Fifth Child

Doris Lessing (1919-2013) is one of the most important writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Her first novel, 'The Grass is Singing' was published in 1950, and since then her international reputation has flourished. Among her other celebrated novels are 'The Golden Notebook', 'The Summer Before the Dark', and 'Memoirs of a Survivor'. Her most recent works include 'Love, Again' and two volumes of her autobiography, 'Under my Skin', and 'Walking in the Shade'.

Many mothers will be familiar with the emotions Harriet has when she first sets eyes on Ben, her fifth child. Initial disbelief, a reluctance to hold him, a pang of disappointment. There is something strange and disturbing about him. Harriet and her husband David have constructed an idyll of perfect happiness in their large house full of children and relatives, but when Ben is born, their world is torn apart. Ben is weird looking, he doesn't speak but makes odd grunts and noises, and he doesn't seem quite human. Although at first you seriously doubt whether there is anything really wrong with the poor child, at the same time you begin to dislike him. Sympathy only comes when Ben is briefly banished to a special home in a bleak Scottish landscape, a drugged creature in a straitjacket. Rescued by his mother and brought back to the family home he becomes ever more nightmarishly 'different' and succeeds in shattering the family. Harriet's dogged devotion is then all the more remarkable as you come ultimately to realize the real and terrible nature of the creature that is Ben. This novel, reprinted five times, is a riveting read and a haunting addition to Lessing's body of work. (Kirkus UK)

Ever unpredictable, Lessing now offers a rather cryptic yet uncommonly accessible tale of psycho-social horror: a variation on the classic "changeling" formula - here marbled, subtly and disturbingly, with such Lessing themes as apocalyptic doom, the rough dignity of society's outcasts, and the dark underside of human nature. (The five-novel "Martha Quest" series, Lessing readers will remember, is called Children of Violence.) In the 1960's, that "greedy and selfish" time of alienation and "bad news from everywhere," young architect David (terribly old-fashioned) meets solid, homey Harriet (a grownup virgin) - and soon they're a couple, blissful and confident in their sharing of all the traditional, "unfashionable" values. They buy a big house (with help from David's wealthy father), joyfully begin having babies (they want at least seven or eight), and become the happy center of rich, extended family life, continually visited by assorted in-laws. Circa 1972, they're relieved and grateful: "they had chosen, and so obstinately, the best - this." With Harriet's fifth pregnancy, however, this idyll (quickly, hypnotically sketched) begins to fall under a sickly, expanding, implacable shadow. The expectant mother is tormented by the fierce, unnaturally strong fetus. When born, baby Ben is heavy, muscular, creepy-looking - "like a troll, or a goblin or something" - and violent. As a child, he's hostile, unteachable, "neanderthal"dike, more dangerously violent (he kills a dog, then turns to humans) with each passing year. The family is splintered, cruelly transformed - by fear, shame, and furious sorrow (especially vulnerable little Paul). Eventually, urged on by David and flinty Grandma Dorothy, Harriet agrees to give Ben over to "one of those places that exist in order to take on children families simply want to get rid of." But, in a truly nightmarish sequence, the mother reclaims her unlovable horror-child from a death-ward for the unwanted. And, through sheer willpower and ruthless shrewdness, Harriet manages a sort of coexistence between the family (forever fractured) and the "throwback" - though the teen-age Ben inevitably takes off to roam the earth with the punks and outlaws who accept him. "Perhaps quite soon. . . she would be looking at the box, and there, in a shot of the News of Berlin, Madrid, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, she would see Ben, standing rather apart from the crowd, staring at the camera with his goblin eyes, or searching the faces in the crowd for another of his own kind." As a symbolic summing-up of the past three decades, from Sixties cataclysm to Eighties terrorism, this short novel is vaguely provocative at best; the even broader, socio-anthropological subtext - civilized, familial mankind forced to confront the primitive animal within - is only slightly more persuasive. But, despite echoes of pop-fiction (Rosemary's Baby, etc.) and TV-movie case-histories (damaged child, valiant mum), the plain story itself - fine-tuned with ordinary-life details yet also insidiously fable-like - is stark, relentless, and memorably harrowing. (Kirkus Reviews)