Doris Lessing: BRIEFING FOR A DESCENT INTO HELL

A mad man is just like that - a mad man. It doesn’t matter if he was a genius or a learned man before his descent into madness. This, I think, is what Doris Lessing is trying to point out in her novel Briefing For A Descent Into Hell.

In the novel, a man (Professor Charles Watkins), who we’ll later know to be amnesiac, is found wandering the streets. He is sent to the police and then later to the psychiatric ward of a hospital. Initially, the sleep-inducing drugs administered to him don’t work. He instead ‘hallucinates’ that he’s lost in an ocean, that he’s someone from another planet, that he was a war in Yugoslavia, and so on. The two doctors, who attend to Watkins on different shifts, can’t agree on the best treatment method for his condition. Things happen; some dizzying things that should trigger discussion among those who’ll read the book.

Rating: 4.0/5.0