Apparently this is a highly controversial award, but as someone who has been reading Lessing for years, I couldn't stop smiling when I saw this news.
She was praised by the judges for her "skepticism, fire and visionary power."
Lessing, 11 days short of her 88th birthday, is the oldest choice ever for a prize that usually goes to authors in their 50s and 60s. Although she is widely celebrated for "The Golden Notebook" and other works, she has received little attention in recent years and has been criticized as strident and eccentric.
Why is this so cool? Three words (or, a title): Mara and Dann.
In recent years I had lost hold of my appreciation for Lessing a bit. I had not grabbed every novel off the shelf as soon as it appeared. I don't know why, perhaps it was a phase, or perhaps she lost me with some of her more sentimental novels (Love, Again?). I had been hooked in as a young reader by Canopus in Argus and Memoirs of a Survivor, both in some ways explorations of the messes intelligent species make of their environs and their resources.
Memoirs of a Survivor, written early in Lessing's career is a particularly harrowing vision, but a nonspecific one; it is a vision of one person's experience in a world that has lost its way and descended into anarchy and brutality as the "good life" faded away.
Mara and Dann (2000) is far more pointed and informed by our current global crisis; it is the story of two children who are swept into a vast human migration caused by a drought that sweeps their continent due to global climate change. As they reach the water they are seeking, drowned European cities beckon from under its surface. As I sit here in the American south, reading news stories about my drinking water supply being in grave danger, I have been thinking about picking up Mara and Dann and reading it again.
Lessing has also written tellingly of relations between men and women, but her strength is in the speculative fiction about the breakdown of societies and what individuals do to survive.
It's tempting to think, because of this award, that the Nobel committee is interested, this year, in the damage humans do to the world and the impersonal-seeming tragedies that will soon befall many of us because of it. Lessing's so-called "strident" literary commentaries on these issues seem prescient today.