Pamela Norris
IN THE KOPJE"S SHADOW
Alfred and Emily
By Doris Lessing (Fourth Estate 288pp £16.99)

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Doris Lessing's new book, Alfred and Emily, is an unusual hybrid, part fiction, part memoir, about her parents, Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude McVeagh. It is not the first time that Lessing has written about her family. Her battles with her mother as a young girl growing up in Southern Rhodesia are vividly recorded in her novel Martha Quest. There are also two volumes of autobiography, and numerous glimpses of her family history in novels and short stories. Now in her eighties, she is still struggling to understand the drama of her parents' lives, and to free herself from what she describes as the 'monstrous legacy' of the trenches. How did the competent and sociable Sister McVeagh of her mother's early life become the suffering woman trapped on an African smallholding?

In her Foreword, Lessing writes that 'the Great War, the war that would end all war, squatted over my childhood'. Her father was badly wounded, his leg shattered by shrapnel, and henceforth he had to wear what he called 'my wooden leg', a crude contraption of wood and metal. He was also emotionally damaged, suffering from nightmares, depression and grief for lost comrades. A nurse at the Royal Free Hospital in London, Lessing's mother cared for Alfred and for scores of other wounded and dying men. The love of her life, a doctor, was drowned when his ship was sunk by a torpedo. These wartime horrors haunted the young Taylers, Doris and her brother Harry.

Alfred and Emily begins with a novella, in which Lessing imagines her parents' lives if the Great War had never happened. It is a clever idea, a way of making reparation for terror, injury and loss, and also of examining character, and the fascinating 'what-ifs?' of human destiny. Lessing begins her story in an Essex village, where young Alfred excels at cricket, takes up farming and, rather than marrying Emily, chooses the kind and sensible Betsy. Meanwhile, Emily, a girl with the talent to become a concert pianist or study at university, decides instead to take up nursing, to 'wipe the bottoms of the very poor'. Efficient and hardworking, she is rapidly promoted, but abandons her career when she marries an eminent cardiologist, a diffident and distant man. After his death, Emily discovers a talent for storytelling and devotes herself to good works, using her husband's fortune to provide schools and books for the poor. But she remains emotionally unfulfilled. All the time, inside this able, talented woman, grief is waiting to 'rush out of the dark pit it lived in and fasten on her heart'.

The second half of Alfred and Emily centres on Lessing's childhood memories of her parents. On leave from Persia, where Alfred had been working for the Imperial Bank, the Taylers visited the Empire Exhibition in London, and saw the Southern Rhodesian stall with its enticing slogan 'Get rich on maize'. Faced with the stark reality behind this invitation, however, Emily was to spend months in bed with what she described as 'a heart-attack', but Lessing thinks was a major breakdown. Expecting an elegant life with 'our class of people', Emily had come to Rhodesia prepared with calling cards, sheet music, boxes of children's books and Liberty frocks. Instead, she arrived in an 'uncharted, unworked wilderness', where she had to help her invalid husband choose land, build a house out of unfamiliar materials (mud and thatch), and furnish it with paraffin-box tables and curtains made from dyed flour sacks. In this real-life narrative, Alfred comes across as brave and stubborn, determined to wrestle his inadequate farm into productivity. Despite the privations and disappointments, he responded passionately to Africa, marvelling at the grandeur of the night skies, 'dazed with starlight, wonder', and inching painfully up a rocky kopje to admire Bushmen paintings. He was to die prematurely from diabetes after decades of gamely struggling to ignore disability. Lonely, often ill and desperate, Emily also eventually rose to the occasion, decorating their house with Persian fabrics and precious copperware, and running a clinic for the blacks suffering from respiratory disease, burns and snakebite. For a time, in a trunk marked 'Not Wanted on Voyage', she preserved the relics of her dreams. But one day, young Doris is given permission to unpack its contents, and gazes in astonishment at the treasure trove of moth-eaten frocks, exquisite lace, chiffon and crystal beads, which her mother caresses with 'a fine, elegant', work-worn hand.

In her fantasy life of Emily, Lessing gives her mother the fulfilling work and authority denied her in real life, but she doesn't allow her to be truly happy. This isn't vindictiveness. She simply recognises that inside her mother, for all her formidable energy and intelligence, there lurked a needy child, longing for maternal attention. In both the novella and the memoir, Emily's mother dies in childbirth when Emily, the oldest of three children, is only three years old. Emily was brought up by a disciplinarian father and an unloving stepmother. Pondering her mother's unhappiness, Lessing sees that this early trauma shadowed Emily's adult life and spilt over into the lives of her children, as inexorably as the tragedies of the Great War.

This is Doris Lessing's first publication since she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007. It has the freshness, clarity and emotional acuity that made her first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950), so outstanding. After more than half a century, Lessing is still teasing out the painful truths of personal relationships and asking probing questions about political issues. If Alfred and Emily is a lament for blighted lives, and the waste and loss of African history, it is also a tribute to a remarkable childhood, and a poignant memoir of the mother whose greatest legacy to her daughter was an invaluable gift for storytelling.

Pamela Norris's 'Words of Love' is published by HarperPress.