The Fifth Child
— 1988 —
New York: Vintage International, 1989; 133 pages
FIRST LINES
Harriet and David met each other at an office party neither had particularly wanted to go to, and both knew at once that this was what they had been waiting for. Someone conservative, old-fashioned, not to say obsolescent; timid, hard to please: this is what other people called them, but there was no end to the unaffectionate adjectives they earned. They defended a stubbornly held view of themselves, which was that they were ordinary and in the right of it, should not be criticised for emotional fastidiousness, abstemiousness, just because these were unfashionable qualities.
PLOT SUMMARY
When Harriet met David.
It was at an office party that they struck a perfect match. Sharing a decidedly conservative outlook, rare in “swinging” 1960s London, they plan to marry and agree to have “six children, at least,” or eight or ten. David, an architect, and Harriet, a sales associate, purchase a large Victorian house with an overgrown garden outside London and waste no time: “Harriet indeed became pregnant on that rainy evening in their bedroom.”
Soon, the expansive house has become a joyous gathering place for relatives and friends to visit the couple and their growing family:
That Christmas, Harriet was again enormous, in her eighth month, and she laughed at herself for her size and unwieldiness. The house was full. All the people who were here for Easter came again. It was acknowledged that Harriet and David had a gift for this kind of thing.
But life will take a sharp, disturbing turn. After eight years of marriage and four children, another child is conceived. A painful pregnancy leads to the birth of a son, Ben. The fifth child’s arrival marks the onset of misery. Monstrous in appearance, insatiably hungry, and unnaturally strong, Ben shatters the family idyll that Harriet and David had seemingly created, leaving Harriet with an awful choice.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: DORIS LESSING
Doris May Tayler was born on October 22, 1919, to British parents in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran), where her father, Alfred Tayler, was a bank official. Alfred had lost a leg in World War I and Doris’s mother, Emily, was the nurse who cared for him. When Doris was five, her father uprooted the family from Persia, acquiring a large property in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) on a whim, Doris later said, with dreams of becoming a wealthy farmer.
Those dreams were dashed and Lessing’s Rhodesian childhood was troubled. After attending convent schools, she dropped out at age thirteen and was subsequently self-educated, becoming an avid reader. At odds with her mother, Doris left home in her teens, working as a nursemaid and later a telephone operator.
At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, a civil servant, and they had two children before divorcing in 1943. Doris left the children with their father and became involved with left-wing politics, marrying Gottfried Lessing, a Communist Party leader, in 1943. They had one son, Peter.
Disillusioned with party politics—and having an affair—Doris Lessing divorced her second husband in 1949 and moved to London. Bringing her son Peter, she left behind her first two children with their father.
“For a long time I felt I had done a very brave thing,” Lessing later recounted. “There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. I felt I wasn’t the best person to bring them up. I would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated intellectual like my mother.”
In London, her writing career got underway. She published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, in 1950, recounting the relationship between a white farmer’s wife and a Black servant on a farm in South Africa. It was the first of five books known as the Martha Quest or Children of Violence series. Autobiographical works, they explored the clash of cultures and racial injustice Lessing witnessed in Rhodesia. They also led to her being declared a “prohibited alien” in both Rhodesia and South Africa.
Leaving behind social concerns and leftist politics for radical psychology, Lessing took a sharp turn with the publication of The Golden Notebook (1962). Featuring strong, independent women characters including writer Anna Wulf, The Golden Notebook became a feminist landmark in the 1970s. Novelist Margaret Atwood (see entry) remembered the book’s impact and the times:
It was before widespread birth control. It was before mini-skirts. So Anna Wulf was a considerable eye-opener: she was doing things and thinking things that had not been much discussed at the Toronto dinner tables of our adolescence, and therefore seemed pretty daring.
Following Lessing’s introduction to Sufism, a mystical offshoot of Islam, her writing took another sharp turn. She produced a series of five novels she termed “space fiction.” Collectively called Canopus in Argos: Archives, the series commenced with Shikasta (1979). Many reviewers found it hard to swallow and dismissed the work. Lessing’s legions of admirers were also dismayed at this new direction.
But Doris Lessing was largely indifferent to critics. She marched to the beat of her own drum, eventually submitting two novels under a pseudonym in an experiment to see how difficult it was to be published. They were rejected, although both novels were later published.
In the late 1990s Lessing suffered a stroke and she no longer traveled. And then, in 2007, came news that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. At eighty-nine, the oldest person to receive the prize to date, Doris Lessing was, according to the Nobel Committee, “that epicist [a writer of epic poetry and fiction] of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny.” Her own reaction at the time was to say, “Oh, Christ! I couldn’t care less.”
Outspoken, opinionated, difficult to pigeonhole, and often uninhibited, Doris Lessing died in London in November 2013, aged ninety-four.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
“It’s an absolutely horrible book,” Doris Lessing told a New York Times interviewer. “And, it has a very strong effect on people.”
I disagree with the author that The Fifth Child is horrible. But it is horrifying. Lessing was admirably forthright about the novel’s effect. The Fifth Child is jarring, weighty, and provocative. I recommended it to a friend—a mother with a young child—with a cautionary note. It is a deeply disturbing piece of fiction that taps into a parent’s worst fear. As Emily Harnett wrote in a recent assessment, it is “a gutting examination of the crucible of motherhood.”
One need not know of Lessing’s unhappy relationship with her own mother and then leaving behind her first two children to be absorbed by Lessing’s narrative force. Other books that deal vividly with the theme of motherhood in this collection are The Dry Heart, Dept. of Speculation, The Hours, The Lost Daughter, and Lucy.
As Lessing moves from a fairly tidy domestic drama into the territory of a psychological thriller, the writing is enthralling. But if Agatha Christie offers a “comfort book,” this is a “discomfort book.” It builds toward Harriet’s crucial moment of decision, and the novel’s scope is broader than examining a family affair. Through Harriet, Lessing is looking at a changing society and wondering where the world is going. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster, the child Ben takes the reader into dark territory.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Lessing continued this foreboding, somewhat twisted family narrative with a sequel, Ben, in the World (2000), which begins with Ben as an eighteen-year-old (and which I look forward to reading). When it was published, reviewer Michael Pye wrote:
At times, Lessing’s spare, sharp prose lets you see things as Ben sees them, as you have not seen things before. The book shares that uncanny effect with the best fiction.
Lessing’s early works, the Martha Quest novels, are still considered among her best work.
But her most famous and most popular novel remains The Golden Notebook. Daring when first published in 1962, it attracted not just readers but devoted followers. Loosely autobiographical, it explores the inner lives of women who, unencumbered by marriage, are free to choose the work and sexual lives they desire.