The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

Book 5 of the Canopus in Argos series

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This book took real effort to finish. For the first few weeks of reading it, whenever I saw it on the nightstand or thought about it, I couldn't remember the storyline. About a quarter of the way into it, there was a pivotal scene involving three individuals and I couldn’t remember the backstory of two of them. Ouch. I began the book again.

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It’s possible Ms Lessing felt the need to sew up some loose ends from the previous books in the series, but beyond that, I don’t see any need for this book. The loose ends she left hanging could well have been left with no harm done. I wasn’t thinking, after the first four books, about the eventual fate of the Sirian empire. I didn’t need to know.

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I had taken a risk, of course, because I did not want Krolgul to stand up and launch himself into oratory. I wanted the tone kept low and sensible.

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He was lounging there on his bench, watching everything without seeming to, and trying to make Incent meet his eyes so that he could once again get the boy under his influence. I could feel Incent beside me as a blank, a void.

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He was not Krolgul’s then, nor was he himself; he was not acting as a conduit for the strengths and powers of the planet so that Krolgul could tap them; he was not letting the virtues of Canopus drain away through him. He was nothing. And I hoped I could keep him so until the healing powers of Canopus could begin to work.

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What she did cover in this book is a topic that is in most of her books: the power of words to incite, convince, shame, convert, etc.

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Ms Lessing spent her 20s and 30s in Britain in the years when demonstrations and protests were a daily occurrence and communism was still seen as viable form of government. She saw how movements spawn their own jargon and how when a movement gets to a certain size, that jargon becomes a complete language that only the people in the movement speak fluently and can understand.

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She is fascinated by how language forms opinions in the minds of people which can suddenly shift as assumptions among the general populous shift.

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You will see that Incent is recovering fast. But he has again been travelling over Volyen telling anyone who will listen about their animal brains and their higher brains.

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‘You see,’ he exhorts earnestly, ‘when you are in a pack or a herd, then the instincts appropriate to these conditions rule you. When you are stampeding along a street in a herd, you have to let out rhythmic, repetitive cries, you have to burn and break and destroy, you have to kill. But when you are sitting quietly alone, as you are with me, then your higher brains rule you, and you are in that condition responsive to higher impulses, don’t you see?’

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In the epilogue of the forth book in this series, she shared an example of this phenomenon as it relates to when Norway and Britain were racing to the North Pole.

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How average Brits felt about that event went from one extreme to another in just one generation. She is right to be fascinated by that dynamic - it’s super interesting. But when you’ve read dozens of books by Doris Lessing (as I have) that interest becomes stale (even though the phenomenon still happens and is still interesting).

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The same day I finished this book I began a book by Octavia Butler. The jump from one author to the other (both contemporaries) allowed me to see the work of Doris Lessing in a new way.

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I love her writing style and I am interested in the topics that she is interested in, however, I could palpably feel the difference in intensity between these two writers.

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Ms. Lessing tells a story that one reads. Her writing is intellectually stimulating. Ms. Butler pulls one into the story so that when reading, the heart pounds and the book is impossible to put down.

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All respect due to Nobel-Prize-winning Doris Lessing, but this book is not recommended.

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