Visit to a Small Planet

By Paul Gray

SHIKASTA by Doris Lessing

Knopf; 384 pages; $10.95

Science fiction is pastoral turned upside down, radiating a nostalgia not for what was but for what could be. Since this mystic longing has increasingly filled the novels and stories of Author Doris Lessing, 59, it is not surprising that she has finally got around to spaceships and galactic travelers; she herself calls Shikasta, her 24th book, "space fiction." This description is accurate enough, but it may mislead some into expecting much less than this dazzling novel actually delivers. Shikasta owes more to Gulliver's Travels and the Old Testament than to Buck Rogers; it is 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.

All that may seem too much for a 384-page book to accomplish, but Lessing's premise gives her aeons of time to fill. Scouts from the benign galactic empire Canopus discover a small but promising planet, obviously the young earth, whose denizens include a strain of monkeys beginning to stand on their own two feet. The Canopeans introduce a race of superior creatures to tutor these humanoids and help speed their evolution. Eventually, the planet, called Rohanda, is deemed ready to be locked into the vast, overarching harmony that prevails throughout the domain of Canopus.

After many Edenic millenniums an "unfortunate cosmic pattern" breaks this lock and introduces cacophony and dissonance into the new world. Almost immediately the inhabitants display symptoms of the "Degenerative Disease," a bellicose assertion of ego against the grain of the common good. Life-spans, which had stretched to a thousand years, begin shrinking dramatically; natural fulfillment is replaced by restless desires and dissatisfactions. The Canopean overseers sadly change Rohanda's name to Shikasta, "the hurt, the damaged, the wounded one." The period of earth's recorded history is about to begin.

The chief recorder in Shikasta is Johor, a virtually immortal Canopean who is in on the creation of Rohanda and who returns in the present (the Century of Destruction) to salvage what he can from the calamity. The novel is also pieced together out of passages from Canopean history books and archives, official communiques, sociological reports, diaries and letters of assorted Shikastans. These documents enable Lessing to imply a vast skeleton of time out of a limited number of bones; she can also shift viewpoints dramatically from the near infinite to the minute. Oddly, the novel's unity rests in its variety.

Thus passages that infuriate can be endured in the knowledge that enchantment is on the way. The book's allegory points insistently to earth, and the history of Shikasta as seen from Canopus is often, by earthly standards, particularly hamhanded: "For a couple of centuries at least, then, a dominant feature of the Shikastan scene was that a particularly arrogant and self-satisfied breed, a minority of the minority white race, dominated most of Shikasta, a multitude of different races, cultures, and religions which, on the whole, were superior to that of the oppressors." Such polemics alternate with passages of aching poignancy: "The lowest, the most downtrodden, the most miserable of Shikastans will watch the wind moving a plant, and smile; will plant a seed and watch it grow; will stand to watch the life of the clouds. Or lie pleasurably awake in the dark, hearing wind howl that cannot -- not this time -- harm him where he lies safe. This is where strength has always welled, irrepressibly, into every creature of Shikasta."

This recognition is the source of Lessing's strength. As interested as she has become in grand designs or configurations of enormous powers, she does not forget the here and now. She will still pause for moments of liquid beauty, stop to portray a sliver of the moon reflected in a dusty courtyard pool in Morocco. Shikasta invites argument. There is something unsatisfying about a vision of history that suggests humans could not, after all, help making the messes they have, that their blunders were all ordained by a small tic in the cosmos. But belief in Lessing's theory is not required to find her novel pleasurably, even furiously engaging on every page.

The creative energy expended in this novel has not, apparently, exhausted Lessing's supply. She has announced a companion volume, to be published next year, in what may become an even longer series. That is good news, but the Shikastan habit of ignoring present pleasures in favor of a chimerical future should be avoided. For the moment, it is enough to welcome an audacious and disturbing work from one of the world's great living writers. --Paul Gray

Excerpt

"I remember the great beasts of Rohanda, the wonderful ancestors of these little animals, miniature lions and tiny deer and half-size elephants that seem to these dwindled people so enormous --yet to those who knew those vast wise beasts of former times, they are endearing, almost toys for children. The children are heartbreaking now. In those times, the children of the Giants, the Natives' children, were each one born after such deliberation, such thought, each one chosen and from parents known to be the best. . . each with such a long life, time to grow, time to play, time to think, time to ripen their inner selves and grow fully into themselves. Now these delightful infants are born haphazardly, of any mating, any parents, treated well or ill as chance dictates, dying as easily as they are born, and dying anyway so soon after they are born--and yet each child, every one, has all the potentiality, has it still, and completely, to leap from their low half-animal state to true humanity. Each one of them with this potential, and yet so few can be reached, to make the leap.

I do not like handling their infants, their children: it is a -- sad business."

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