Doris Lessing (1919–2013)

There are two things that struck me about this book: 1) how difficult it is to read despite fascinating topics written with a crisp and clear style; 2) how incredibly modern it is: it hasn't aged one bit.
Lessing is part intellectual, rational, logical and part raw emotion tapping into the depth of the soul. While it is not always evident, it comes in waves through different notebooks, the different perspectives weaving in and out of each other.
My favourite parts were definitely the nostalgic show more scenes of Mashopi which hold the foundation of the book: relationships between men and women, social inequality - notably racism and feminism - and capitalism, the very themes that we still struggle with today.
A tough read but a masterful novel. show less

Lessing continues the bizarre tale of an archaic human born to modern humans in the 1960s/1970s through some genetic fluke. I kind of love this weird saga of a brutish neanderthal adolescent making his way in a world where he is unloved. His only salvation are people who alternatively use him or take pity on him . In both this novel and its predecessor, he does horrible things, but others do horrible things to him; his predicament is oddly poignant. The concluding scene in the mountains show more suggests we are not all that different from him. show less

Great science fiction has a sense of wonder and this dystopian novel achieves a unique atmosphere which isn’t quite wonder but then again it isn’t really science fiction. On the face of it Lessing achieves a similar sense of a breakdown in civilisation that J G Ballard achieved in novels like “The Burning World” or the “Drowned World”, but Lessing gives us much more than that. It could be argued that Ballard kept on re-writing the same novel with “High Rise” and “Concrete show more Island” whereas Lessing adds mystery, madness and human suffering in a heady cocktail that left this reader wondering about just what he had read. From the very start Lessing confuses readers perceptions; yes society is breaking down, the unnamed Survivor is a first hand witness as she gazes out from her apartment window, but we never know quite what caused this unravelling of the civilised world, and who is Emily whose pet is a monstrous cross between a dog and a cat and far more insidious is the other world that the Survivor crosses over to behind her apartment wall.

The novel opens with:
“We all remember that time. It was no different for me than for others. Yet we do tell each other over and over again the particularities of the events we shared and the repetition, the listening, it is as if we are saying: It was like that for you too? Then that confirms it, yes, it was so it must have been. I wasn’t imagining things.”………

There lies the mystery: it is written in the first person as a memoir by the Survivor, but we are never sure just how much was imagined. The survivor describes herself as an older woman living alone at a time when essential services in her city are breaking down. The Government seems to be losing control of events which are shrouded in here-say. There are food shortages, industry has broken down, there are no new products, most manufacturing people are unemployed and the only people who are earning a living are government workers - the bureaucracy. People are living on the pavement opposite the apartment, they form themselves into groups centred round a leader preparing to move off into the countryside, when one group leaves another is soon forming, there are criminal violent gangs taking over districts and in the absence of hard news people are relying on each other for information; the information they need to survive. One evening there is a knock on the Survivor’s door and a stranger leaves Emily a young girl of 14 with her to look after. Emily brings Hugo with her; an ugly amalgam of cat and dog. They settle in and Emily soon morphs from a young girl to a young woman taking her place with the various groups living; for part of the time with them on the pavement. It is at this time that the Survivor sees the wall in her apartment dissolve, allowing her to enter another series of rooms. The rooms appear too have been disrupted and she works to put things straight. On another visit through the wall she sees Emily as a very young girl being tickled unmercifully by her guilty looking father.

Conditions get tougher, people forage for food, cottage industries spring up repairing and adapting goods and bartering takes precedence. A new leader (Gerald) emerges from the groupings on the street and Emily falls in love with him and together they take control, meanwhile the Survivor is left with the forsaken Hugo. Electricity supplies breakdown and the group are threatened by a gang of feral young children who live underground. The Survivor waits again for the wall in her apartment to dissolve as she watches Emily and Gerald’s relationship develop.

The Survivor acts like a teller of a story, she does not seem to be affected by the events around her: she is reporting what is happening both in the real world and her trips through the wall: she is a sort of cipher, perhaps not quite real. Doris Lessing in her novel “The Four Gated City” (that culminated her children of violence series) has a mentally ill woman as one of the central characters. This woman spends great chunks of her time examining the walls of her room, looking for a way through; a way out and it made me think that the Survivor in this current novel is suffering from a similar mental illness. How much is she imagining, perhaps everything although her descriptions and the telling of her story is very realistic. Hugo the strange monster, and Emily’s arrival all point to a world at the very least out of kilter and then again there is the world behind the wall where the Survivor looks for her salvation. There are layers in this book that remain mysterious perhaps just out of reach adding to that sense of wonder that Lessing achieves with her descriptions of the dystopia that is quickly gaining ground.
This is a brilliant work of fiction, told by the all seeing eyes of the Survivor. Lessing's view of the breakdown in civilisation has a ring of authenticity and this is juxtaposed with the strange events that appear so matter of fact to the story teller. There is no doubt that the world behind the wall is a parallel to the world outside the apartment, but just how much of this is in the head of the survivor whose technique of reporting seems so perfectly sane. Could she be a lonely elderly woman going quietly insane within the confines of her apartment? Does the real world outside the apartment as she sees it actually exist? Is the real breakdown wholly internal to the Survivor? Whether or not this is the case, it is Lessing’s convincing depiction of the breakdown of civilisation, with the descent of the city people first into self help groups, but then into hunter gatherers in danger of being overrun by barbarism, that makes the story seem so real. New leaders emerge from the coalescing groups, on the pavements, but in the cityscape it is the ferrel children that claim the streets. Gerald’s attempts to impose some order on the children are met with incomprehension and violence.

Fiction, fantasy, dystopia, political reality, mental breakdown add up to another of Lessing’s jaundiced view of the nature of the society in which we live. It all coalesces in this novel, but not quite enough to provide a central vision that would make this an outstanding work of art. It does however make a great novel and one that prays on my worst nightmares - feral children, or is that just children. A 4.5 star read. show less

This is the fourth book in Lessing’s children of Violence series. The children of violence are those people who had all of their idealism knocked out of them by the horror and waste of World War II and this includes Lessing herself because this series is semi-autobiographical and tells the story of one young woman’s journey through life in a British African Colony, thinly disguised as Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). This book picks up Martha Quests’s story a couple of years after her show more Marriage to Anton and the war is coming to an end. There was no fighting in the Southern part of Africa, but local men were called up and a large Royal Air force (RAF) base was established just outside the capital city. The government were mainly concerned with the war effort and this allowed revolutionary groups to exist hovering just above their radar. Anton was the leader of the communist group who were trying to forge a relationship with the undereducated and largely servile black majority. They were optimistic that a Russian victory in the war (they were allies) would give an opportunity for a communist/socialist revolution.

Martha was heavily involved with the group not only as Anton’s wife but as an educator and organiser. The war years however had largely extinguished any optimism and she realised that her marriage to Anton was still a marriage of convenience and they would divorce and go their separate ways after the war had ended. Many of the members of the communist group had come from the RAF base and they were being killed or posted elsewhere as the war progressed. Anton had lost his enthusiasm and was concentrating his efforts on getting back to Germany once the war was over. Martha was set on going to England and so their lives were in Limbo. She embarked on a series of affairs at a time when everybody seemed to be waiting for the world to change (the end of the war).

The book introduces us to the scattered remnants of the communist group, all at sea in a town that they were desperate to get away from. A Greek contingent anxious to get back home to fight in the war against the Nationalists (although this was a war that they knew they would not survive). Thomas a Polish Jew who has a love affair with Martha, but the destruction of his homeland has left him shell shocked. Anton of course wanting to go back to East Germany to continue the ideological struggle and Johnny Lindsay, the fierce trade unionist wasting away with disease. The men in the group seem to be resigned to and waiting for death while the women are taking what comfort they can from a transitory existence. Martha keeps busy, falls in love, manages other peoples problems, which covers the gap in her life left by the disintegration of the communist group.

Lessing writes powerfully about her own experiences during this time; for large sections of the novel she is Martha Quest. There is a brilliant description of her group going to the cinema and sitting through a newsreel; describing the probable defeat of the Germans. They are of course cheered by the victory but horrified by the allied bombing, while at the same time the Nazi’s extermination programmes are filtering out and they as outsiders cannot comprehend the deaths of over 44 million people. Martha avoids the victory parade.

“Every fibre of Martha’s body everything she thought, every movement she made, everything she was, was because she had been born at the end of one world war, and had spent all her adolescence in the atmosphere of preparations for another, which had lasted five years and had inflicted such wounds on the human race that no one had any idea what the results should be.
Martha did not believe in Violence.
Martha was the essence of violence She had been conceived bred, fed and reared on violence.
Martha argued with Thomas: What use is it, Thomas, what use is violence.”

Martha’s relationship with her mother and the guilt she feels over the desertion of her daughter closes in on her, she is indeed Landlocked, fervently wishing to escape and start again. The book ends with a black workers strike that is based on the Black railway workers strike of 1945 (Southern Rhodesia) and significantly the old communist group are completely sidelined. They do not even know the names of the leaders of the strike. History has passed them by, their hard work has been futile and they can only watch as a younger generation meet to form a new group.

As before Lessing”s personal history/experience combines with the history of a Southern African state and the power of her writing lies in her ability to place the reader in that time and place. Martha Quest is a figure in this landscape that sucks up the feelings of a liberal minded young woman desperate to leave. She does not hide her faults, but displays her feelings with a gusto - here I am; this is what I did. Another excellent novel in this personal historical novel series. 4 stars. show less