I reread this the day Doris Lessing died. It's very short, and every sentence packs a heady concentration of power. This is the novel that introduced me to Lessing. I was lucky enough to be working in a bookstore when it was released; I read a review and immediately used my employee's discount to buy a copy. I think I read it all in one sitting that day, too.The premise is simple: A man and a woman fall in love because each sees in the other a rejection of the shallow, worldly, sex-is-entertainment values of the '60s (the decade in which this novel begins). They marry and announce their intention of having a very large family. Their relatives are grave and skeptical. David and Harriet can't even afford the mortgage on the sprawling Victorian house they insist on buying; how can they possibly make enough money to support "four, or five...or six!" children?They're stubborn. Like so many people on the subject of personal happiness, David and Harriet are irrational. They insist that having a big family isn't just something that will make them happy; "This is what everyone wants, really, but we've been brainwashed out of it. People want to live like this, really."Harriet's mother Dorothy tries to talk some sense into her daughter and son-in-law in the most memorable passage in the book:"Harriet said fiercely, 'Perhaps we ought to have been born into another country. Do you realise that having six children, in another part of the world, it would be normal, nothing shocking about it -- *they* aren't made to feel criminals.''It's we who are abnormal, here in Europe,' said David.'I don't know about that,' said Dorothy, as stubborn as either of them. 'But if you were having six -- or eight, or ten -- no, I know what you are thinking, Harriet, I know you, don't I? -- and if you were in another part of the world, like Egypt or India or somewhere, then half of them would die and they wouldn't be educated, either. You want things both ways. The aristocracy -- yes, they can have children like rabbits, and expect to, but they have the money for it. And poor people can have children, and half of them die, and expect to. But people like us, in the middle, we have to be careful about the children we have so we can look after them.'"David and Harriet refuse to listen. They insist that they are old-fashioned people -- a superior breed in a newfangled world -- and they are going to have their unfashionably large family. They view Dorothy's common sense advice as just more persecution from a world bent on destroying deep, strong, solid happiness in favor of fleeting pleasure. They aren't bad people, but they are arrogant:"Happiness. A happy family. The Lovatts were a happy family. It was what they had chosen and what they deserved."They never stop to wonder why they should "deserve" happiness when so many perfectly decent people are denied it. They never consider what they are giving back to the world, only what they can get from it -- a house beyond their budget, more children than they can afford to send to "good" schools. Their parents help them pay for the house and care for the children. Apparently there is something irresistible about Harriet and David's insistence that they will have what they want just because they want it.We've all known people like that.Most of them don't become the protagonists in a cautionary tale, though.Fate smiles on Harriet and David, but not in a friendly fashion. So, it says, you want an old-fashioned family? Coming right up.The Lovatts are blessed with four happy, healthy, rather generic children. And then they conceive a fifth. To their credit, they don't mean to. Sure, they wanted more children; but not yet. "They had been careful." Well, too bad. Which is fitting. In the real good old days (as opposed to the Lovatts' dreamy vision), birth control was shaky and unreliable. Children came when they weren't wanted, or didn't come when they were. (Okay, that part isn't too different from today.) Harriet has always suffered during her pregnancies -- nausea, discomfort, fatigue. This pregnancy is different. The baby is frighteningly active, far earlier than the others have been. Its movements feel like blows from a hostile stranger. My lone pregnancy was very much desired and eagerly awaited, but I related very strongly to some of Harriet's suffering during her fifth. "The only thing that helped was to keep moving" -- oh, yes. I walked two miles the day I went into labor -- not because I was some sort of supermom, but because it was the only thing that would calm this vigorous stranger down, make him stop doing horrible things to my internal organs (or so I imagined). And yes, my son's innocent kicks and punches felt at times as if I were being beaten up from the inside. He had a terrifying habit of hooking one foot under my rib cage and pushing hard. I asked my midwife if it were possible for an unborn baby to break its mother's bones. "It can happen," she replied. "Not often," she added, which didn't exactly make me feel any better.Harriet has it far worse. Another memorable passage:"Time passed. It did pass, though she was held in an order of time different from those around her -- and not the pregnant woman's time either, which is slow, a calendar of the growth of the hidden being. Her time was endurance, containing pain. Phantoms and chimeras inhabited her brain. She would think, When the scientists make experiments, welding two kinds of animal together, of different sizes, then I suppose this is what the poor mother feels. She imagined pathetic botched creatures, horribly real to her, the products of a Great Dane or a borzoi with a little spaniel; a lion and a dog; a great cart horse and a little donkey; a tiger and a goat. Sometimes she believed hooves were cutting her tender inside flesh, sometimes claws."Finally, the baby is born -- early, but none too soon so far as Harriet is concerned. The child she's been waiting to see. And what sort of child have these insistently old-fashioned parents made? A very old-fashioned creature indeed. Some sort of throwback. A specimen of pre-civilized man, perhaps; or perhaps, as Harriet speculates much later, a descendant from the "dwarves or goblins or hobgoblins" that once inhabited our world. "How do we know...that kind of thing didn't really live here? And that's why we tell stories about them? They really existed, once...Well, how do we know they didn't?"I wish Lessing hadn't gone quite this far. I wish, instead of positing magical creatures, she'd simply stuck with the idea of "Hey, you wanted an old-fashioned baby -- well, here's what people used to look like!" Ben, as he is named, certainly seems to be a specimen of what we used to call primitive man:"He was not a pretty baby. He did not look like a baby at all. He had a heavy-shouldered hunched look, as if he were crouching there as he lay. His forehead sloped from his eyebrows to his crown. His hair grew in an unusual pattern from the double crown where started a wedge or triangle that came low on the forehead, the hair lying forward in a thick yellowish stubble, while the side and back hair grew downwards. His hands were thick and heavy, with pads of muscle in the palms. He opened his eyes and looked straight up into his mother's face. They were focussed greeny-yellow eyes, like lumps of soapstone."Be careful what you wish for.Lessing went on to write a sequel to The Fifth Child: Ben, In The World. I haven't read it yet, and am rather reluctant to. Ben is a perfect symbol in his first novel; I'm not sure he can survive as a real character in his second. But if Lessing felt compelled to write more about him, I'm probably going to feel compelled to read.
She felt rejected by him. They had always loved to lie here feeling a new life, greeting it. She had waited four times for the first little flutters, easily mistaken but then certain; the sensation that was as if a fish mouthed out a bubble; the small responses to her movements, her touch, and even- she was convinced- her thoughts. But what about me? I've been shot. Go on without me, save yourselves. Ooh aah it hurts, like a spoon or a papercut that irritates your mind into the beyond. Listen, take this review from my pocket over my frozen heart... Give it... gasps.... I don't have much time... Don't let it bash anyone else over the head with it's magazine article case study depthless void of empty characterizations that zip along like the latest autotuned hit to the next check on a form. Why the flipping hell did they HAVE to have six to ten kids? (Ten if someone was suspected to think the original six was too many. People who were essential to foot the bill, naturally.) Lovey dovey eyes that see into a shiny mirror. Don't let the constantly pregnant wife and her automatically possessive husband suck you into their weeks long Easter house parties of freeloaders hitched to their shag carpet ride on daddy's money and her mommy's retirement time. The glow of brand new furniture under layers of visiting butt sweat and baby vomit. Poor Ben was born into the dreams of spit out and consume. Poor Ben calls himself Poor Ben. He must have heard someone say it. It is getting life off on someone else's foot. He must have seen something, sensed something to have kicked and screamed with a "This is wrong" and not ask for better. I said better but there was nothing else here. He did come from a family who expected gloating contentment of the variety of I really couldn't give two shits. Housewife stuff if you were really angry about the sexual revolution. For no good reason. People were doing it and yeah I was researching for a period drama about issues. I saw a whir of ugly faces in a stream of going through the motions of this is the dream. Kill me before they get to tupperware parties. The boredom nearly did it. Their hopes meant nothing to me. What do they have to lose? So the wife-mother Harriet collects Ben out of the institution he is stuck in to die. It's like when your dog is going to "live on a farm somewhere with room to run" without the "room to run" part or the "farm". It's cold as the clinical shit baby Ben is covered in when Harriet lays her brooding (the egg laying definition) on him. I didn't know, I didn't think. I don't want to know, I don't want to think. It all happened so fast of and this happens next boringly flippant narration. The four kids whisper together. They were cute babies to show off five pages ago. We want Ben to be gone. Ben means nothing but an obstacle. An object of stone for their unfeelings. The side of the lucky to be born under a better sign, before the difficult pregnancies got more difficult. No body really knew what they wanted. I didn't know the kids. Theirs were a blurred face of get on the next bus out and marry the first person you see. They will all speak in the language of The Fifth Child that is whining or bragging grunts of hear what you expect to hear before anyone has said a word. The only difference in Harriet is that she turns her head when what she expected to hear is not what she had heard, though she is still afraid to look (that's important) and doesn't live. They weren't a family at all. Harriet may be a woman too weak to be good enough for a child like Ben. The other children may have felt unsafe in their own homes. I read a baby locked behind bars in a lonely room until he became the snarling animal in the corner they bought him for sight unseen. Yeah, there's a story in there and it kills me. But I didn't know them any more than the passing story related third hand about a man in Fla who fucked his wife into fourteen kids (he would yell at her "Flossie!" for back room sex with a house full of people). She dies and the fourteen kids go to the orphanage. The next wife gets four kids. The Fifth Child knows these people as well as that. It's creepy and sad and about complete strangers. Shouldn't there be more than passing judgement on strangers to this? It's not an issue or product of the times when it is your life. Maybe that kind of heartless removal speaks to others in a societal morse code I can't understand. Although a disturbing number of people on the review sites read this as a book about an evil little baby boy. I guess the message! anvils missed them, somehow. I don't get anything out of reading shit like that from strangers on the Internet either. I don't want it. That kind of thing kills me and I have no letters to home about that. That's so lonely. Harriet sees Ben and translates a monster stare looking for others like him. Where's the dying breath to understand?
Do You like book The Fifth Child (2010)?
By recent Nobel literature prizewinner Doris Lessing...about Ms. Lessing, "Ms. Lessing, who turns 88 this month [09/08?], never finished high school and largely educated herself through voracious reading. She has written dozens of books of fiction, as well as plays, nonfiction and two volumes of autobiography. She is the 11th woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.....[further quoting NY Times reporters Motoko Rich & Sarah Lyall] "Ms. Lessing’s strongest legacy may be that she inspired a generation of feminists with her breakthrough novel, “The Golden Notebook.” In its citation, the Swedish Academy said: “The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work, and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship.”Ms. Lessing wrote candidly about the inner lives of women and rejected the notion that they should limit their lives to marriage and children. “The Golden Notebook,” published in 1962, tracked the story of Anna Wulf, a woman who wanted to live freely and was, in some ways, Ms. Lessing’s alter ego. Because she frankly described anger and aggression in women, she was attacked as “unfeminine.” In response Ms. Lessing wrote, “Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise.”
—Fenixbird SandS
This was a fine book. I'd been reading so much about Doris Lessing, went to the library and of the 5 or 6 books there, chose this one.Not going to mention plot, that is everywhere, but the writing style was great. Lessing wrote non-stop, with no chapters or white space so I read it that way and finished it in one morning.Enjoyed her writing, enjoyed my wondering what was going to happen and why. Enjoyed the many comments here by others who read it.Going to read more Lessing -- like her intelligence.
—Katharine
The book was compared to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which really gets on my nerves. Why on earth do we have to do that? Publicity? I do that sometimes myself (i.e. comparing books), but on a personal note. I’m not a publisher / critic and my opinions don’t go on book blurbs or magazines. I wish publishers found an interesting / original / catchy thing to say about the book itself in order to sell it rather than just compare it to a classic or whatever best-seller is handy.Back to the book. Though set in the wild 60’s, David and Harriet seem to share traditional values and once they got married start making them real. Now, the reason any couple would like to buy a Victorian house as big as a hotel and plan a certain number of children beats me. I do agree with traditional values, it's just their careful planning that scares me. I wonder whether it’s innocence (mixed with positive thinking /optimism) or rather naivety (as most of their relatives see it). I do have the tendency to consider they do this from a sense of accomplishment of real life values opposed to the shallowness of the era - if so, why do they accept financial support from David’s father?So we get the point. They live, procreate and party with a huge amount of relatives and friends in this idyllic place. This really gets annoying at some point, everything is so repetitive, (especially since Mrs. Lessing has no taste for dividing her book in chapters or anything of that sort) that something has to happen. Thank goodness the 5th child is born, because you either go crazy or throw the book away. With Ben in their lives, nothing stays the same, the parties end, the relatives stop visiting and the family’s existence is shaken. Animals die, doors are locked and eventually the whole family disintegrates. Older children choose to spend time with grandparents or friends instead of their parents. Is it their fault? Can anyone blame a mother for wanting to keep a child with a certain “condition”? We never actually know what the real condition is, except he’s different and what really struck me towards the end was the easiness David and Harriet referred to Ben as being anything but human, like a troll, a gnome, an archetypal being.I wish Lessing went deeper with the book. OK, I really love modern books (as in them being shorter compared to biblical-length classics), but some things are so left out in the middle of nowhere, you just need to know what happens next. Catchy, not as haunting as I expected and easy to read.
—Lavinia
