[In the following review, Brandon focuses on the theatrical setting, style, and implications of the central theme of Love, Again.]

When [Love, Again] starts, this is still just a concept; by the end, the play is a success, but its creators have lost interest in it. The addictive group life of the theatre, vividly evoked, becomes the backdrop for the novel's own drama.

This theatrical effect is heightened by the rather highly coloured, simplified nature of the background. The weather is always sunny; the small town in Provence where much of the action takes place, and the stately home that is the setting for much of the rest, might be operatic stage: sets. And Julie herself, the play's subject, never convinces as a historical figure. She's too good at everything, her life is too dramatically symmetrical.,

But all this is just a frame for the book's real theme: love, As one might expect, Lessing's love is no sweet story. What she portrays is Racine's Venus route entiere a sa proie attachee. Sarah writes: “I think I am really ill. I am sick—with love … People killing themself for love do it because they can't stand the pain. Physical pain. I have never understood that before.”

The play itself sets the theme. Julie is a beautiful quadroon from Martinique, the illegitimate daughter of a plantation-owner, who runs away to France with a lover, is abandoned, falls in love again, loses a child, and finally commits suicide. Eighty years after her death in 1912, it is discovered she was a brilliant composer and artist who kept a journal. Sarah's play is based on this and uses her music.

Sarah is obsessed with Julie; so (more pathologically) is the play's backer, Stephen, who is trapped inside a loveless marriage and has fallen in love with her. In love with someone dead? At first Sarah can't believe it; soon, though, she realises it is literally true, But this is not the only unlikely coupling. As the production unfolds against the magical hot summer of 1989, the novel's entire cast falls victim to the merciless goddess. Sarah herself is doubly afflicted; and Stephen, who seems so imperturbable, is more wounded than anyone.

The love life of the elderly is a popular theme these days, but it is rarely treated with Lessing's merciless eyes. Mary Wesley treats it with a rosy disregard for physical dilapidation; Alan Isler (in The Prince of West End Avenue) with the distancing device of affectionate humour. But neither sentimentality nor gentle irony were ever Doris Lessing's line, and the years have not blunted her scalpel.

Her style is unadorned; she carries the reader forward by sheer force of observation and intellectual vigour. It's hard to credit that a woman of Sarah's age would suddenly become a love-object for three (!) young men. Nevertheless we believe it, because Lessing's style sternly informs us that she is wedded to the bare truth. Indeed, nobody is more surprised (and appalled) by all this than Sarah herself.

Lessing is tapping real depths here, the more affecting for being so unexpected. Though affecting is perhaps the wrong word: the curious thing about her writing is that, although strong emotion is her subject, empathy is not one of her tools. She is perhaps too detached, too chillingly analytical, for that.

Lessing clearly knows just how human beings work. I have never seen love's effects and depredations described in more minute and accurate detail. What is less clear is whether she's a fellow-member of the species. That distinctive tone could belong to no one but Lessing. And Love, Again is a wholly compelling book, as vigorous and thought-provoking as anything she has ever written.