Time Bites by Doris Lessing: book review

Time Bites (2005) is a series of essays by British author Doris Lessing (1919-2013). She writes about novels and authors, and current events – for she has a point of view about almost everything.

She writes about love, sex, intimacy, morality, marriage, infidelity, pregnancies, children, and family life in novels, from DH Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Jane Austen to modern writers. She discusses the scandals and the controversies, and how the novels are ‘firmly’ of their ‘place and time.’

She says the book that changed her was The Sufis (1971) by Idries Shah, and writes several essays on his books.

She writes about European, American, Australian, Eastern, African, and Russian literature, showing an extensively global outlook in the books she reads. She critiques novels, but is not critical, because she covers the books she reads, understands, and loves.

She writes about censorship of books and the inner censor within writers who edit their own writings due to ‘political correctness.’

Lessing includes autobiographical essays, such as discussions about her book, The Golden Notebook. I liked her essay called My Room, about the bedroom and the view of her ‘bird-inhabited confusion’ of an English garden.

Her views about people writing biographies about her are mostly philosophical, but sometimes her annoyance shows; she mentions a ‘bad biography’ where ‘all the facts about my family are wrong, including my daughter’s name.’ No, she did not own a farm in Zimbabwe, and she is amused at the ‘phantom friends’ who contribute to biographies, claiming to know her intimately. ‘This woman says that my (naturally) curly hair was

achieved with the aid of a home perm kit. Now that’s fighting talk.’

Lessing, in each and every essay, is direct, unapologetic, well-read, scholarly, and informative. She is thoroughly thought-provoking, and always brilliant.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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