[In The Sirian Experiments, the third novel in her Canopus in Argos: Archives sequence,] Doris Lessing attempts once more, but obliquely, to make us examine our world and its preconceptions. The 'Martian' technique is sometimes heavily obvious … and sometimes bitterly pointed…. When Ambien sounds most human, the voice of her creator rasps through: 'I could not help feeling myself undermined by the familiar dry sorrow at the waste of it, the dreadful squandering waste of it all'.

It may well be that wandering colonists from other planets would wring their hands when they observe this polluted globe—but in this ambivalent Ambien it does not ring true. Her character, that of the bureaucrat whose 'document' we read, is the novel's serious flaw. In the preface Doris Lessing describes her protagonist as 'dry, just, efficient, deluded about her own nature', and adds that she 'could like her more'. It...