stone, we must think of it as a dance and a flow. And at a hillside. Or a mountain.''

The narrative style of this novel is deliberately reduced to a vocabulary of a few thousand words, as if reflecting the collapsed cultures Lessing describes. It is easy, in the presence of this minimalist narrator, to see why Lessing's fiction has appealed to Philip Glass as raw material for his operas. There are few rhetorical flourishes, but the novel gains much intensity and emotional depth from the unornamented approach. Aiming, presumably, to construct a story of mythic simplicity, Lessing has recaptured the tone of those oral quest-narratives with which the Western literary tradition begins.

It mystifies me that Lessing's writing, though always popular with ordinary readers, is underrated (or simply ignored) by most literary scholars. Quite apart from the serious and ambitious themes of her work, one is impressed by its copiousness and variety: 21 novels, three collections of short stories, two plays, a book of poems, two opera libretti, essays, two volumes of an unfinished autobiography. In terms of her energy and productivity, I sometimes think of Lessing as an out-of-Africa Anthony Burgess, but her work is truly sui generis. There can no longer be any doubt that she is a major novelist. ``Mara and Dann'' is a substantial achievement, the latest (but not, I hope, the last) remarkable book from a seemingly inexhaustible writer who will celebrate her 80th birthday this year.