Which of us ever, really, escapes our parents? The best we can hope for, as the decades pass, is to learn to understand them differently, which offers a kind of freedom. Nobel laureate Doris Lessing has lived nearly nine decades of intensely varied life, and has written everything from operas and plays to poetry and autobiography. Yet this odd and intriguing new book tells us she is still emerging from the shadow that the first world war left on her parents' lives. That war took away her father Alfred's leg, and killed her mother Emily's sweetheart, a doctor; bereft, Emily nursed, and then wed, Lessing's father, forsaking the excellent job she had been offered as the matron of a large London teaching hospital for the hard life of a wife and mother on a small African farm.

Alfred and Emily is Lessing's attempt to reinvent her mother and father as they might have been had the first world war never happened. It is her gift to her dead parents, a kind of making right of an old injury; Lessing tells us she hopes they would “approve the lives I have given them”.

The book falls into two parts, one fictional, one autobiographical. Her reinvention of her parents' fates (in which they would not have married each other) comes first. The fictional Alfred is allowed his heart's desire, to become an English farmer with an easy, loving wife, while the fictional Emily finds her greatest fulfilment as a rich, childless widow who discovers a talent for storytelling and on that basis sets up a successful series of progressive schools.

The style of the first part is conversational and casual, and the narrative at first moves back and forth between the invented and the actual in a slightly dislocating way. Slowly and surely the real world recedes and both writer and reader are drawn into the invented one, but for me this section could not match the raw power and conviction of the second part. Nevertheless it has many fascinating features, among them an insistence on the importance of adoptive and informal rather than blood relationships: with Mrs Lane, for instance, a central, quasi-maternal figure to both Emily and Alfred. Emily is allowed not to have children (thus, of course, Lessing herself would never have been born). Later Lessing describes how in real life “all our mothers . . . bemoaned” having children, saying, “Children finish you”. She is quite matter-of-fact about it, but what hellish suffering lies behind that line?

The second part, Lessing's commentary on her parents' real lives, burns into vivid being as it re-examines Lessing's African childhood. The rising sun flames through the orange curtains of her bedroom, its door held open with a stone so she can see the “blue and rose and mauve” of the mountains in the morning. There is a brief, illuminating coda to the life of Lessing's brother, but in both parts of the book Lessing concentrates most keenly on Emily and Alfred.

Surprisingly, Emily emerges as in many ways the more sympathetic character, partly because Lessing understands her wrecked dreams so well and sees her neediness in such painful detail. By contrast, Alfred, the father, so much the more attractive and charming figure in Lessing's volumes of autobiography and in the photographs that are one of this book's pleasures, remains a little abstract here, despite the obvious suffering caused by his diabetes and his crudely made wooden leg. He has the imagination to look up at the African stars, which redeems for him, but not for his wife, the harshness of life on the farm, but when Lessing records his actual words, he often seems merely cool or peppery.

Lessing never reverses her earlier judgment of the two, but the mixture of avowed youthful hatred and horrified pity that informs her intensely focused portrait of her mother makes Emily both triumphantly vital and also impossibly oppressive and unimaginative. Decades after Emily's death, Lessing's reimagining of her mother's life can be seen as a deep, liberating form of love.

Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing
HarperCollins £16.99 pp274

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