Bad News for the Nice and Well-Meaning

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THE FIFTH CHILD

By Doris Lessing.

April 3, 1988

Bad News For the Nice and Well-Meaning

By CAROLYN KIZER

fter her excursions into space with her Canopus

series of novels, Doris Lessing - to the relief of many

of her longtime admirers -has returned to earth, to deal

in her customary forthright fashion with our flawed andcrumbling social fabric. Ms. Lessing's new novel - her

35th book - is a moral fable of the genre that includes

Mary Shelley's ''Frankenstein'' and George Orwell's ''Nineteen Eighty-Four.'' All

three works derive their energy in part from their echoes of Promethean heroes, of

''Paradise Lost'' with a tinge of Faustian hubris: ''Frankenstein,'' as the critic Ellen

Moers called it, that ''waking dream of monster-motherhood''; ''Nineteen Eighty-

Four,'' a nightmare of social collapse. And if Ms. Lessing is a better writer than the

teen-age Mary Shelley, she is fully the equal of the mature Orwell - than which

there is no higher praise. In ''The Fifth Child'' she has given us what is destined tobecome a minor classic.

The monster-child born to the nice normal British couple, the Lovatts, is not the

creation of science but a genetic error, a throwback, or perhaps a throw-forward,

who eventually, like Anthony Burgess's delinquents in ''A Clockwork Orange,''

finds his true home in the monster-company of the underclass: the uneducable, the

unemployable, the rootless, whose vacuity leads them inevitably to drugs, violence

and crime.

''The Fifth Child'' begins when Harriet and David meet at an office party in the late1960's. They seem like freaks to their friends and associates because they

epitomize the traditional values of family and fidelity so violently overthrown in the

upheavals of those times. Harriet is a virgin, although she prefers to think of herself

as ''something like a present wrapped up in layers of deliciously pretty paper, to be

given, with discretion, to the right person.'' Her grandmother's generation might

have said, ''She's no better than she ought to be.'' Her contemporaries say to one

another, ''It must be something in her childhood that's made her like this. Poor

thing.'' Within minutes of meeting each other, David and Harriet discover that their

ideals and goals are nearly identical. David knows the kind of woman he wantsand needs. ''His wife must be like him in this: that she knew where happiness lay

and how to keep it.'' Poor Harriet indeed. Poor David.

Very soon they marry. Why wait? They find a large Victorian house a long
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commute from London, a house they can't afford, with plenty of space for children

and guests. But they mean to have a lot of both. Harriet becomes pregnant almost

immediately. Their first child, Luke, is an easy baby, so they go ahead with plans

for a large family gathering at Easter - the first of many parties for their extended

family and friends. For the next few years the births of three more children hardly

put a damper on the continuing festivities.

Even when she is exhausted, Harriet has a compulsive need to keep open house asa validation of the life she and David have chosen. ''Listening to the laughter, the

voices, the talk, the sounds of children playing, Harriet and David . . . would reach

for each other's hand, and smile, and breathe happiness.'' There is a disturbing hint

of hubris in their self-satisfaction. When Harriet's unhappily married sister gives

birth to a retarded child, Harriet doesn't believe it is a case of bad luck. No, their

misery, their quarrels have brought this blight upon them.

First, the Lovatts' economic situation deteriorates; David barely manages to hang

on to his job; their safe little town has become a magnet for brutal crimes. ''There

was an ugly edge on events: more and more it seemed that two peoples lived in

England, not one - enemies, hating each other, who could not hear what the other

said.'' Or, as Orwell predicted 40 years ago, there was ''a vast amount of

criminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits,

prostitutes, drug peddlers and racketeers of every description, but since it all

happened among the proles themselves, it was of no importance.''

If the ''ugly edge on events'' in the world outside can be held at bay by nice, well-

meaning people like the Lovatts, the turmoil within the family cannot. Although

Harriet has never had an easy time with her pregnancies, the fifth one is different,frighteningly so. The energy of the fetus, beating a tattoo on her belly, keeps her

from rest or sleep. ''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.'' Shades of Frankenstein's horror

when, instead of that radiant creature of his imagination, he first viewed the poor,

botched thing he patched together from diverse pieces.

When at last Ben is born, he doesn't look like a normal baby but like some troll or

goblin. At various times, Ms. Lessing describes Ben as a Neanderthal, a dwarf, a

being forging metal deep under the earth with his kind, as well as intimating that he

is a creature from another planet. To hear it described, one might wonder whether

Ms. Lessing were still toying with science fiction here, but the remarkable thing

about this creature is its complete believability. Where a lesser writer would have

presented page upon page of pseudo-scientific hokum to educate his readers on

the workings of genetics that might account for such a throwback, Ms. Lessing

simply presents the monster as a fact, and so taps into the fear familiar to all

parents: that they are capable of producing something abnormal. And when the

nightmare comes true, how own up to it? ''I wonder what the mother would looklike, the one who would welcome this - alien,'' Harriet says. Not to welcome him,

on the other hand, goes against the grain. As Dr. Frankenstein's poor monster

pleaded, ''Remember, I am thy creature.''
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Before he is six months old, Ben has begun to destroy the Lovatts' family life. He

has grasped his little brother Paul's arm through the bars of his crib and badly

sprained it. No one needs to tell the other children to be careful. A guest brings

along a little terrier. Ben strangles it, and later murders the old family cat. Watching

over her wild child, trying to teach him something resembling normal behavior,

absorbs all of Harriet's time and energy, to the neglect of her four charming older

children. The world that David and Harriet constructed for themselves has fallen

apart. Paradise lost indeed.

Keeping their efforts a secret from Harriet, other members of the family arrange for

Ben to be institutionalized, but Harriet - in the most brilliant passage in the book,

an almost unbearably dramatic and harrowing scene - retrieves the child from the

nightmarish place to which he had been banished. She is met with the open hostility

of her husband and children.

As the family sinks into despair - the ''real children'' drift away to live with the

relatives who used to crowd their house in the good old days - Ben gains a

hideous sort of ascendancy. John, an unemployed layabout, agrees to look after

Ben during the day. Suddenly, ''poor Ben,'' as he has taken to calling himself, is

accepted for the first time in his life. This child who kills animals, speaks in

monosyllables and squats on a table tearing a raw chicken apart with his hands and

teeth, becomes, first, a kind of mascot for John's motorcycle gang, then as he

grows older, attracts a ''Clockwork Orange'' crowd of television junkies who

lounge around the house, lapping up the shootings and killings and torture. Ms.

Lessing, in a stroke of genius, makes Ben all the more sinister by placing him,

indistinguishably, among his own - ''the uneducable, the unassimilable, the

hopeless, who move up the school from class to class, waiting for the happymoment when they can leave.''

With Ben away for longer and longer intervals, Harriet reads in the papers of

muggings, holdups, break-ins. The outcome is clear: Ben and his friends will drift

off to the city and vanish into its netherworld, living in its derelict buildings, finding

their thrills in street fights and riots, to end up in prison or the morgue.

In 1948, Orwell predicted a world ''more primitive today than it was fifty years

ago.'' When the real 1984 came around, in a flurry of self-congratulation we

assured ourselves that Orwell's bleak prognostications had not come to pass. A

scant four years later, we may take a less sanguine view. The distance between the

Lovatts and their friends and the Bens and their friends becomes more of a chasm

with each passing season. Decent liberals still hang on to the hope that, with

massive infusions of money, we can repair the infrastructure, educate, train and

house the ignorant, the unskilled, the homeless. I don't believe that Ms. Lessing is

among them, absorbed as she is in her horror story of maternity and the nightmare

of social collapse.

Carolyn Kizer won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Her most recent bookis ''The Nearness of You.''

GOBLINS AND BAD GIRLS


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