Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

THis was a very interesting book.

Greetings
I read the fifth child recently and would like to study it with my students next year. But I am unable to find critics on the entire book on the net. Do you think you can help me ? Thank you. Regards.
H A

Hello,

I couldn’t find any critical notes (either online or on print) on “The Fifth Child”. Interviews and articles about her works are listed in her official web site (http://www.dorislessing.org/interviews.html), but I suppose you probably already found this page… There are interesting hints to interpreting “The Fifth Child” in her interview about its sequel, “Ben in the World” (http://www.dorislessing.org/chat-ben.html). There might be other relevant interviews or articles on this page…

I find the fifth child a portrait of English (and any other first world country)fear for their dark side, the uncivilized offspring of the most civilized societies. It’s the horror that lies beneath that you think you are, when suddenly your sinister side pops up.

yes, I agree with your view, Ben brings us back to the instinctive, animal part of the human being behind the varnish of civilization…

I’ve just finished reading “The 5th Child” and to be frank that book gave me the creeps. I even had nightmares. I think part of the reason is that it touches a very difficult subject, difficult especially for mothers who are naturally expected to love and cherish their children. Well, what if they don’t? What if a mother cannot (for whatever reason) love her child? Harriet hates herself for it, and yet in trying to make up she neglects her other 4 kids – she fails in every sense. Horrid!

Melian, I think more people than we know (even mothers) don’t love their child, a lot of children are abandoned, neglected, abused, or just not loved. I think it is society that makes us think that love for one’s own child is granted, it is the acceptable, the politically-correct notion. We talk about motherly instinct but what if it is a myth? “The Fifth Child” raises all these questions, what a challenging novel! I also recommend “We need to talk about Kevin” (but be ready for more nightmares…)

David says “I was careful not to see. What did you suppose was going to happen? That they were going to turn him into some well-adjusted member of society and then everything would be lovely?” Now, what is it that civilization doesn’t want to see? What do they prefer to do at all costs to avoid meeting their sinister side? On page 54, a story is told to the children by David. The three children in the story are lost in a forest and the little girl has a close encounter with a girl reflected in a pool. The other, the sinister side of oneself, the evil, unknown part of what we think we know but cannot recognize, the part of our reality that we are all careful not to see, because we acknowledge as impossible to be re-adjusted. It is our own reflection that we fear, our own fears haunt us. The English civilization has done to the world what she herself fears to recognize as her dark side. The monstrous fifth child Ben displaces the “real” English children as a symbol of the return of the colonial repressed. What does Ben stand for? The answer does not matter, what matters is that we are like David, blindfolded, we choose not to see.

Wow! Good point! I hadn’t spotted the parallel between responsibilities towards a child and towards a colonized country, both expected to be grateful and “civilized” and turning rebellious instead. There are many ways to read this story, that what makes it such a good novel to discuss…
But your mentionning of the pool reflection scene immediatly recalled a scene in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, when the creature says “how I was terrified when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification.” Frankenstein: another example of a “father” refusing to take responsibility for his monstrous offspring, and no doubt a source of inspiration for Lessing’s “Fifth Child”…

i really did like the book. my professor assigned it to us in the sylibis. i bought the book used on line. i was planning to resell it after using it for the semester. im actually thinking i will keep the book. its an interesting book i’d read again for fun.

Hi, I’m french and I’m keen on english books. This one is just fascinating. I had never heard of Lessing before, but I’m quite impressed by her talent…

The thing that I don’t like about Doris Lessing is that she leaves out a lot of details. Plus she forwards the scene really quick, and sometimes I get lost how old are Harriet’s children. Another thing I was seeing about The Fifth Child is that she mentions about the garden how it leads to family lifestyle. For instance, Molly’s garden was neglected when she had drama between her and I believe it was James or Fredrick.

Throughout the book, there’s always a signifigance about each person and each minor character such as when Ben killed the dog or Dr. Brett and Dr. Gilly. The names that were chosen such as Ben’s teacher who’s name is Mrs. Graves.
I find it everything is pretty interesting about the book.

I thought this book was fascinating and read this in one sitting. If there is ever a book to make you really think about people’s motives for bringing a child in to the world, this is it. Could this book be added to Year 7/Year 8 reading lists?! Perhaps that’s too harsh. My husband and I have been trying to conceive for 6 years and all but given up hope. Strangely, a few weeks after reading this book I found out I was pregnant! I was just about to start Ben in the World but might put this off till later. Maybe’ll I’ll Read the The Golden Notebook instead…..then again, maybe not!?!

I have read this book twice: the first time out of curiosity a few years ago when I was a university student, the second a few weeks ago as an English teacher who had strongly advised his students to read it and find their own conclusions. Both times I found it quite compelling and disturbing as Lessing deliberately leaves the Ben character vague and indefinite. Ben cannot be inscribed in the outlines which delineate what a “round” character is, because a great amount of empty spaces surround him: what is this child in the end? What does he represent in the whole texture of the setting he lives in? His substance is made up of the numerous questions the author demands the readers to ask themselves, being “not an ordinary” person, according to Harriet’s views, Ben is fleshed out by way of words and sentences others build around him. We never understand Ben’s real medical condition: he is not Down syndrome-affected, nor an autistic child, maybe a hyperactive one; a specific condition would have made things clearer and more easily definable.
I’m led to believe that the Lovatt’s fifth child should be considered rather as a symbol of decay and dissolution of a world no longer stable: Harriet and David’s familiar idyll, the ancient British society tenets and the British Empire colonial power. As a matter of fact, Ben’s parents achieve an enviable domestic bliss to the detriment of family and friends, out of self-centredness and desire to paradoxically and anachronistically stand out in a period – the late sixties and the early seventies – where old values such as patriarchy, sense of belonging and large happy families had grown thin, social turmoil for women’s and minorities’ rights and the struggle for independence from the oppressive British Rule were taking off. In the figure of this majestic couple, I can see the same greed and cynical behaviour of British colonists who were unable to face the needs and urgencies of the oppressed. David refuses to accept Ben as his own child (Harriet – “He’s a little child […] He’s our child.” David – “No, he’s not. […] He certainly isn’t mine.”), Harriet keeps telling how she feels like a “criminal” for giving birth to such a creature: descriptions of both outer and inner features of her child are vividly, and sometimes ironically, rendered by her voice: “alien”, “He was wrestling, fighting, struggling, crying in his characteristic way, which was a roar or a bellow, while he went yellowish white with anger – not red, like a normal, cross baby”, “Neanderthal baby”, “[…] a troll, or a goblin or something”. Thus, it is interesting to remark how Harriet connotes herself when she perceives what other people may think of her after seeing Ben: “And so the house was not the same; there was a constraint and a wariness in everybody. Harriet knew that sometimes people went up to look at Ben, out of the fearful, uneasy curiosity he evoked, when she was out of the way. She new when they had seen him, because of the way they looked at her afterwards. As if I were a criminal! she raged at herself. She spent quite too much of her time quietly seething, but did not seem able to stop. Even David, she believed, condemned. She said to him, ‘I suppose in the old times, in primitive societies, this was how they treated a woman who’d given birth to a freak. As if it was her fault. But now we are supposed to be civilized!’
I finally think this book, written in the late eighties in quite a hectic and untidy manner, has stayed alive and vibrant over the years since it tackles relevant and topical issues which will capture the reader’s attention for still a long time. By taking into account this book each one of us must confront with his inner self getting answers we would not possibly be given.
Davide Locuratolo – Italy

I just finished The Fifth Child and found it disturbing, but felt eager to discuss it with others. No one I know has read it though, so here I am.

Throughout I wanted an answer re: what is wrong with Ben (or is the problem with his parents as some suggest in the book), but ultimately, it is probably best Lessing left this uncertain so the reader can focus on the main idea–what happens when a child is not loved by its parents or its siblings? I do think there are children who just don’t fit in with their families, and indeed, child development experts do talk about the importance of “fit” for a good parent/child relationship. Usually the difference isn’t as severe and startling though, more along the lines of two extroverts having a shy child and feeling ashamed because he or she is different.

I cannot say the enitre problem is Ben. Initially my sympathies were with his parents, but as time goes on, less and less so. Why do they not bring him to another specialist or a child psychologist? Why do they not persevere to figure out why he cannot learn, why he is so different from others? I suspect both parents resigned themselves to the idea that their child was a freak by nature and nothing would change him. I did find it disturbing the way the family treated and spoke about Ben at times, and as he got older, his mother wonders what he is thinking, yet never once does she ask him. I would say she does not want to know exactly what he is thinking.

It’s interesting that some saw this as a metaphor for English culture, I did not get that out of the reading. I would guess Lessing wanted to write about the notion that a mother might not love her child, and the societal expectation that this is always the case isn’t necessarily so. It reminded me slightly of the character Martha Quest in “A Proper Marriage,” who also seemed alienated from her child initially, and also had a horrible pregnancy. Though the alienation was not so severe.

I had to read “The Fifth Child” for IB A1 English, and everyone in the class but me found it a really horrible horror story. I think it is just the story of two people who try to hard to make the world their way, and can not deal with anything that is not maleable. David starts off despising all of the “typical” workers in the firm, but by the end of the novel he himelf is worse than they were. Harriet thinks that everyone is blaming her, and in a way she is right, even though it was always David who initiated the physical aspect of their love. In the scene when they view the house and end up in the bedroom, Harriet seems almost afraid of David. This is kind of personified in Ben. He evokes the same emotions in everyone that all of the other characters occasional evoke in each other.

I really like the book, and I think that I will read Ben and the world (or whatever the sequal is called) soon.

What I find most interesting in this novel is the uncertain point of view adopted – is it the anonymous narrator’s, Harriet’s, other characters’ ? Depending on how we identify this point of view, the novel can be read as a realistic novel, a psychological novel or as a fantastic novel.