Lessing was spurred to write The Good Terrorist by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing of the Harrods department store in London in 1983.

One critic complimented Lessing's "strong descriptive prose and her precise and realistic characterisations",[1] another her "brilliant account of the types of individuals who commit terrorist acts",[2] yet another called it "surprisingly bland",[3] and the characters "trivial or two-dimensional or crippled by self-delusions".

Other members of the squat include Bert, its ineffective leader, and a lesbian couple, the maternal Roberta and her unstable and fragile partner Faye.

To be more useful to the struggle, Jasper and Bert travel to Ireland and the Soviet Union to offer their services to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the KGB, but are turned down.

Despite her initial reservations about the bombing, Alice feels a need to justify their actions to others, but realises it would be fruitless because "[o]rdinary people simply didn't understand".

[13] By 1964, Lessing had published six novels, but grew disillusioned with Communism following the 1956 Hungarian uprising and, after reading The Sufis by Idries Shah, turned her attention to Sufism, an Islamic belief system.

[20] A biography of Lessing for the Swedish Academy on the occasion of her being awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature called it "a satirical picture of the need of the contemporary left for total control and the female protagonist's misdirected martyrdom and subjugation".

[28] The American novelist Judith Freeman wrote that one of the common themes in The Good Terrorist is that of keeping one's identity in a collective, of preserving "individual conscience".

Margaret Scanlan stated that as in books like Mansfield Park and Jane Eyre, The Good Terrorist "defines a woman in terms of her house".

[31] Yelin described The Good Terrorist as "an urban, dystopian updating of the house-as-England genre, [where] ... England is represented by a house in London".

[36] When real revolutionaries start using the squat to ship arms, she panics[36] and, going behind her comrades' backs, makes a telephone call to the authorities to warn them.

[36] Fishburn suggested that it is Lessing herself who is the "good terrorist", symbolised here by Alice, but that hers is "political terrorism of a literary kind",[31] where she frequently disguises her ideas in "very domestic-looking fiction",[31] and "direct[ly] challenge[s] ... our sense of reality".

[37] Greene wrote that Alice's "humanitarianism is ludicrous in her world",[38] and described her as "so furiously at odds with herself" because she is too immature to comprehend what is happening and her actions vary from being helpful to dangerous.

[41] Even though Jasper takes advantage of her adoration of him by mistreating her, Alice still clings to him because her self-image "vigorously qualifies her perception of [him], and thus proliferates the denial and self-deception".

[44] Kuehn called Alice's obsession with the "hapless" and "repellent" Jasper "just comprehensible",[3] adding that she feels safe with his gayness, even though she has to endure his abuse.

[3] Knapp stated that while Lessing exposes self-styled insurrectionists as "spoiled and immature products of the middle class",[36] she also derides their ineptness at affecting any meaningful change.

[36] Scanlan compared Lessing's comrades to Richard E. Rubenstein's terrorists in his book Alchemists of Revolution: Terrorism in the Modern World.

Elizabeth Lowry highlighted this in the London Review of Books: "[Lessing] has been sharply criticised for the pedestrian quality of her prose, and as vigorously defended".

[47] The Irish literary critic Denis Donoghue complained that the style of the novel is "insistently drab",[17] and Kuehn referred to Lessing's text as "surprisingly bland".

[47] Freeman described the book a "graceful and accomplished story",[2] and a "brilliant account of the types of individuals who commit terrorist acts".

[2] In a review in the Sun-Sentinel, Bonnie Gross wrote that it was Lessing's "most accessible" book to date, and that her "strong descriptive prose and her precise and realistic characterizations" made it "remarkable" and "rewarding reading".

[1] Amanda Sebestyen wrote in The Women's Review of Books that at first glance the ideas in The Good Terrorist appear deceptively simple, and the plot predictable.

[48] But she added that Lessing's strength is her "stoic narrat[ion] of the daily effort of living",[48] which excels in describing day-to-day life in a squat.

[48] In a review in Off Our Backs, an American feminist publication, Vickie Leonard called The Good Terrorist a "fascinating book" that is "extremely well written" with characters that are "exciting" and "realistic".

[49] Writing in The Guardian, Rogers described The Good Terrorist as "a novel in unsparing close-up" that examines society through the eyes of individuals.

[8] She said it is "witty and ... angry at human stupidity and destructiveness",[8] and within the context of recent terrorist attacks in London, it is an example of "fiction going where factual writing cannot".

[52] In the award ceremony speech by Swedish writer Per Wästberg, The Good Terrorist was cited as "an in-depth account of the extreme leftwing squatting culture that sponges off female self-sacrifice".