During the days that followed, when the household was all plans and packing and arranging and people running in and out, Jack was thinking that there was only one difference between himself now and himself as he had been before 'the bit of a shock'. He had once been a man whose sleep had been — nothing, nonexistent, he had slept like a small child. Now, in spite of everything, although he knew that fear could lie in wait there, his sleep had become another country, lying just behind his daytime one. Into that country he went nightly, with an alert, even if ironical, interest: the irony was due to his habits of obedience to his past — for a gift had been made to him. Behind the face of the sceptical world was another, which no conscious decision of his could stop him exploring.
'The Temptation of Jack Orkney' is—like 'The Habit of Loving', and 'To Room Nineteen', and 'The Eye of God in Paradise' (the last three are from Volume One)—a story with hidden depths. Often this happens without a writer knowing how she or he has tapped a deeper vein. The new way of education, which is often to omit any teaching of history, may mean that some young thing may enquire about the title, and then you have to spell out the irony, that Jack Orkney sees God (and the other hidden dimensions of life) as a temptation to compromise with the integrities of his stem atheism, whereas for many centuries, not to say millennia, temptations were to do with the flesh, and the lack of belief in God. A nice little version of the whirligig of time, this one. You may try saying to such a youngster, Go to a picture gallery and see how the saints were tormented by visions of food and sex and happy disbelief But they look at you, these infinitely indulged ones, with amazement, for it has never occurred to them to do without anything in the way of fleshly delights, unless it is for fear of AIDS, or because they are slimming.
Doris Lessing