#Ghoulvember ‘The Fifth Child’ by Doris Lessing

About the book…

Doris Lessing’s contemporary gothic horror story—centered on the birth of a baby who seems less than human—probes society’s unwillingness to recognize its own brutality.

Harriet and David Lovatt, parents of four children, have created an idyll of domestic bliss in defiance of the social trends of late 1960s England. While around them crime and unrest surge, the Lovatts are certain that their old-fashioned contentment can protect them from the world outside—until the birth of their fifth baby. Gruesomely goblin-like in appearance, insatiably hungry, abnormally strong and violent, Ben has nothing innocent or infant-like about him. As he grows older and more terrifying, Harriet finds she cannot love him, David cannot bring himself to touch him, and their four older children are afraid of him. Understanding that he will never be accepted anywhere, Harriet and David are torn between their instincts as parents and their shocked reaction to this fierce and unlovable child whose existence shatters their belief in a benign world

‘The Fifth Child’ was originally published in 1988 and was re-published by Vintage books as recently as 2010.

It is equal parts social commentary as a terrifying light shone on women’s reproductive rights. Written as a time when the pill, and the Abortion Act were passed, this was ushering in a new era where the size of your family could be determined by you, rather than the state.

However, here we have Harriet and Dave, who meet each other, fall in love, and decide to have the largest family that they can imagine.

Neither has had the type of upbringing they really wish to repeat-Dave’s parents are divorced and re-married, Harriet’s father has died and left a widow with 2 daughters behind. The various in-laws have plenty to say regarding the young folks lifestyle choices and it does not all go down well.

In one corner, Harriet’s mother being widowed and no longer of child bearing age, is expected to be the care giver and supporter of Harriet every time she has a baby. She has fulfilled her function by having children, staying married and now, widowed, she can be useful to the next generation. Whether she wants to do this is quite another matter. Then there is the matter of Harriet’s sister, who has a daughter with Down’s Syndrome, still relatively mis-understood in that age (particularly the words used to describe her which are shocking to any modern reader). The implication which I took away was that if she had been born a little later, if the technology was available, this child would not have been born. The burden is on both society and Harriet’s sister alike.

In the other corner are the re-married parents of Dave, who between them provided him with no home, according to him. So he wants to create the stable upbringing which he felt he never had, and being that neither he or Harriet had had a relationship prior to this, they have fallen into one by default and feel that they will not make the perceived mistakes of their elders. Except , Dave’s father will be the one bank rolling their life as the house they want for their growing brood is beyond the means of a family supported by one wage. After all, Harriet will be staying home to look after the children, not returning to work.

As child after child arrives, sleeps in the annexed room to the master bedroom before moving to make way for the new arrival, the family seems to grudgingly admit that the house is a home around which extended members gravitate. The seasons are marked with great gatherings where an idyllic lifestyle is oohed and ahhed over. Mutterings of this being too good to be true are shot down by the comfortable ease with which Harriet folds each child, each visitor into their home.

Until the birth of Ben.

The eponymous fifth child is a complete anomaly from pregnancy onwards. Harriet feels invaded, tearful, exhausted, huge and restless. She feels attacked from the inside, and distraught at the idea of giving birth to this child. If it is as monstrous as she suspects it will upset and ruin everything. The delivery is incredibly traumatising and then there is this baby who cries, is never satisfied and seems to burn with an anger against the world. All the things he shouldn’t be able to do, he does. He stands, rolls over, bites, climbs way before he should be reaching these milestones and then, he begins to affect the rest of the family. The other children begin to behave differently, Dave is not in such a hurry to return home, and one by one, relatives stop turning up at Easter, at Christmas and birthdays.

Harriet is left alone to make the decision over what to do with this anomaly, this cuckoo who has landed in her nest and burnt it completely to ashes.

She wanted the family, she is raising them, so how could one have gone so wrong?

And what do you do with a child like this?

The answers are horrific, and awful, and entirely of the time.

I would definitely urge anyone who is interested in challenging fiction to pick up a copy as it is disturbing in the extreme. it challenges the notion of women as born mothers, challenges the notion of societal expectations on mothers building false equivalency between a life lived with value, or a life lived at all.

It makes you think long and hard about where you stand on the issue of having children, and bearing in mind the time that it was written in, when those seen as ‘feeble’ or ‘handicapped’ were sent away, locked behind closed doors where polite society would not have to look their ‘mistakes’ in the eye.

About the author…

Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer), Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual.

In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and later had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists “who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read.” Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.

During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer.

In June 1995 she received an Honorary Degree from Harvard University. Also in 1995, she visited South Africa to see her daughter and grandchildren, and to promote her autobiography. It was her first visit since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. Ironically, she is welcomed now as a writer acclaimed for the very topics for which she was banished 40 years ago.

In 2001 she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, one of Spain’s most important distinctions, for her brilliant literary works in defense of freedom and Third World causes. She also received the David Cohen British Literature Prize.

She was on the shortlist for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Links-http://www.dorislessing.org/