Doggedly,magically on the side of cats

On Cats by Doris Lessing. Photo / Supplied

There are some authors whose tone is instantly recognisable. It's like an atmosphere, a kind of light. Doris Lessing, at the age of 90, still has the magic readers first came upon more than 50 years ago with The Grass is Singing.

There's a kind of sober truthfulness, intensity of vision. But there's also something we New Zealanders can sense - her post-colonial sensibility.

In this small book she looks at cats. Cats, of course, are the subject, or is it object, of obsession. You either find them fascinating or you find them loathsome. Are you doggish or catlike?

Lessing comes down on the side of cats. But she brings to her subject her gimlet gaze. She starts out on the wings of a hawk. We are back in Africa and a vast number of hawks sparkle in the sky. One whooshes down and snatches away a kitten for a snack. Lessing limns the number of cats at her childhood farmhouse.

Miles away from a vet, Lessing's mother had the job of extermination. The cats littered four or five times a year. The farmhouse was surrounded by an army of diseased cats, and one day Lessing's mother packed up and left. It became the job of Lessing's World War I returnee father to shoot the cats with a revolver. Lessing refuses to do cute. She does her usual intense take on animal life. She shows cat sexuality, cat flattery, cat sadness - she takes us into the human connection with these bewitching, annoying, beautiful and banal animals.

This book is a small object, to be held in the hand appreciatively. But why is it printed on such awful toilet-paper? The paper quality is coarse and the print is minute. At the start I worried that this was bottom drawer stuff - things Lessing might have been sitting on forever. And once she won the Nobel, it became an excellent time for cashing in.

"Any old rubbish, any old rubbish!" But Lessing is too good a writer. Her glance is deep, her pen is sharp. I would rather read Lessing on cats than any New Zealand celebrity who has ever lived or will ever live on almost anything.

The difference is brain power. The difference is being a magician of language. Now she is old, very old indeed, she has brought this small delight to cat lovers the world over.

Once again, she reintroduces those dramatic personae, her long suffering mother in the African sun, her slightly cracked father. Then she shifts us to London, through her expatriate homes. We meet Rufus, the survivor and live through the last days of el magnifico. We are lucky to have Doris Lessing.

Enjoy her while we've still got her. If Lessing were a cat, I would see her as a large marmalade cat, a little scrappy, sitting by a window looking out. This cat is old now, prefers to stay indoors. But she also notices everything which goes on outside the window.

She has beautiful tiger-yellow eyes and the most deeply reassuring of purrs.

On Cats
By Doris Lessing (Harper Collins $24.99)

* Peter Wells is a writer who lives in Hawkes Bay.