A Ripple from the Storm (1964)

I am continuing on with the Children of Violence series by Lessing, and have finished A Ripple from the Storm and begun Landlocked. In Ripple from the Storm Martha has left her marriage, gone back to her office work from before her marriage, and is an active member of a communist group working in South Africa, which also involves being active in several more liberal organizations which the small communist group hopes to influence. In this work Martha seems to be for the first time acting from her true self, independent of whether this work will have much influence in the end. WWII is going on, though it is somewhat remote to South Africa, where it is present mainly through the soldiers stationed there. It is also present in the sense of waiting, waiting for the war to be over, and an impermanence in relationships as relationships are formed with soldiers who ship out, and young men from the town serve in different places. Again Martha drifts into relationships. The leader of the communist group, a German refuge, cares for her when she is sick and they become a couple, and then he is threatened with internment because of the relationship, and she marries him to prevent it. This drifting is presented as partially the result of unsettled times, but also as a sort of falsity or perhaps difficulty in the relationships between men and women, in playing out roles for one another, being the person the other expects, or resisting that. This book contains a lot of information about the political forces in the British colony of Africa. A note - I had identified the colony as South Africa, mainly because of the mention of Afrikaners and Johannesburg at one point. But Lessing actually grew up in Rhodesia, so perhaps it was written about Southern Rhodesia. At one point there is mention of a group as Policy Sub-Committee for the Communist Party of Zambesia, which makes no sense because Zambesia was a Portuguese colony, and this one is clearly British. (Wikipedia to the rescue - "The name Zambezia or Zambesia was also used up to 1895 for the territory later called Rhodesia, now Zambia and Zimbabwe.") I don't know why they used it in the 1940's. Also, there were Afrikaners in Rhodesia as well as South Africa. ( )

Third volume of the Children of Violence series. Martha escapes the meaningless of her marriage and becomes passionately involved in left-wing political causes, and from there a member of the fledgling local Communist party. Her passionate idealism changes to dismay as the comrades become bogged down in dialectic. Very interesting look at Rhodesian politics during WWII. Lessing's characters seem so real. ( )

The sequel to 'a proper marriage' pursues the flight of Martha Quest into communism and politics: first illusion then desillusion. The description of the working of the communist cell was very convincing for me. I have never been in one, but have seen it operating when I was involved in university politics. The same would-be dictators, hangers-on who promised a lot but did nothing, the sympathizers who saw it just as a pasttime, grandiose plans which came to nothing. But also the enormous energy people put in, which could only end in tears, or rather (at least in western societies): farce. As Karl Marx put it so well: history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as comedy. Although communism is dead, the book still makes an interesting read. ( )