[In the following review, O'Faolain assesses the themes, motifs, and characterization in Love, Again.]

Doris Lessing's fictional range defies comparison—unless with a literary team which might include, say, Bunyan, Balzac and several more. Her new novel [Love, Again], the first for eight years, recalls Racine. Like his, its characters seethe with pent desire; but, unlike his, their decorum scarcely cracks; there is some boiling over, but little scandal or mingling of hot liquids. Their climax is solitary.

The novel opens: “Easy to think this was a junkroom, silent and airless in a warm dusk, but then a shadow moved, someone emerged from it to pull back the curtains and throw open windows. It was a woman, who now stepped quickly to a door and went out, leaving it open.” Allegory? Perhaps. Both “shadow” and “junkroom” sound like emblems. In a sermon, “junk” could stand for terrestrial vanity. But is a sermon under way?

This assumption vacillates, as Lessing's skilled realism creates a plausible world inhabited by one of her typically solitary and valiant female protagonists whose age lags just behind her own. This one is called Sarah Durham. “A good sensible name for a sensible woman”, thinks Sarah, giving us a signal that she will soon be put to the test. An allegorical test? Portents differ. The “bits of theatrical junk” turn out to be there because she works in the theatre and because her flat holds “thirty years of memories”. But the allegorical nimbus grows brightly when she notes how little of the clutter is due to a “choice from that part of her she thought of as herself”. The italics are Lessing's.

Sarah has written a play which the London theatre company that she helped to found will put on in Provence with the help of French, English and American money. Particulars now crowd in fast. Practical Sarah—aged sixty-five but looking younger—is in her element. The company's English “angel”, Stephen Ellington-Smith, has written an unacceptably sentimental play on the same subject as hers and must be placated. This is done deftly, as the two agree to use her play, to sign it jointly and to incorporate some of his dialogue. After its run in Provence, it will be put on in the grounds of his house in Oxfordshire.

Lessing's novel is about what happens to the people who now gather to rehearse this play, about the spell it casts over them and the sexual passions aroused. Or rather this is the narrative scaffolding on which she will hang a meditation about a number of topics which interest her.

The novel is all layered themes and patterns, several emerging from the play itself. It tells the life story of Julie Vairon, a lovely, talented, illegitimate quadroon who comes from Martinique to France in the 1880s with a young lieutenant. Abandoned by him, she takes another well-born lover, loses him, goes mad with misery, then recovers. Later, when a kindly, older man asks her to marry him, she agrees, starts to prepare for the marriage, but instead throws herself into a mountain torrent.

Sarah's play, Julie Vairon, draws on the “real” Julie's journals and uses her recently discovered musical compositions which have been enjoying critical acclaim. The play will be put on in English in the woods near the small Provençal house where Julie lived and recorded her thoughts. “Freedom! Liberty! she often cried to herself, roaming about her forests.” Her self-portraits aimed to discover “her real, her hidden nature.” Though passionate, she was afflicted with a cold eye which led her to see her own story, “as if Jane Austen were rewriting Jane Eyre”.

The cross-over is a tip-off. Sarah too will suffer through an impossible love. She will fall secretly and foolishly for Bill, the actor playing Julie's lieutenant, who is gorgeous, twenty-six years old and prefers men. Perhaps group euphoria is to blame? The theatre? Provençal nights? These are exquisitely described.

Other contagions rampage through the company. Stephen, the “angel”, claims quite seriously to be mortally stricken by the long-dead Julie. The steamy 1880s wreak emotional havoc. Anguish and jealousy are described with a baroque brio. Sarah, watching Bill with a young actress, feels pain slice through her. “Knives had nothing on this: red-hot skewers were more like it, or waves of fire.” Passion hurts. Both Sarah and Stephen discover this, as their mirroring obsessions rack them and he goes slowly mad. Meanwhile, Sarah, recovering from her yearning for Bill, develops a scarcely more viable one for the American director, Henry, who is thirty-five. Age matters in our day as much as family and property did in Julie's. There is some despairing and rather dogged self-scrutiny by Sarah who, having been celibate for twenty years, has failed to monitor her body's decline. She sleeps with neither Bill, Henry or Andrew, another young actor who offers himself.

A lot of action? Yes, but it is presented as food for thought and is often imaginary—like Sarah's couplings with Henry and Bill. Little actually happens, and the mirroring of Julie's story remains fanciful. Thus, though the thought is lively, the novel is static, since characters fail to engage with each other and so with us. Lessing, a Cupid bent on enlightening rather than delighting, showers us with arrows armed with pedagogic points. Tipped with the vaccine of sadness, most have to do with love.

Love, Again—admire the rueful comma—muses on the grand old passion's theatrical disguises: love as malady, as memento mori, narcissism (one seeks one's own youth) or re-enactment of childhood-need. In the end, something like the old patristic notion that Eros is a lure to distract humanity from its divine love-object seems to be implied when Sarah, retracing her emotional neediness to her babyhood, rejects the notion that what she has been longing for is a substitute for mother's milk or love. Some grander—mystic?—need must, she decides, be mirrored by later ones. “To fall in love is to remember one is an exile. …” An allegory then? In part, yes. Sarah's soul has been passing through calamity to clarity of vision.

En route to this discovery, she makes a more specific one. This is that her vulnerability may go back to blocked memories of a childhood in which her mother preferred her brother. Hal, and denied Sarah affection. Since Hal is one of the novel's nastier and more vivid minor characters, this is both interesting and credible. The subplot, in which he manipulates Sarah into looking after his semi-deranged daughter, achieves an urgency which the main story lacks. Hal's selfishness could indeed be the result of childhood spoiling. His daughter, Joyce, a sweet but irrecuperable street-person, is a present-day twin for Julie, who also lived on the margins of society, while Hal is contrasted with Stephen, in whom Sarah finds the lovable brother she never had. Thus the thematic frame tidies up a narrative sprawl. Lessons are conveyed and incidental pleasures delivered, as characters lark about, exchanging quotations about love. The novel is a florilegium of wise comment and apt illustration. For me, however, it lacks fiction's first, basic requirement: it fails to seduce, tantalize or move. Maybe it was never meant to.