June 14, 1988

The New York Times
The Painful Nurturing of Doris Lessing's 'Fifth Child'

By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN

hated writing it,'' said Doris Lessing. ''It was sweating blood. I was very glad when it was done. It was an upsetting thing to write - obviously, it goes very deep into me somewhere.''

Mrs. Lessing was talking about her latest novel - her 35th book - ''The Fifth Child,'' a work that critics are already referring to as ''a minor classic.'' The novel is set in the English suburbs from the 1960's to the 80's, where a happily married couple are bringing up their four children. There is an unexpected fifth pregnancy, a very difficult and painful one, and when the fifth child, Ben, is born, he turns out to be a monster in almost-human form. What is the family to do with him?

''It's a horror story,'' Mrs. Lessing said, sitting in the offices of her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. ''It seems to me it's a classic horror story.''

Readers have had very strong reactions to the novel, Mrs. Lessing said, which pleases her. She is even thinking of writing a sequel. But other kinds of reactions are bothering her - the comments of some critics and academicians who regard the novel as a moral fable or a commentary on the disintegration of society.

''I just laugh,'' she said. ''God knows how many things they've said this book is really supposed to be about.''

Mrs. Lessing was disturbed by the book, and by the pain she felt in writing it - ''so much pain, not all of which I can explain.'' She has spent much time thinking about why. ''I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world,'' she said, attempting to explain her reaction. ''This is such a common emotion. I think we even get used to it. Every time we pick up a newspaper there's something. It seems to me that one feels all the time a kind of anguish, a rage, of helplessness. ''

Mrs. Lessing was born of British parents in Persia in 1919. Her father, who lost a leg in World War I, had taken a job with the Imperial Bank of Persia. When she was 5 years old, her family moved to Southern Rhodesia, where she stayed for 25 years. In 1949, she moved to England, where she now lives, in northwest London. 'Many People's Fantasy'

She talked more about family -her family, and the family in ''The Fifth Child.'' Perhaps there was a connection, and another clue to the unexplainable pain.

''I did create this rather attractive family in the novel,'' she said, ''and it was painful to destroy it.'' The wonderful home life the family had before Ben was born is many people's fantasy, she said. ''It's certainly not easily attainable these days, and it's certainly not easy to keep, I think.''

''I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.'' she said. ''It's a sense of disaster. I know where it comes from -my upbringing. That damn First World War, which rode my entire childhood, because my father was so damaged by it. This damn war rammed down my throat day and night, and then World War II coming, which they talked about all the time. You know, you can never get out from under this kind of upbringing, the continual obsession with this. And after all, it's true. These wars did arise, and destroyed a beautiful household with all the loving children.''

Home Is Where the Horrors Are THE FIFTH CHILD

By Paul Gray Monday, Mar. 14, 1988

TIME - CNN

Most horror stories appeal to a collective memory of childhood, the sense of being small and vulnerable in a world filled with large, mysterious beings. Portrayals of innocence or helplessness stalked by danger produce responses that are largely involuntary and hence all but fail-safe: a reader's skin crawls, a moviegoer looks away from the screen or screams. One variation on this formula is its mirror opposite: an evil child is born into an unsuspecting, defenseless society. This situation crops up in folk literature, with tales of changelings or of sleeping women seduced and impregnated by incubi, and occasionally appears in popular entertainments like The Bad Seed and Rosemary's Baby. Not many serious writers have risked such a plot. It reeks of discredited superstitions and demonologies; it suggests, contrary to liberal, enlightened opinion, that wickedness is inborn and intractable.

So perhaps it should not be surprising that the latest of Doris Lessing's more than 30 books tells of the birth of a monster. Throughout her long, distinguished career, Lessing has specialized in bucking currents. Her early fiction carried a strong, if artfully submerged, feminist message. Later, when the women's movement gathered force, she did not join the parade but rather devoted her energy to a cycle of five science-fiction novels. She criticized the West when its power seemed paramount. When the enemies of democracy grew threatening, she changed her emphasis; in The Good Terrorist (1985) she showed civilized London under siege by mindless anarchists. The Fifth Child admirably continues this iconoclastic tradition; it is scary, engrossing and radically disturbing.

At a London office party in the mid-1960s, boy meets girl. David Lovatt, 30, and Harriet Walker, 24, share the same unfashionable dream of settling into married life and having lots of children. David, whose parents divorced when he was seven, wants to create the stable home he lacked while growing up; Harriet, a virgin, hopes to replicate her untroubled childhood. They find a huge Victorian house within commuting distance of London. It costs more than David's salary as an architect can provide, but his wealthy father agrees to take on the mortgage payments.

Despite the initial skepticism of relatives and friends, the Lovatts' experiment gets off to a brilliant beginning. In quick succession, four healthy children are born. Over Christmas and Easter vacations and during the summers, the house overflows with in-laws: "People came and went, said they were coming for a couple of days and stayed a week." Harriet's chores and recurrent pregnancies are eased by the almost constant presence of her mother, whose labor subsidizes this enterprise just as thoroughly as the money from David's father. But cost hardly seems to matter, measured against what it has helped to achieve: "Happiness. A happy family. The Lovatts were a happy family. It was what they had chosen and what they deserved."

Immersed in the coziness of their own creation, sensing themselves admired by their less fortunate houseguests, David and Harriet succumb to smugness. "We are the center of this family," David informs his mother. "We are -- Harriet and me." Harriet chimes in, "This is what everyone wants, really, but we've been brainwashed out of it. People want to live like this, really."

When it comes to bizarre horrors, though, there is no place like home. Harriet's fifth pregnancy disrupts the insular domestic bliss: "David saw her sitting at the kitchen table, head in her hands, muttering that this new foetus was poisoning her." Harriet complains to her doctor, but he refuses to see anything wrong: "He made the usual tests, and said, 'It's large for five months, but not abnormally so.' " After long agony, the child is born. Seeing him for the first time, the mother says, "He's like a troll, or a goblin or something." Harriet names him Ben and brings him home to his father and siblings, who learn to shun and fear him. The infant is physically precocious and incredibly strong, and he betrays no trace of human sympathy or fellowship. A dog and a cat about the premises die mysteriously, apparently strangled. David and Harriet come to view Ben as an enemy, one who "had willed himself to be born, had invaded their ordinariness, which had no defences against him or anything like him."

The Fifth Child can be read simply as a hair-raising tale; the struggle $ between the Lovatt household and the "alien" who comes to live there is as full of twists and shocks as any page turner could desire. Lessing's style is straightforward, sometimes almost telegraphic: "In September, of the year Ben became eleven, he went to the big school. He was eleven. It was 1986." This spareness suggests parable, a single accessible version of complex truths. Yet beneath its clear surface, Lessing's novel roils with several possible meanings. Perhaps David and Harriet, in their zeal to create a haven for themselves and what they call the "real children," have blinded themselves to humanity that lies "outside the permissible," beyond their constrained definitions of themselves. Maybe Ben represents a dangerous, violent streak in the species that must be either tamed or excluded from the realm of civilized life.

Lessing is much too canny to answer the questions her story so teasingly raises. Her artistry here, as it has so often been in the past, remains provocative. Family and society represent attempts to ward off all that is wild, destructive, unreasonable. But Lessing suggests that these controls, these apparently benign attempts to make life secure and bearable, may in fact spawn the monstrous.

Reviews :
‘“The Fifth Child” has the intensity of a nightmare, a horror story poised somewhere between a naturalistic account of family life and an allegory that draws on science fiction. Read it and tremble.’ Clare Tomalin, Independent ‘“The Fifth Child” is a book to send shivers down your spine, but one which it is impossible to put down until it is finished. Doris Lessing’s power to captivate and convince is evident from the first, and the effect of the odd, alien child on the family is conveyed with quiet understatement which adds to the mounting sense of horror.’ Sunday Times ‘A disturbing vision, “The Fifth Child” offers a faithful if chilling reflection of the world we live in.’ Sunday Telegraph

Family Relations, Society and a Monstrous Baby

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: March 30, 1988

''The Fifth Child,'' the title of Doris Lessing's new novel, immediately brings to mind such fast-paced thrillers as ''The First Deadly Sin,'' ''The Third Man,'' ''The Fourth Protocol,'' ''The Fifth Horseman.'' As it turns out, the book reads like a horror story, full of suspense and portentous melodrama - a sort of highbrow ''Rosemary's Baby,'' in which Mrs. Lessing uses the birth of a monstrous child as a springboard to examine the relationship between freedom and responsibility, between private suffering and societal disorder.

These are issues, of course, that have preoccupied Mrs. Lessing throughout her long and varied career; and in ''The Fifth Child,'' she merges domestic realism with fablelike qualities.

The setting is the English suburbs; the time span, some two decades - from the heady, hedonistic 60's through the violent 80's, when ''shootings and killings and tortures and fighting'' are routine fare on television, and the papers bristle with ''news of muggings, hold-ups, break-ins.''

The book is an absorbing novella, set down in the stark colors of a late-night thriller and shaded here and there with the chiaroscuro of deeper and more ambitious fiction.