The story is of creation in reverse - first came the women. So relates a Roman Senator who wishes to stem the tide of Christianity as it inserts itself into Roman society. Full of symbolism and euphemisms, the book was difficult to read. It seemed to focus on why women nag and why men deserve to be nagged. It could have been so much more. ( )

The idea behind The Cleft was intriguing and fun. An ancient community of women with no knowledge of nor need for men. It sounded like a fun read. I am sorry to say that the story left me disappointed. I think so much more could have been done with this concept. I read it, I finished it... I liked the first few pages and the last few pages. Sadly disappointing! ( )

A fascinating idea that is not fully realized. I was disappointed in how such an interesting theory-- that humans were originally only female-- ended up as a story that relied predominantly on stereotypes, and mainly the cliched stereotypes of bad jokes on marriage (think "men get lost but won't admit being lost;" "women are incessant nags"). Perhaps that's meant to be assumed as the rendering through the biased eyes of our male Roman historian narrator. If it is, the narrative device fails the idea behind the novel. Lessing is a good writer, even here the story has a good flow to it, but I had to make myself finish this relatively short book, and it took me longer than to read than good books twice its length. ( )

The premise of this novel intrigued me immensely: a mythical, entirely female community, living in harmony with nature, is disrupted by the birth of a ‘Monster’ – a boy. Initially, the premise seems likely to deliver a thoughtful story, complicated as it is by being told through the voice of a Roman man; this is a situation which is guaranteed to lead to a slight distrust of the narrator, telling the women’s story. The narrator’s reluctance to tell the story if the women’s initial cruelty to the Monsters is striking in contrast to their own insistent hatred and fear of the strange tubes and pipes that the males possess. As the novel progresses, you increasingly question his bias as he weaves parts of his own history into the tale and extrapolates from it to develop simple and apparently inflexible truths about human nature.

There are some interesting ideas in the first section of the tale. The first fragmented bit of history that the ‘historian’ narrator recounts describes a world in which there was no awareness of females or mothers, for they were all female and mothers, and one can only define oneself by finding differences from the other. Moreover, they were scarcely aware of themselves as individuals, and many women were identified by the same title as they completed the same jobs. Interestingly, this is not really a utopia: the women are mindlessly content, but there is nothing in their mundane existence to envy. This is made clear by the narrator’s description of them as incurious almost slug like creatures. They do not question. They procreate effortlessly but do not seek to create or explore. Later on in the novel, they are repeatedly contrasted against the active men, who build and hunt and generally develop more skills in decades than the women have since whenever they crawled out of the sea.
Ultimately, this is my problem with the novel: the characters are gendered caricatures. While a few characters are picked out and followed, even these are slaves to their genes. The men are active; the women nag. The men want adventure and challenge; the women want clean huts and instinctively know how to fix hurts. Regardless of Lessing’s use of narrative voice, she seems to be endorsing a thoroughly biological view of human nature as fixed, unchanging and inescapable.

The main strength of the novel is its fluid narrative style which successfully creates a sense of myth. Lessing’s use of repetition emphasises this, especially in the first section of the novel, in which the same events are recounted three times, in a varying amount of detail. The fluidity of the characters supports this mode of storytelling. Even key characters suffer from a sense of flux: they appear without preface, their lifespan is indefinite and they vanish without care. In this way, the novel also raises some interesting questions about history: what can we know for certain? Who can we trust to record it?

Overall, this is an unusual novel that seems to lack a thoughtful response to the question it initially posed. ( )

A nightmarish tale about human creation where women are called "clefts" and men are called "monsters" or "squirts". Male babies are sacrificed for years until some eagles decide to save the "monster" babies and to take them to another part of the island they all share..where they grow up to be "squirts".
When the Clefts learn of this, they wander over and thus begins the story of how the human race began. Add animals that feed the babies, genital mutilation, and depictions of rape and murder and you have The Cleft.

It was almost unbearable for me to read it. Crude and not well written. I would give it half a star if I could figure out how to do so ( )