Doris Lessing
The Children of Violence Series
Martha Quest: A Novel (Perennial Classics): I have decided to re-read Doris Lessing's Children of Violence series which begins with Martha Quest and ends with the Four Gated City. I read these in my early twenties and was impressed. So far I have just read Martha Quest, so I have four or five more volumes to go.
Lessing was writing about a time in the late thirties when she was between the ages of 14 to 19. I was that age in the late sixties, but I remember how much her somewhat autobiographical writing about the mother and daughter in the novel resonated with my experience. She is the daughter in this book. And, when I've read books (by her) that are from the point of view of a mother those have also resonated with my experience of being a mother, although she describes that relationship quite differently.
In Martha Quest, people seemed locked in roles which cause them to act in ways that have nothing to do with their real feelings or their real selves. At the beginning of the novel she is on a farm in South Africa with her parents. There is a brother, little mentioned, because he was sent away to a good school though she is a reader and he is not. She is in a battle with her mother who tries to control her life, and also has all the typical English attitudes about native Africans. Her father simply wants to avoid conflict. Her only real relationships are with the two sons of a Jewish shop keeper, who is fairly isolated in the area because of his Jewishness. They lend Martha books and her association with them seems to be what allowed her to form opinions about the equality of people that are different from those of all the others around her. Her opinions are intellectual, however, and don't prevent her from feeling prejudice, and, in this book, she does not act on her ideals.
What she does do is to finally break away from her parents, at the age of 17 or 18, helped to do so by Josh who arranges a job interview with his uncle, and moves to town and a job as a secretary. In the middle of discovering she is not really qualified as a secretary, and beginning to take classes to improve, she becomes part of a crowd that spends a lot of time at the sports club. Again there is the disjoint between who she really is, and the roles she plays in this group. In a short period of time, she drifts into three or four different relationship with people whom she doesn't really like. At the end of it at age 18 she is getting married. A few days before her fiance has asked if she really wants to go through with it, and she feels a sense that there is no stopping it, she knows she will get married. At the same time, a small voice inside her is telling her that she will not stay married.
The point of view of the novel. It is third person, and, but though it stays in Martha's head, it seems to be of someone reflecting back on Martha rather than in the moment. Sometimes you see the current Martha and this other person's thoughts side by side, with the other person commenting on Matha's actions Martha, herself, has an inner voice, the real Martha, so in a sense there are three voices: Martha in her role; the real Martha; the future (also real) Martha - I'm guessing on the last. 
Proper Marriage: The time and place is Rhodesia of the 1940's in the early stages of Rhodesia becoming involved in World War II.
I am struck by how constrained the characters are from saying what they really want to say and acting as they really want to act, or even associating with or marrying who they want to associate with and marry. At the end of book 1 Martha drifted into a marriage, and now she is acting in the marriage the way she believes she should, which in large part means not acting like her mother, the complaining female.
Martha Quest is a character who is very intellectual, as is the narrator, who seems to be a version of Martha somewhat in the future, but she doesn't seem able to do is to simply ask herself what it is that she wants. Once I was involved in this exercise in a kind of self-actualizing group. One person keeps asking: what do you want. The other person responds with whatever comes into their head. It goes on for quite some time, and does in fact finally result in you getting a pretty clear idea of what you want. I recommend it to Martha, in the series of dialogues that I tend to have in my head with characters in novels that I read.
Martha always has a sense that she is meant for something, and that something is different from being in a marriage and having a child. She doesn't really know what it is, but seems to feel closer to it when she is involved with socialist study groups, although, at the same time, she sees that little action is taken. In the Rhodesia of the 1940's Martha is one of a distinct minority who believe that black Africans are equal to whites. While she believes this, at the same time the unequal world is the one in which she is comfortable, used to, there would be something disquieting about a change in that status quo. This is probably nearly always so to some extent even of the most well-intentioned person, and part of Lessing's honesty that she presents it so, instead of showing Martha totally as we (or I) might want her to be. It's probably also so that most of us have a sense of destiny without knowing what the destiny is.
The one thing she feels strongly about his her daughter, Caroline. While she feels tenderness for her daughter, she feels so strongly that parents ruin their children, so it is possible for her to feel the way to save Caroline would be to leave her.
So this book is a second stage of Martha's becoming. And while I am impatient and disagree with her choices, even parts of the final one when she seems to be getting back on her own path at last, still I am interested in learning what she is becoming. There is always a kind of irony and even humor in how she is looking over her own shoulder, which is maybe what allows me to like this character in the end.
A Ripple From the Storm : I am continuing on with the Children of Violence series by Lessing, and have finished A Ripple from the Storm and begun Landlocked. In Ripple from the Storm Martha has left her marriage, gone back to her office work from before her marriage, and is an active member of a communist group working in South Africa, which also involves being active in several more liberal organizations which the small communist group hopes to influence. In this work Martha seems to be for the first time acting from her true self, independent of whether this work will have much influence in the end. WWII is going on, though it is somewhat remote to South Africa, where it is present mainly through the soldiers stationed there. It is also present in the sense of waiting, waiting for the war to be over, and an impermanence in relationships as relationships are formed with soldiers who ship out, and young men from the town serve in different places. Again Martha drifts into relationships. The leader of the communist group, a German refuge, cares for her when she is sick and they become a couple, and then he is threatened with internment because of the relationship, and she marries him to prevent it. This drifting is presented as partially the result of unsettled times, but also as a sort of falsity or perhaps difficulty in the relationships between men and women, in playing out roles for one another, being the person the other expects, or resisting that. This book contains a lot of information about the political forces in the British colony of Africa. A note - I had identified the colony as South Africa, mainly because of the mention of Afrikaners and Johannesburg at one point. But Lessing actually grew up in Rhodesia, so perhaps it was written about Southern Rhodesia. At one point there is mention of a group as Policy Sub-Committee for the Communist Party of Zambesia, which makes no sense because Zambesia was a Portuguese colony, and this one is clearly British. (Wikipedia to the rescue - "The name Zambezia or Zambesia was also used up to 1895 for the territory later called Rhodesia, now Zambia and Zimbabwe.") I don't know why they used it in the 1940's. Also, there were Afrikaners in Rhodesia as well as South Africa.
the Four Gated City: I am in the middle of the Four Gated City by Doris Lessing. This is the last book of the Children of Violence series, beginning with Martha Quest by Doris Lessing. This is a reread of all five books. I remembered the Four Gated City as being the culmination of all the books, the best of them, and better having read the first four, although I'm sure it would be good stand alone as well.
The first four books are solidly realistic. The one thing that pervades them, and also the last book, is the sense of being caught up in roles that seem not to relate to your true self, and yet, all the time there being the watcher, that is who you really are. In the 4 gated city Lessing describes it as the look in an infants eyes when they first look straight at you. The rest of life is growing into those eyes.
The first four books follow Martha from girlhood to an early marriage, to leaving the marriage and becoming a communist activist during World War II. These are good book, getting better as they go along. Landlocked is the best of the four for me and kind of a prelude to the Four Gated City as Martha begins to come into who she really is. She falls in love for real for the first time - this after being married twice. The Four Gated City though, is another level. It is also a different kind of consciousness, verges on science fiction. Martha is in England. As it begins she had been there for a few months and is coming to the end of a time when she can be in a place and not be claimed by it yet. She's stayed in a couple of places temporarily and has a relationship with a man who knows things through his body.
Not long after she takes a job, meant to be temporary, but she is still there halfway into the book and about 10 years later. She was to help a writer with his work, and ends up becoming the matron of an extended family. Mark is the writer, and his brother, Colin, is a scientist who flees to Russia during the McCarthy era when he is about to be arrested for insisting on the sharing of knowledge. His wife and small son are left behind and his wife soon kills herself, leaving the son. There is also Mark's son, whose mother, Lynda is in a mental hospital. I don't remember details well, but at the place in the book where I am now, in addition to an examination of the times, 1949 - mid sixties, Lynda has come home, living in the basement apartment of the big house, and Lynda and Martha have begun an exploration of the mind, including tapping into the thoughts of others. Lynda is learning to do without the drugs which mask her abilities, and Martha is paying attention to things which were there all along. Partly she is pulled into this by her own crises when her mother writes her that she is coming to England. She thinks she ought to be able to be at peace with her mother and provide her a calm place to spend the rest of her life, but she is actually thrown into a panic, nearly a breakdown.
Like I said, I haven't finished, but this is still probably my favorite.
others by Lessing
Ben, In the World: The Sequel to the Fifth Child: I read The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing a few months ago, and have just finished it's sequal, Ben in the World. Both novels are short. The first is about two people who marry and want to have a traditional home with many children, which they do. They become a kind of magnet for their friends in the warm, family centered life that they lead. Then their fifth child is born. He is a kind of throwback. His instincts don't fit in the family. They try to preserve the hospitality at holidays, but it is impossible. The new child is a strain on everything. At one point they try institutionalizing the child, which seems to be like a death sentence for him, and the mother goes and rescues him. At the end of that book, the fifth child has managed to find a group of teens with whom he fits to an extent.
As I recall, the point of view of that first book, though I believe it was third person omniscient, was mainly through the mother.
Ben in the World is also told in third person omniscient, but it's center is Ben and what he experiences. We see him much more trying to adjust and be like others, doing his best, but with a kind of primitiveness to his emotions, needs and perhaps intelligence. He has to struggle to keep his emotions under control. There are things he can't do, such as drive a car, yet he understands a great deal. He tries to please, and responds to anyone who truly likes him, but he is continually taken advantage of by others.
Lessing can be quite a stark writer. She never tries to make anything softer or prettier than it is. The book has a few scenes that include the children of Rio de Janeiro who live on the streets and beaches, attacking and preying on others to survive. A note in the front illustrates this: "The authorities have cleared the gangs of criminal children from the streets of the centre of Rio. They are no longer permitted to annoy tourists."
So, as you wonder, in fiction, how someone like Ben could survive, you can also wonder what has happened to those children. 