Children of Violence

I can now add Doris Lessing to Iris Murdoch and (less so) A. S. Byatt among women authors with whose work I am somewhat familiar [edit: I forgot Jane Austen. Still, I'm a bit surprised by how short this list is]. She is less similar to those two than they are to each other. I first read Memoirs of a Survivor, then The Fifth Child, both of which share what I want to call a whimsical bleakness. Her five book series Children of Violence does not have quite the same effect; it couldn't be sustained over such length. But the series, written from 1952 to 1969, does show (especially in the last book) a gradual blurring of lines of reality. Her signature, developed in the last book The Four-Gated City and appearing strongly in Memoirs, is a fantastical, or magical, conception of the inner life.

The first two books in Children of Violence read a bit like F. Scott Fitzgerald; they are set in a backwater colony (Rhodesia it would appear) between the wars, and their world, living its pale imitation of the roaring twenties, has the same intense mix of superficiality and inner desperation. The second two books switch focus from a milieu of dance-parties and "sundowners" (a kind of cocktail?) to a hilariously observed proto-Communist cell and the politics of the committee meeting and the public lecture. Of course, what we learn is that the two worlds are not so dissimilar. They are about escape from a world ruled by someone else; they are each in their way, utopian.

What made the fifth book, which is far longer than those before it, worthwhile was a moment near the end. This book is in large part about the different kinds of madness people feel. It has both love (and lust) and politics and power, and these things are linked by the pathologies of inner human lives. What we realise as Martha (the heroine of all the books) teeters on the edge of mental breakdown is that in fact she has always been there, always teetering, always so close to just drifting off or falling down broken.

This is a story of "Children," drift and development, the slow construction of a personality (recounted with pained self-awareness), which is then in this last book - maybe - broken down again, eroded, deconstructed. There is an appendix describing a global apocalypse occuring after the main action of the book, and this acts as a sort of counterpoint. It demonstrates how much more poignant is life lived always on the edge of individual catastrophe.