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Doris Lessing (2008). The Cleft, London, Harper Perennial, 260 pages, paperback, P100, ISBN 978-0-00-723344-1. Available at Exclusive Books, Riverwalk.

The Cleft is an adult fantasy tale by one of the world's greatest storytellers. Doris Lessing, who was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2007, recognising the overwhelming body of her work since the publication, now 58 years ago, of her remarkable debut novel, The Grass is Singing (1950-actually written before she left Africa to live in England) that reflects her own childhood on a farm in Zimbabwe and the power of her creative writing and ability to critique society.

Doris Lessing, who will be 90 next year, grew up in what was then Southern Rhodesia from when she was five until she moved to England in 1949 when she was 30-years old. Lessing is a well-known writer in Southern Africa because of her collections of short stories This Was the Old Chief's Country (1951), African Stories (1964) and The Sun between Their Feet (1973). Her memoirs about Africa include, first, Going Home (1957), and then much later on four visits to Zimbabwe, African Laughter (1993).

Her great contribution to literature is found in her quintet of novels, beginning with Martha Quest (1952) through to The Four Gated City (1969) published as The Children of Violence (1952-1969). All this is viewed from a different perspective in The Golden Notebook (1962) and then again in her two volume autobiography, Under My Skin (1995) that goes from her birth in Persia to her leaving Africa in 1949, and Walking in the Shade (1997) from 1949 to 1962. Her forte was to convey with great meaning the social conflicts and issues of the time. She was a member of the communist party, prohibited and deported from South Africa and banned at home.

Doris Lessing's output covers at least 57 different novels and books. In 1969 she began writing a series entitled Cat Tales. Then in 1979 she began a series The Canopus in Argos: Archives that were labelled science fiction but were actually far greater than that medium and shaped by her interest in Sufi mysticism. Then in The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) and If the Old Could ... (1984) she wrote under a pseudonym Jane Somers, to see if her books would still demand attention for what they were instead of her name; thus demonstrating some of the problems unknown writers face.

Lessing returned to modern fiction in Love, Again (1996) where she traces what it means for an older woman to fall in love with younger men. Her recent works include four novellas together in Grandmothers (2003) and The Cleft that first came out in hardcover in 2007 before she was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Lessing's Nobel Prize follows on ones to Orhan Pamuk (2006) and Harold Pinter (2005), both writers caught up in present day controversies. Lessing is no less controversial, but her challenges are grounded in events over 50 years ago. Her novel The Golden Notebook became a landmark for feminists, as did the five volumes in The Children of Violence.

Lessing's latest novel seems closer to the work of Ursula le Guin, as it combines fantasy with prehistory, exploring the origins of people and the forces that may have helped to make us what we are today. Lessing said of her new novel that it is about, "a younger type, a junior variation. They seem to lack the solidity of women, who seem to be endowed with a natural harmony with the ways of the world ... men in comparison are unstable, erratic".

The Cleft will be perceived as a feminist novel because of its initial premise: in the beginning there were only women who lived in caves and canyons or clefts above the sea and were known as "The People" or The Clefts for that is where they dwelled. It is perhaps unfair to label this a feminist tract as the narrator is a man, elderly Roman nearly 2,000 years ago, who has discovered an ancient history that covers the changes that took place when women lived on their own, one gender, with no men. They gave birth to daughters without any sexual relations (through a process that goes unnamed, but is a form of parthenogenesis, normal in lower orders). Then suddenly male children began to arrive too and these products, labelled the "Monsters" or "The Squirts", were disposed of and the unintended consequences occupy this unusual fantasy novel.

The narrator was able to trace the oral history preserved over generations by the two lines, Male and Female, and then recorded using ancient methods. Because females came first he finds it amusing that "In Rome now, a sect - the Christians - insists that the first female was brought forth from the body of a male. Very suspect stuff, I think. Some male invented that - the exact opposite of the truth."

"I have always found it entertaining that females are worshipped as goddesses, while in ordinary life they are kept secondary and inferior". The link between the Clefts and the Monsters was the Great Eagles. "The Great Eagle watches us, he knows us, he is our father, he hates our enemies, he fights for us against the Clefts."

Originally the women who lived in the cliffs by the sea believed that the children they delivered were brought to them by Fish from the Moon. When the first male-child arrived they were sacrificed. Later, when the Eagles rescued the Monsters or Squirts and took them to the other side of the mountain, they were raised by wild animals, similar to the legends in Rome of Romulus and Remus. The Clefts were the persecutors of males, but they had the power of birth, while the Monsters didn't. "Without the Clefts there would be no new arrivals in the eagles' claws, there would be no Squirts".

Across the mountain a small tribe of men evolved, "tormented by the demands of their maleness, but did not know what they yearned for". Words like "mother", "father" and "love" were unknown, as were "sister" and "brother". When the first Clefts explored, first alone, then in twos, across the mountain and found the product of the Eagles' craft, they still did not know the role of their organs or the origin of babies. Finally one gave birth to a Monster whose father was a Monster. It was kept and raised by a Cleft and differences in temperament and character were noted. Now the island is destined to change irrevocably. Lessing also presents us with a fable on the origins of ethics, spirituality, language, violence and the defence against perceived predators.

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