The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

Book 4 in the Canopus in Argos series

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A deceptively simple book that delves deep into the psychology of a people who are facing their own extinction. It’s a profound story told in a sort of parable.

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Like in the other books of this series, Lessing creates a very strong atmosphere and such vivid imagery that one almost feels the weather when reading it. In this book she again demonstrates the mechanics of evolution.

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No, they were not the small and pretty birds of the warm times, flocks and groups and assemblies darting and swirling and swooping as one, moving as fast as water does when its molecules are dancing. They were the birds of this chilly time, individual, eagles and hawks and buzzards, moving slowly on wings that did not beat, but balanced. They too had heavy shoulders and their eyes glared from thick feathers, and they circled and swept about the skies on the breath of freezing winds that had killed our familiar flocks sometimes as they flew; so that, seeing the little brightly coloured bodies drop from the air, we had looked up and imagined we could see, too, the freezing blast that had struck them down out of the sky.

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In this case, evolution from the consensus stage of consciousness through the individuated stage and into the spirituated stage. To do it in a single lifetime is amazing, unheard of - at least, for humans on Earth.

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But I suppose that was the point of these people striving to stay alive until the last possible moment: to refine and distill them in to a single Representative.

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I set in front of myself a mirror, and I looked at my features – nose from my mother, eyes from my father, shape of head from one, set of body from the other, with memories of grandparents and great-grandparents.

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I looked, saying: her hands came down to him, and then to her and so to me, and his hair shows on that head and grew again on my grandmother, and so me – and I thought how that couple, my parents, could have given birth to – how many? – children, thousands, perhaps millions, every one slightly different – it was the slight difference that intrigued me in this private game of mine, and I imagined as I stood there looking at my face, my body, how stretching behind me, to each side of me, in every direction away from me, stood slight modifications of me, some very similar indeed, some hardly at all.

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I filled a town with these variations of myself, then a city, then, in my mind, whole landscapes. Doeg, Doeg, Doeg again, and mentally I greeted these nonexistent never-to-exist people, people who had not come into life because I had come in this precise shape of body and face, with this particular set of mannerisms – I said to these people, all of whom resembled me more or less, closely or only slightly, being the same height, or a little taller or a little shorter, with variations of the same hair, eyes in an allotment of possibilities – I said to them: Look, here you are, in me … for the feeling of me, of I, that feeling I am here, Doeg, would have been your feeling had the chances of the genes fallen differently, and if you, your particular shape and mould, had been born instead of me.

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What was born, then, to those repositories of a million years of the dicing of the genes, was a feeling, a consciousness, was the self-awareness: here I am. And this awareness was later given the name Doeg – though I have used many names in my life.

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It’s a short book. The story moves along at a clip. About two-thirds of the way in, it slows down and there are conversations and soliloquies that are profound and which sent my mind shooting in a million directions; I could feel my consciousness pushing into new avenues as I considered the ideas she presented.

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The book is about probabilities, the concept of identity and shared consciousness, quantum physics, death, and the reorientation that must happen when a person recognizes themselves as separate from their identity.

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…my mind full of thoughts that come from somewhere, float around there, as if I am a sort of sieve or catchment for thoughts that are part of me for a time and then drift past?

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Really recommended.

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