Soul Mates

By Paul Gray

THE MARRIAGES BETWEEN ZONES THREE, FOUR, AND FIVE by Doris Lessing Knopf; 245 pages; $10

By publishing standards, this second installment of Doris Lessing's series of visionary novels arrives at the speed of light. It was only six months ago that Shikasta unveiled Lessing's new cosmology; three vast galactic empires (two benign, one evil) and mysterious universal harmonies that, when slightly untuned, wrecked life on Shikasta. a small planet suspiciously similar to earth. The result of this disturbance was the dark underside of human history, which Lessing retold as much in sorrow as in anger. Now she has traveled past Zone Six to some nicer neighborhoods in her mental landscape. If Shikasta was an admonition, its successor is an epithalamium.

Zones Three, Four and Five exist side by side in descending order, both geographically and culturally. Three is mountainous, its inhabitants refined almost beyond fleshly desires; they have become too snug and self-sufficient even to remember the denizens of Zone Four, a primitive militaristic empire in the lowlands. They know the nomads in the desert of Zone Five only as rumors. But these separate regions have become united in a single problem: the birth rate among humans and animals has fallen off; a sense of sadness and stagnation envelops the lands. So the Providers who administer the galaxy issue an order that no one can refuse. AlsbIth, the Queen of Zone Three, must marry Ben Ata, the warlike King of Zone Four.

What follows is part fertility myth, part comedy of manners. The bride and groom are hardly thrilled at the prospect of this marriage made in heaven. They approach the pavilion magically erected for their nuptials with mutual dislike. She thinks he is a barbarian, he finds her too snobbish and ethereal. He has never faced women except as the conquering general, accepting the spoils of victory: "On their campaigns, when the army reached new territory, into his tent would be thrust some girl, or she was thrown at his feet.

She would nearly always be crying. Or she might be hissing and spitting. She might bite and scratch as he entered her."

Compelled to make love to the Queen, he makes sure his first performance is nasty, brutish and short.

Those who look for a feminist parable to begin at this point will be disap pointed. It is true that AlsbIth is superior to Ben Ata; love between them cannot be achieved until he climbs and she falls. Yet Lessing's narrative imbues this war between the sexes with an urgent purpose, nothing else than the regeneration of life.

Both participants suffer. Ben Ata is slowly ennobled by contact with his bride, but at a cost of self-confidence. His once brutal decisiveness has been tempered by the uncertainties of reflection. AlsbIth, experienced in the bloodless sex of her own zone, sinks into a passion and carnality as frightful to her as it is exhilarating:

"Alsblth felt that she loved this man utterly . . . But with what a sinking of the heart did she acknowledge this commitment to him -- she could not now remember what she had felt for the men she had been with in her own realm, but she knew it had been nothing like this. It was as if she were relinquishing light and air for bonds that tightened as she breathed, growing into her flesh." Suffering still, she bears Ben Ata a son.

This love story is abruptly terminated by the Providers, who decree that Ben Ata must now abandon AlsbIth and marry and civilize the hellcat Queen of Zone Five.

Grumpily and obediently, he does so.

Consistent as this development may be with Lessing's larger pattern, it does vitiate the final pages of her novel. What has happened earlier between her two principals seems too important to pass over so quickly. Lessing, 60, has written often about the struggles between men and women and the dimensions of sex and love, but never with more sweetness, compassion and wisdom. --Paul Gray

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