Briefing for a Descent Into Hell

Doris Lessing’s psychological work of literary fiction, Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, follows the inner adventures of Cambridge Classics professor Charles Watkins, who is found wandering the banks of the Thames in a catatonic state. He is taken to a mental hospital where two doctors, Dr. X and Dr. Y, dose him with ever-increasing quantities of antipsychotics, trying to bring him back into the real world. Meanwhile, Charles experiences an incredible adventure inside his own head, full of memories and imagined landscapes. The book is written in a stream-of-consciousness form, and for much of the novel, it is unclear what is real and what is entirely imagined.

The overarching scheme of the novel is of meddling primordial beings: Minna Err and Merk Ury. They hold a conference in the clouds to send a series of delegates to Hell, otherwise known as Earth, to help subdue the beings there, curtailing their separateness, defined elsewhere as a kind of selfishness in which each person is focused more on the self than the collective whole. The novel then follows one of these delegates, a man who is found wandering the Thames in London in a state of amnesia, completely shut off from the outside world. The man, whose name is not revealed until much later in the book, is the protagonist Charles.

Charles is picked up by an ambulance and taken to a mental institution, where he is treated by Dr. X and Dr. Y – though Charles does not believe that Dr. X is real, and seems to prefer Dr. Y for unknown reasons. The initial part of the book is written as a dialogue, like a play, and then morphs into stream-of-consciousness writing as Charles explores his internal psychological world, and Drs. X and Y attempt to treat him with powerful psychiatric medications.



Charles is on a raft in the Atlantic, left behind by his friends who have beamed up to some kind of unknown alien spacecraft. Then he is taken to the ruins of an ancient city on a nameless tropical island; after that, he is beamed into outer space, where he floats among planets that sing songs. His psychological adventures bring him through memories and scenes from favorite novels, and into entirely unfamiliar worlds.

Meanwhile, Drs. X and Y have figured out who Charles is, and a series of testimonials about the man appears. Charles, it seems, is a grouchy and selfish professor of Classics at Cambridge, whose long-time colleague, Jeremy, has nothing particularly good to say about him, other than that their relationship has always been a struggle. Also on his bad list is Charles's former mistress, Constance, who is carrying his child and began to have a relationship with Charles while she was his student. She changed her major for him from something more practical and then struggled to make him love her again after he coldly dumped her without explanation. After discovering she was pregnant, Constance began to hate the man who had, in her view, ruined her life.

Other people in Charles's life include his wife, with whom he has a strained relationship and who demands a level of normalcy, and a stranger named Rosemary, who, one day, caught a lecture of Charles's in London and loved it so much, she asked him to visit her the next time she was in London. This is apparently what Charles was doing the night he became catatonic – Rosemary is one of the few characters in the novel not obsessed with returning Charles to his “normal” state, and who is accepting of his abnormalities.



In the final third of the novel, high doses of sedatives pull Charles out of his psychological adventure; the doctors encourage him to go back home, hoping to free up a bed in the already overly full psych ward. Charles doesn't feel particularly normal yet, and the doctors recommend electroshock therapy. The doctors insist that Charles must have his memory returned to him, but Charles feels as if his new state is one of elevated happiness; he is a better human being now, with a strong sense of urgency to live his best life. He explains this to his friend from the psych ward, Violet, a woman who likes to act like a little girl. The next day, when he receives his shock therapy, Charles remembers his old self and is removed from that enlightened state of being forever. The elevated consciousness he discovered during his internal journey has been killed. With this sad loss of Charles's new self, the novel ends.

Doris Lessing is the award-winning author of a number of novels, including The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook, and the Children of Violence, a five-novel sequence. She was the oldest person ever to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born to British parents in Iran and then moved with them to Zimbabwe (then South Rhodesia), where she was raised. Lessing has been awarded a number of honors for lifetime achievement, including a David Cohen Prize for Lifetime Achievement in British Literature. She also wrote under the pen name Jane Somers.