ON FINISHING THIS book, you want to go out and get drunk. The Four-Gated City is less a work of art than an act of despair, and its cumulative effect is numbing. It depicts a world—from 1950 until 1997—in which technology and fascism have triumphed; a world in which sex and imagination and intelligence have been brutalized; a world of figurative and literal plague; and a world for which the only hope is drastic biological mutation. What makes Doris Lessing’s black vision so compelling is that it is not the product of a literary debauch. It is not a satanic self-indulgence. It is not a tract. It is, instead, a painstaking extrapolation of the present, a sort of elephantiasis of the already obvious and the perfectly ordinary. It is the inevitable terminal point toward which the modern mind is monorailing. Those logical lunatics described by Wallace Stevens in Esthétique du Mal—men like Konstantinov, who “would not be aware of the clouds, / Lighting the martyrs of logic with white fire”—have taken over; and our blank uneasiness has turned to terror.
Martha Quest arrives in London in 1950 with an advanced case of blank uneasiness. The intellectual and emotional terrain she has crossed to get there has been exhaustively cartographed by Doris Lessing in the four previous volumes of the Children of Violence series. She has gone through a “Zambesian” (Rhodesian) childhood, two husbands, motherhood, racism, the Communist Party, and a war. The Four-Gated City will not only finish her off, but will finish off the series and England as well.
After some preliminary skirmishing, Martha settles down as a combination nursemaid-housekeeper-editorial-researcher in the home of Mark Coldridge, a novelist. At first the Coldridge household seems a domestic mirror image of the world outside: private madness taking refuge from public madness. Outside, there are totalitarianism and genocide; spiritual impotence and scientific evil. Inside, there are hallucinations and despair. And Martha Quest, somehow hanging out the window, videotapes it all.
But we become gradually aware that this time Miss Lessing is up to something different. Mark Coldridge has written a fantasy novel, part prophecy and part racial dream, about an ancient city ruled benignly by a clairvoyant priesthood. This “four-gated” golden city was betrayed—a kind of original sin ushering in our modern, postlapsarian civilization—and the clairvoyants went underground. Somehow their psychic powers were dispersed.
Coldridge’s novel takes over from Doris Lessing’s novel. Suddenly we are no longer living in the world of Doris Lessing’s indefatigable realism, but in a nightmare of evil. The city and its destruction and its meaning can only be apprehended fleetingly in dreams; or perceived at the odd angle of madness. We are made to understand that the psychic powers dispersed at the time of the city’s betrayal attach now in bits and pieces only to the dislocated and the outcast, the drugged and shocked and suicidal. Our final, chilling realization is that, after the bombs and the nerve gas and the holocaust, the children of these mad believers will be the new clairvoyants, the mutant hope of a new world.
Miss Lessing, in other words, has given up: on politics, on rationalism, on psychoanalysis (except for a dose of R. D. Laing). This most exemplary of modern women, who has moved like a relentless tank over the abstractions, aggressions, and dependencies of the twentieth century, who has noticed and remarked on everything, who has entertained and ultimately refused almost every illusion that tempts the contemporary intelligence, has given up. She seeks now, in prehistoric recesses and unconscious memory, a new sustaining myth, an island of the mind on which to hide.
And what is terrifying about her giving up is the absoluteness of the documentation. She has never been an elegant writer, and she has usually been a humorless one. But her mind is formidable, her integrity monumental, and her operating methods wholly uncompromising. She has not spared herself and she will not spare the reader. So she is not content merely to show us the asylum and the hospital. She grabs us by the lapels and drags us inside. She forces us to touch the slavering idiots and the haunted children, the ideas that fester and the flesh that rots. If hatred is the underbelly of “all this lovely liberalism,” then she will take the knife to that belly. And if monsters then climb out of the knife wound, she will introduce them to us. The monsters are our fathers and our children and ourselves, and we can’t ask Miss Lessing to dispatch them for us. She has done her job, and what a staggering one it is.