Readers of this blog know that I am a Doris Lessing fan. Not all of her books are equally brilliant, but the best are classics. I recently reread parts of The Four-Gated City, the fifth in her Children of Violence quintet, which Lessing considered a bildungsroman. And yet I find that claim very strange. It is true of the first four books in the series, which follow the life of Martha Quest from her teens to the age of 30. But the  final volume is a novel of ideas that gradually abandons the semblance of a conventional narrative.

It is not, however, surprising that Martha, a former Communist, would become the subject of an experimental novel.  After moving to London in the late 1940s, she takes a  job as a live-in secretary-cum-editor-cum -housekeeper to Mark Coleridge, a factory owner and leftist writer of a best-selling utopian novel: 

In the course of the novel, Martha and Mark analyze post-war politics, the evolution of the extended family to gird up Mark’s floundering dysfunctional nuclear family, the Laingian theory that the mentally ill are psychic, and the unity of the Aldermaston marches against nuclear disarmament.

And in the final section, Lessing one-ups the level of defiant rule-breaking by embracing science fiction in the form of describing a world-wide disaster, documented by the surviving characters in the form of letters and other papers.

Lessing is best-known for her naturalistic writing about women’s lives, and, indeed,  one of the most interesting sections of of this novel is a portrait of  Martha’s unhappy mother.  Mrs. Quest, a widow who lives on an African farm with her son and his family,  has always disliked her radical daughter.  But suddenly she writes a letter to Martha announcing plans to visit her in London.  Martha promptly has a nervous breakdown. 

 Martha knows exactly what her relationship with her mother is like.  And Mrs. Quest has no conception of the changes in London:  she imagines the  England of her youth before World War I.  And who can she possibly imagine Martha to be now?  But in a way, Mrs. Quest knows the visit will be a disaster.  She keeps postponing the visit. 

The voyage to England is not the happy adventure Mrs. Quest had hoped for.  Her disillusion and disappointment on the the cruise ship is sad, even terrifying, because Mrs. Quest’s life is rather like this voyage, and she would rather not face it.  She perceives with dismay that the passengers drug themselves with food, sleep, silly games, and drinking.  And this is her first glimmering of the sadness that the trip will bring.

Lessing devotes some remarkable pages to Mrs. Quest’s old age as it is revealed to her on the ship.  She writes,

Mrs. Quest, an old lady among old ladies, all of them widows (for women live longer than men), sat in her deck chair, which had been placed well out of the wind.  She would much rather have been in it.  She had a rug over her knees, and she knitted something or other:  they all knitted or sewed, and they watched others at play. When Mrs. Quest had said how much she loved a voyage, a good deal of what she loved was the games….  She always had… but had she, she wondered?  Well, she had always been a good sort, of course.  Now a good sort, obeying, as she always had, she played whist and bridge.

And this is the fate of a certain generation of women. Mrs. Quest goes along with the games and even pretends to have rewarding relationships with her children and grandchildren, as do the other women of her age. In reality, her family tolerates but does not love her. And Mrs. Quest wonders if this is true of any of the other old women.

Mind you, not all old women in Lessing’s books are tragic figures.  In her 1995  novel, Love, Again, Sarah Durham, a vigorous woman in her sixties, is  a writer and director of a small, prestigious theater. Then one days she happens to read the memoirs of a society woman, written in old age.

A strange thing, Sarah thought, that she had picked the book up.  Once, she would never even have opened a book by an old person: nothing to do with her, she had thought.

Of course Sarah does not lead the life of an “old woman.” Over the course of a summer in France, where the theater is rehearsing a production of a new play, Sarah falls in love for the first time in years.  She had forgotten the bloom and intensity of love. But iove is a challenge. Love is mortal. Love is irrelevant, Sarah thinks at the end of the summer.

In short, Sarah is an old woman of Lessing’s generation, who believed in themselves but were faced with the knowledge of a sell-by date in the eyes of others.  But Lessing’s Martha Quests and Sarah Durhams have more freedom than the Mrs. Quests: let us pray in this strange age that freedom will continue.