The Four-Gated City

Children of Violence #5

by Doris Lessing

Dorris Lessing's classic series of autobiographical novels is the fictional counterpart to Under My Skin. In these five novels, first published in the 1950's and 60s, Doris Lessing transformed her fascinating life into fiction, creating her most complex and compelling character, Martha Quest.

Author Biography: Doris Lessing was born Doris May Taylor in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. 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). Her mother installed Doris in a covenant school, and then later in an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury, from which she soon dropped out. She was 13, and it was the end of her formal education.

Lessing's life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against the cultural and biological imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood. Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing is a process of "setting a distance," taking the "raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general."

Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggleamong opposing elements within an individual's own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good.

Over the years, Lessing has attempted to accommodate what she admires in the novels of the 19th century — their "climate of ethical judgment" — to the demands of 20th-century ideas about consciousness and time. After writing the Children of Violence series (1952-1959), a formally conventional bildungsroman (novel of education) about the growth in consciousness of her heroine, Martha Quest, Lessing broke new ground with The Golden Notebook (1962), a daring narrative experiment in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing depth and detail. Anna Wolf, like Lessing herself, strives for ruthless honesty as she aims to free herself from the chaos, emotional numbness and hypocrisy afflicting her generation.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing began to explore more fully the quasi-mystical insight Anna Wolf seems to reach by the end of The Golden Notebook. Her "inner-space fiction" deals with cosmic fantasies Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971), dreamscapes and other dimensions (Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974), and science-fiction probings of higher planes of existence (Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979-1983). These reflect Lessing's interest, since the 1960s, in Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufi mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation can come about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of society.

Lessing's other novels include The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Fifth Child (1988); she also published two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers (The Diary of a Good Neighbor, 1983, and If the Old Could., 1984). In addition, she has written several nonfiction works, including books about cats, a love since childhood. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 was recently joined by Walking in the Shade: 1949 to 1962, both published by HarperCollins.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Literature, Africa, Novels, 20th Century, British Literature

656 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Doris Lessing was born into a colonial family. 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.

(Extracted from the pamphlet: A Reader's Guide to The Golden Notebook & Under My Skin, HarperPerennial, 1995. Full text available on www.dorislessing.org).

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This long, dense, intense novel is not well served by some of the descriptions of it. The back cover and many of the reviews talk about it as ‘post-apocalyptic’, but this is, to put it mildly, misleading – aside from the epilogue, all 660 pages deal with London in the 1950s and early 1960s. At heart, it's a social-realist novel, which looks at the topics of the age: 50s espionage, the vogue for psychiatry, the Cold War, the protest movement, the birth of the permissive society and the Swinging Sixties. But there's a strange twist in the tail.

Readers who come to this having read the previous four Children of Violence novels might be a bit thrown, since at times it feels like a completely separate book whose central character happens to share the same name. Though as I write that, the continuities do suggest themselves: the frustrated obsession with social justice, the refusal to accept easy answers, Martha's wonderfully prickly and bloody-minded feminism – all these qualities are consistent, just transposed to a European context.

It is fascinating seeing Lessing's painstaking, analytical style finally being applied to English social mores – nowhere more so than when it comes to sex, which becomes a major theme of this volume. She writes about it like no one else – long, meticulous descriptions which are too long to quote but which show a constant attention to the mental gymnastics and psychological quirks that accompany any kind of sexual interaction. Often these manage to be funny and touching and frustrating all at once, as when Martha pays a visit to what we'd now call one of her FWBs – and as they're lounging around naked, one of his other girlfriends suddenly turns up, leading to a weirdly polite and English sort of pre-threesome scene:

Joanna gave Martha a slow once-over.

‘You're very pretty,’ she said.

‘I'm sure that I'd think the same of you!’

Meanwhile Jack sat, not at all embarrassed, or amused, or annoyed. He was pleased and interested. […]

‘The thing is, Jack, either we both have to get dressed, or Joanna has to be undressed.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Joanna in her brisk fair English way.

Jack wanted Joanna to get undressed. Afterwards he said to Martha: the tears positively drowning his eyes: ‘If she had trusted me so much: if she had taken her clothes off – then I swear, I'd have been so happy, I can't make you feel how happy I'd have been. But not yet. She will though. I'm sure she will.’

He left it to them, the two women, to decide when to trust him. Martha began to dress. That had been during the heatwave, and she had put on, but not too fast, while they watched, bra, pants, slip and a narrow blue linen dress. Joanna had admired the dress. Then Jack had got dressed and they had all gone out to eat lunch at the Indian restaurant.

There are lots of scenes in here dealing with situations for which we now have a sort of pre-formed script of how people ‘normally’ behave or react, but which here come across as entirely new to the world. It's remarkable. Jack goes through a bizarre journey in this book from sexual sensitivity to sexual perversion and predation – all very uncensoriously described – and Martha is baffled by the way the same language is used to describe all points on this spectrum.

She was desperate. But what was being created in her was not the never-to-be-sated ‘woman in love’, ‘wife’, ‘mistress’, etc. etc. Sex…What is sex? We keep using all these words, and what do they mean after all? The word sex has to do for so many different experiences, and like the word energy, it is what you make of it[…]. She thought: If I were a man I'd go to a prostitute.

Martha herself is living in a strange ménage-à-trois with a wealthy writer, Mark Coldridge, and his mentally unstable wife Lynda, who (in an inversion of the madwoman-in-the-attic trope) lives in the basement. The investigation in this book into the nature of Lynda's ‘instability’ is, again, quite extraordinary: in an effort to understand her, Martha visits therapists, undergoes psychoanalysis, takes drugs, spends days sitting with Lynda in her room and banging her head against a wall; and, finally, shuts herself away for weeks on end to explore the depths of her own mind. She emerges from this self-induced breakdown to find that the rest of humanity seems completely alien to her, and there is a hallucinatory, pages-long section where she simply reels through the streets of London in horror:

There they were all around her, with their roundish bony heads, that had flaps of flesh sticking out on either side, then the protuberance in the middle, with the air vents in it, and the eyes, tinted-jelly eyes which had a swivelling movement that gave them a life of their own […] And they stank. They smelled abominable, awful, even under the sweet or pungent chemicals they used to hide their smell. They lived in an air which was like a thick soup of petrol and fumes and stink of sweat and bad air from lungs full of the smoke they used as a narcotic, and filthy air from their bowels.

And all the time, Martha is getting older. What happened to the ambitions and stresses she had as a girl in southern Africa? Now she has responsibilities! There are children to look after! Not her own – her daughter, Caroline, is still in Africa and only alluded to – but, worse, other people's children, whom Martha has reluctantly come to care about, take responsibility for – raise. Everything shifts very quickly, and Lessing doesn't miss any of it.

Oh, how hard it is to be a middle-aged woman, who has to stand in for everyone's difficult mother, and who has to take – and return – looks from younger women examining their futures, exactly as one used to do oneself, and who are thinking, what a short time I've got left.

Indeed – though time hardly seems short in this book, which even its biggest admirers would have to describe as occasionally stodgy. I always picked it up with a slight sense of weariness, but always put it down feeling hugely rewarded. Partly because I kept thinking that I've never read anyone who writes like this before, and partly just from aesthetic pleasure – there are frequent passages of descriptive beauty:

Next night, she walked down a quiet middle-class street where only two or three windows still shone yellow in a strong white moonlight. Decorous little trees, like children allowed to stay up late, stood in patches of garden that defined individual front doors, each on its best behaviour, shining knocker, letter slit, bell. […] Elsewhere the moon rocked oceans in their beds, stuffed pillows full of uncomfortable dreams, made doctors double their dosage of sedatives for sad lunatics in hospitals, set dogs howling and drew fish up to goggle at the streaming white light.

What is perhaps most extraordinary about The Four-Gated City is what happens to its form towards the end: it cannot, finally, hold the content. We are in the last fraction of the last volume in a five-novel sequence, and suddenly, almost without any warning at all, this ruthlessly focussed naturalism breaks down – or, perhaps, is augmented – with elements of…well I was about to say ‘magic realism’, but that's not right, and anyway anachronistic. Elements of the supernatural and speculative descriptions of a dystopian future. One of the minor characters in here is a science-fiction (‘space fiction’) writer, and you can see Lessing examining the genre with interest, noting its possibilities, noting also the way it better allows authors to keep their biography separate from their work.

It's as though, ultimately, realism is not enough for Lessing to say everything that she wants to say, and so this gigantic realist project ends in a flourish that announces: this is what fiction allows me to do. (After this was published in 1969, she started experimenting with science fiction in earnest, leading to the Canopus in Argos series from 1979; here you can see that concept start to take hold.)

How to sum up the Children of Violence series? I think it's a real masterpiece – a completely unblinking look at how a person engages with the pressures and responsibilities of their society, and very aware of the fact that no one is a neutral ‘person’, everyone comes with specific attributes that entail their own weight of preconditions – Martha is female in a world where men have disproportionate power, white in a society where whites have disproportionate power; most of all, perhaps, she is politically aware in a culture that has perpetrated two world wars and built the military infrastructure of global extinction. These are colossal questions, and what you see in these books is something you don't see that often: someone with fierce intelligence and literary gifts addressing them head-on.

[Zanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

So ends Lessing's Bildungsroman par excellance. This near-700 page breeze block of a book takes Martha from her early 30s to old age, and is set in post-war London. Lessing compelled my attention before even beginning, with a dervish teaching story and a quote from The Edge of the Sea Each of the Parts the book is divided into has one or several such juicy snippets from diverse sources, making me feel that Martha herself, in her habit of reading into a topic to educate herself, is also Doris (although there is a severe reprimand in this book of seeing autobiography in every novel, a fault I have been never more guilty of than in my reading of The Children of Violence series). If the quotations seem a little oblique until later, they are both intriguing and beautiful, surprisingly so when they come from school text books. A quote from Idries Shah on the beliefs of the Sufis reminded me of this quote that has haunted me since I stumbled on it somewhere at 17, from Hazrat Inayat Khan: The world is evolving from imperfection towards perfection; it needs all love and sympathy; great tenderness and watchfulness is required from each one of us. And I felt that bridges were being built in me like the mangrove roots. I remembered books I'd read more than ten years ago on astrology, philosophy and history, as well as science fiction and other novels. The whole last half of this book was unexpected, as Lessing writes on epic, visionary scales as in The Memoirs of a Survivor and Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

Some readers might have felt the shift incongruous, but on the contrary it seemed to me utterly appropriate, since watching Martha move through states in herself and grow as a person from adolescence on has afforded so much insight, self-reflection that every step of her progress and learning is satisfying. She is appealingly ordinary yet completely unique, in a way that makes it clear this is true of everyone if only a five volume epic could be devoted to their psychological development! The depths and heights of self-discovery she reaches in this final novel are made breathtaking by the scope and stretch of Lessing's genius. Really, how many times do we have to say that the personal is political? The arc of Martha's experience is on the only scale we can truly feel, yet Lessing measures a world with it, as we measure our world by living in consciousness.

I was struck by the evocation of grim, poverty-stricken post-war London, standing partly ruined, grimy, miserable, with blackout fabric still around the windows, no food worth eating or clothes anyone would want to wear in the shops. The slow slow coming of the '60s is like a change from Winter to Spring, although Martha arrives in summer. London seems to be full of people who want Martha to work for them in some capacity, and each of the encounters she negotiates makes space for a different quality of insight – the Maynard's relative, Henry, allows fresh and incisive view on the English class system. Incisive particularly because I was desperate for Martha to take the job even as I exulted in her refusal, because I didn't want her to be destitute. I envied her courage. She is also wanted by a young man, Jack, whose simply decorated room is the first place apart from gardens that Martha describes appreciatively. He is a kind of medium for Martha, allowing her to access a certain transcendent state. Finally she begins working as a kind of assistant to Mark, managing his troubled family in an increasingly fractious and oppressive political atmosphere. In this role it's particularly obvious how different this wise and restrained Martha is from her impulsive younger self. The quality of her consciousness, as of her conversations, is much deeper

For example, she is so acute in speaking to psychoanalyst Dr Lamb, posing the question of why parent-child relationships are so awful, so destructive. We see that this is not a permissible question in the field, which is ahistorical. He tells her 'you need an historian, or a sociologist'. Martha is demanding responsibility. This tasty slice is just grazing the iceberg of what Martha eventually comes to understand about mental illness and the medical approach to it, with the help of Mark's wife Lynda, who has been the victim of aggressive and damaging psychological 'therapy'. Martha's mother's abusive, apparently unconscious monologue relatedly helps her towards understanding, though very painfully.

Discussion of literary genres takes place in a context that makes it serious, even urgent. The 'Ivory Tower' as a mood of political reaction, the humble, outsider status of sci-fi and the revulsion and ridicule of any challenge the the rationalist orthodoxy in the form of esoteric knowledge, occultism or mysticism are both vital issues here. There is also much continuation of the political insight of the earlier volumes, here focusing especially on the mood and political atmosphere among young people in post-war London. The observation of young people at an anti-nuclear march is especially striking

Ultimately what most sets Lessing apart from other writers is her courage to go further than the time she was living in, to extrapolate the trends she perceived. Big business' rising political power is perhaps her most acute prediction, and though the Cold War anxiety about nuclear apocalypse has been out of mind for a few decades, so that the shadow it has cast over my generation, for instance, has been penumbral compared to back then, that threat has been replaced by climate change, presently having relatively minor effects on the privileged nations of the global North who caused it, but increasingly devastating less wealthy regions. “Another preventable horror' as Martha would say. Lessing's consciousness of the environment is always in evidence. Here Martha shares a thought I have very often as I decend into the guts of the underground every day: the soil under the London streets looks dead, has been killed, lifeless for hundreds of years. It's not that we should dig over the city and return it to our bacterial brethren, but that such moments of consciousness remind us of the urgent need to live on this fragile crust of mud in this flimsy sea of gases in balance and reverence. Our soils are in crisis, depleted of minerals and microorganisms, rapidly being washed away mainly because of deforestation, livestock grazing and now misguided biomass farming. This novel is of its time, but it speaks loudly in this one too.

[El · Rating 4 out of 5]

I originally picked up this series because I had it in my mind somehow that these books were post-apocalyptic or dystopic, and please don't ask me where I got that. But as I read these books I realized that, whoops, that's not right, not right at all. There was a period of adjustment and once I got over the fact that I was completely wrong about that, I just enjoyed the books for what they were.

This fifth book is completely unlike the four that came before it. This isn't to say that this final book is better, or worse; it is just its own entity. It's a hefty book in comparison, clocking in at over 600 pages while I believe the other books all were in the 200 page range. It was almost as if Lessing realized suddenly she was on her last book of the series and she still had all these things she had to say. She managed to cram it all in here, impressively so. Annoyingly so, in some instances.

At times it felt like the book would never end, and I found myself frustrated with the directions the book would take. And there were so many directions. From Martha's constant growth and transition to the constant growth and transition of every other character in Martha's life to seemingly unimportant people that come back, and it's like every. single. thought. that Lessing ever had about sex and politics and philosophy. It's all here.

And then the last 20+ pages were the post-apocalyptic part. See, it exists! And it was disarming and totally jarring because by that point I was no longer looking for it. I'm not sure if it added anything to the series or not - in some ways I felt it was sort of shoddy, or maybe like Lessing wanted to take the story a different direction at the last minute but didn't have the balls to follow through with it.

This book is more like The Golden Notebook than the first four books, and I did enjoy that. I liked Lessing's philosophies in The Golden Notebook, and this seems to be the point in Lessing's life where she was really getting down and dirty with her politics and beliefs. It's like the pre-Golden Notebook. A little rough around the edges, certainly, but a good step in the right direction.

It's strange to be done with this series now, especially because I spent so much time with this last book - I feel like I really got to know Martha Quest/Knowles/Hesse in the end, while in the process really getting to know Doris Lessing as well.

My understanding is Lessing drew a lot from her own life and experiences in the writing of these books, which makes me all the more excited to read her journals and letters. If this final book alone is any indication, Lessing had a wildly fascinating life.

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are several different schools of thought when it comes to writing about sex. At one end of the spectrum, there's Mamma Mia: Dot, Dot, Dot. Well, at least that satisfactorily ducks the issue altogether. And at the other end, if we insist on staying Swedish, there's IKEA assembly instructions: insert rod A into hole B, making sure that X stays in contact with Y as you do so. This also has its merits, though once again you feel something's missing. In between, there are various types of poetic metaphor that people like to use; but here, too, I'm often in some doubt. What, if anything, do these metaphors actually refer to? All too often, you fear the author's just cut and pasted them from somewhere else.

Every now and then, however, you find an author who's actually got something new to say about sex, as opposed to a better way to put a coffee table together or a novel twist on a dubious metaphor. It's surprising how rare these people are. Jan Kjærstad is one of them, as you'll discover if you read Forføreren and the rest of the trilogy. And Doris Lessing is another; I think The Four-Gated City is the clearest example.

I wonder if she actually experienced sex this way? It's hard for me to imagine she didn't. Well Doris, I'd like to thank you for what you did: both for telling us about the strange and wonderful places you were able to get to, and for finding words that made them at least partially comprehensible. You must have been such an extraordinary person to have as a lover.

[Janelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

A re-read of an old favourite.
The fifth book in the children of violence series and the heftiest.
The book begins in 1950 and Martha has arrived in a postwar London. After wandering around for a bit she gets a job in the house of a writer and becomes involved in his family including children and a mentally unstable wife. The book continues for the next couple of decades (it was published in 1969) and then goes on to a post ‘catastrophe’ world. It focuses on progressive politics, the Cold War, militarism and antinuclear protests, and also the rise of mental illness and psychotherapy. I loved it!

[Sandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Four-Gated City closes Doris Lessing's Children of Violence series. It is a marvelous finale to Martha Quest's story. Born after World War I to settlers in South Africa, Martha is the daughter of a veteran who had fought for the British (and never got over it) and a woman whose great love died for the same cause. The child of settlers who are never quite at home in their world and who have settled for less than happiness, Martha spends her life actively addressing the questions of who exactly she is and where she belongs. Her sense of herself as living on the fringes of her own life and her keen and clear sense of the pretenses that feed a false sense of identity for the people around her make her an exasperating character. So often, I just wanted Martha to settle, to take what was offered and run with it. I wanted Martha to be me. But she wasn't inasmuch as she pushed the question of identity--and value and worth--to the very end, where there is no happiness but there is the disconcerting truth that we are children of violence, and we are undoing our world left and right by failing to own up to this truth and undo it. It's a brilliant, painful story.

[Janice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why did it take so long for Doris Lessing to get the Nobel Prize?

I kept asking myself that as I continued through the 710 pages that make up the concluding Volume 5 of the "Children of Violence" series: The Four-Gated City. Although the publisher claims that the five books can be read as stand-alone novels—and it is true that they can—the observant, thoughtful reader will find a greater reward in absorbing them in sequence. Together they make up (as the author wrote in her end-note) a Bildungsroman. And more than that—forty-five years after publication, the text can be read as a renewed journey through momentous events treated as more than incidents. History is written and deliberated on a personal level.

One needs the first four books, the Martha Quest books set in fictional Zambesia, in part because characters already introduced return--as foils or in passing--to fully understand the fifth, set in post-war four-gated London, swinging London. How did we get from WW II to here—here being the age of Wikileaks, Edward Snowden, chemical warfare in Syria, internet surveillance and collection of information from private persons by corporations for handing over to governments.

It helps understanding of The Four-Gated City if the reader has lived through the described world events that give fodder to Martha's thought, can follow along in her mental processes, in her pursuit of trying to make sense of the world she lives in. It helps if one remembers, or is at least intellectually informed about (on a higher level than a quick Wiki-look): the rebuilding of postwar England and the disintegration of the Empire, the Tories and Labour, the Aldermaston Marches, the Cambridge Five, the Mau Mau, mental health reforms and fiascoes, the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction on both sides of the Cold War lineup.

She gives us sobering perspectives and evaluations. I will always hereafter compare the number of marchers in any protest with the seating capacity of sports stadiums. I will always hereafter—when I hear someone say "Obamacare is socialism/communism"—remember this passage:

Martha and other had warned us not to let them use the word 'Communism'. In the seventies the word was as loaded as it had been in the fifties, but loaded vaguely. In the fifties it had meant, quite simply, the Soviet Union, and had associations of treachery and espionage. Twenty years later it meant anything that wasn't good—a kind of portmanteau word of unpleasant and frightening associations that were never defined. Well, after that, we were stuck with the word.

It isn't that Doris Lessing gives answers—she gives questions, more correctly, she suggests a way of looking at the world around us in terms of our individual and personal lives. The attentive reader of today will be attuned to the worldwide imbalance of money, global pollution (another word that has lost its alarming meaning), mental hospitals and pharmaceuticals, corporate gathering of information on citizens and its sharing with governments, the role of the media and its minions, public awareness (or lack of it), the absence of bees, personal sexuality and the sex industry, and much more. She sees all of these and foresees their coming escalation. Different readers will find different points of interest.

Of course, I say to myself, of course, she did not want to be pigeonholed (or claimed as) a feminist. Her works transcend that compartmentalizing. Some will be put off by her experiments with (drug-free) mental excursions into her inner space, but I couldn't help recalling the men and women of various eras and religions given sainthood (or its equivalent), for similar explorations, including cave artists, shamans and priests; also Aldous Huxley comes to mind, but he (and others) traveled inward with the help of mind-altering drugs whereas she grapples with herself.

It is also notable that the series, not least The Four-gated City is a return to all the books she previously wrote and contains seeds to all she would write thereafter: the African stories, the science fiction novels, dystopias, memoir and semiautobiography, the societal roles and presence of children, the explorations of inner space, mental space.

Strangely, The Four-Gated City is never found on the lists of her "best".

Having finished the book and closed it, I couldn't help mentally replaying the indelible scene when she was notified of the Nobel Prize. Remember? Her getting out of the taxi, besieged by journalists waiting at her home: a cadre for she had little or no respect and none of whom likely had read any of her work but saw only the news value of an old lady suddenly catapulted to millionaire status. No wonder she looked annoyed and said simply: Oh, Christ!

[Diana BB · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even being aware of there being too little time and too many books, I know I will read The Four-Gated City again. Such an impressive, deep, moving, prophetic, insightful, and disturbing book. It encompasses so many themes developed by so many others in the years to come. Those numerous themes - the Cold War, communists in Britain, a change of government and the bitter realisation that although expectations are great, things are actually getting worse, the rise of television, psychiatry with its dark side, being a teenager in the 1960s, searching for and exploring the depths of self, the Disaster, to name just a few - they evolve and develop so naturally and are genuine eye-openers. It is a prophetic book, for although it was published in 1969, I very often had the feeling it spoke of our times. If anybody asked me what books I would take on a desert island, the 'Children of Violence' quintet would be among them.

[James F · Rating 5 out of 5]

The final and longest book of the Children of Violence series, twice the length of any of the others and with a very different outlook and "feel", and to some extent a different style of writing. Martha moves to England, and becomes involved with the Colridge family. The novel covers the late fifties (the Witch hunt, less extreme than in the U.S. but still terrible) and the sixties; it's helpful, but not really essential, to have some knowledge of British history/politics in that era. The political and personal themes are gradually subordinated to a new theme concerned with mental illness and parapsychology; in the end the two themes are combined in a sort of science fiction. This was written in 1969, after The Golden Notebook but just before Briefing for a Descent into Hell and her science fiction writings, and shares in the concerns of that period, very different from the earlier and later books. It is very interesting, as with all her writings, but resonates less with me personally than the earlier volumes. (And I don't share her very sixties counterculture views on mental illness; the mentally ill people I have met were ill, not tuning in to a higher reality.) The ending is somewhat disappointing, not so much because it describes a world disaster in the 1970s which obviously didn't occur -- actually much of what she describes has in fact occurred, more gradually and locally -- but because the telepathy theme seems somewhat like a "cop-out", a fantasy solution to real problems that she previously treated realistically. In short, this really seems like a separate novel (as I wish it had been) than a real continuation of the earlier books, even though many of the characters from the earlier books other than Martha make "cameo" appearances. I can't help wondering how much of this book was planned when she wrote the earlier ones; there are one or two passages in the earlier works I can think of which may "foreshadow" the turn, but on the whole they seem unconnected.

[David Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the Lessing book I keep going back to; over the 40 year period since I first read it, I have gone back to it maybe 5 times, and each time its somewhat different from my memory of it. Its plodding heavy and somewhat burdensome to read, but its reality accumulates as its read, and its always at some point part of my perceived reality. I love what Lessing has provided me with---a rigor that I would not otherwise have.
50 years of being engulfing this experience, and the prolific managers of `reality reality` is fading into the RIFF of powerlessness, at last!

[Marika Oksa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Viimeiset 150 sivua "luin" silmäilemällä - Marthan tarinan päätös on nyt taputeltu minun osaltani. Puuh, olipas kirja ja sarja. Tämän päätösosan aikana ei ilmeisesti olisi pitänyt antaa itselle lupaa lukea välillä kevyempiä kirjoja. Niiden jälkeen oli aina vain vaikeampaa palata Marthan sielun syvyyksiin.

[A.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

So finally I finished the Children of Violence series. I should be honest and admit that I was a bit disappointed that it came with no mounting crescendo. In Lessing's defense, this does not come without purpose, as one of her intents throughout the series seem to have been writing a story that would reflect the searching and unfinished quality of real life. None of the previous books are plot driven, nor does Martha ever reach some final, definite understanding of herself and the world around her (except, perhaps, in the conclusive, yet shifting way, we all interact with our memories).

The primary difference between this book and the previous books is that much of the story is focused on the drama and dysfunction of the Coldridge family, who Martha starts working for about a quarter of the way into the book, almost by accident. Her life becomes very much about maintaining the house, maintaining the family, just keeping everything from falling completely apart. If you've read the previous books, you can see the family very much as a mirror for all of Martha's previous experiences. There are definitely some parallels between the abandonment of her own child 10 years before, the abandonment of Paul by his father (and resulting suicide by his mother), and the emotional distance between Francis and his mother Lynda. When Paul and Francis and all the other children hit adolescence, get married, and so on, we see the inevitable echoes of the first two books. The politics as well echo some previous elements. While I would hardly reduce the story down merely to a repeat of what's happened before, since it is far more than that, this kind of element is inevitable when you've followed a character around for so long, and I believe Lessing does a good job of reflecting the passage of time and the impact of the previous world on the current one.

Martha loses a bit of herself in this world and while the previous books are so defined by her searching for some authentic truth, this one is more focused on the searching of everyone else for those truths. This, I think, makes the book a bit of a struggle, as you're often left floundering (like the characters) for some kind of single focus that will direct you to the meaning. As I continued reading and realized that the story wasn't heading to a single sort of statement on Martha's (or anyone's) identity, I began to understand that this was the point. So while this approach doesn't make for the most satisfying reader, there was ultimately a kind of unity to it.

But aside from all this, what surprised and impressed me most was the subtle introduction of mystical/SF elements, with Martha becoming a kind of conduit for the thoughts and emotions of those around her and Lynda's mental illness being more than what it is. This is all subtly integrated into a contemporary realistic context in such a way that's not jarring or silly and certainly adds something in terms of understanding the world at the time. This all leads to the appendix, which is mysterious and fascinating, ambiguously suggesting a future in which London is emptied or destroyed, and Martha and what remains of the family are struggling to make sense and put what they can back together. In a series defined by its struggle with issues of war, violence, and identity, I really can't think of a better addendum. That Lessing had the gumption to stick all this into a book and a series that is pretty much classic realism without having it seemed tacked on is all the more impressive. She even manages some meta-commentary on these elements by featuring a couple of characters who write SF.

All that and I still didn't manage to get to the sex, which she does indeed write well. There's so much going on in this book that it's hard to tackle everything in such limited space. Despite my struggle with bits of the story, I came away with continued respect for Lessing as an author. Overall, the Children of Violence series was a great introduction to her vision and highly recommended.

[Ed · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three whole novels of non-story later (I assume they are non-story considering the nature of several flashback/updates present in this installment), we find Martha Quest newly arrived in London in the 50's as England slowly rebuilds.

700 more pages of non-story and we arrive at the end of the Children of Violence series and in a post-apocalyptic world in which humans are scattered around the globe in huddling terrified poisoned tribes of mutant scavengers and some have adapted by evolution into telepaths.

Helluva way to turn the corner from a fem-/socialist-lit author into a science fiction author, but I suppose that depending on how you look at it the leap is not so far.

I'm being unnecessarily snarky. There are major things about this book that I really, really liked, and I didn't just finish it because I'm obsessive compulsive and HAD to, though that's always in play.

Lessing continues many threads that I can only assume were continuous throughout this series--questions about social organization, politics and anti-politics, gender issues, group-think, hatred, violence; then questions about family, sex, sanity and insanity, perception, education and indoctrination...and her observations on all of these topics are exceedingly interesting and insightful, whether the characters through which she presents them are particularly credible or not.

At the end of the day, I like her voice, I like her perspective, and even in areas of political and social theory where it's clear she and I basically already agree, she provokes thought in directions I never considered before. Not too shabby.

Meanwhile she provides a unique picture of dynamics at work in British society through a period of upheaval in the 50's and 60's which for obvious reasons I associate normally only with the United States and, to a lesser extent, Eastern Europe. She examines British modern historical phenomena of which I have heard but with which I am not terribly familiar, for example: the anti-gay clamor of the 50's and the counter-movement it spawned; the twilight of empire and the incredibly fraught independence movements in Africa; widespread fear of the Soviet nuclear threat heavily laden with shadowy stories of spying and treason and the concomitant McCarthy-style social repression, accompanied nonetheless by a head-shaking dismay at the unenlightened way the Americans were dealing with the same stuff. Etcetera.

This is not to mention what seems to be one of the more central themes of the novel, which is the devastatingly inhumane way that the British (and they are not alone) treated and in many cases still do treat the mentally ill as a result of decades of quackery in the field of psychoanalysis.

A lot of ground to cover, clearly. But she brings all these threads to what I suppose is their only logical conclusion, which is the near-destruction of the world followed by chaos and darkness and fumbling attempts at renewal. There you have it!

Clearly I have mixed feelings. Hence the three.

[Jenn Avery · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finally, I have read my first Doris Lessing novel. I admit, it may not have been the best one to wet my feet.

The Four-Gated City is the final book of a five-book series called the "Children of Violence." I didn't read the first four but only the last. I felt as if I was doing what I told myself I would never do anymore when I was fifteen: like I was reading the last pages of the novel before beginning it.

Lessing is touted as a major British writer for a reason. I see that clearly. Her exploration of Martha Quest's psychology is intricately bound to a complex critique of the political climate in post-World War II Britain. Not having read the earlier novels of the series, I was pleased to find that I could jump onto the caravan and understand the story.

Firstly, The Four-Gated City is a novel about ways of being -- and of knowing oneself. Quest is a receptor ("recording instrument") for other characters' personas as she struggles to locate exactly who (what) she is. She used to be a "communist" but isn't anymore. So what is she now? Now she is a middle-aged woman in the 1950s coming to terms with her ravaged past: a shady childhood, a failed marriage, a dead second husband (apparently), a lost daughter. This past coincides with the past of her nations of South Africa and Britain (this "country where people could not communicate across the dark that separated them"). Like these nations she is without a clear identity or direction. As she meets people she drifts into new (or old) ways of being. At one moment she may assume the pesona of "Matty" (who she created "as an act of survival"), at another she is Phyllis Jones, at another she is the "Watcher," an anonymous body used for sex, or a corporeal "machine."

She maintains a sense of dislocation until a house finds her.

Martha Quest is a woman who has been on the run and has finally settled down in a house that seems to hold her hostage. Mark's house is, like Quest, an empty space filled with ways of being. Like the unfathomable house in The House of Leaves, Mark's space eats memory and consumes identity. Yet, it also reveals the darkest secrets, locates the hidden fears, and pushes the boundaries of human capacity. For Quest this means that she, by plugging into the space and into the many people who inhabit it, is closer to understanding who "Martha Quest" is. She is no one. Like her nations, like every nation, she is devoid of meaning.

So secondly The Four-Gated City is a story about madness because when any character gets close to a Nietzchian perspective about self-identity then insanity is on the table. Lynda, Mark's estranged wife who lives alternately in asylums and in the basement of the house, is the alter-ego of Martha (but then, so is every character). Like Martha's mother and Marth herself, Lynda is the "madwoman in the basement," which is altogether different than the "madwoman in the attic" that Gilbert and Gubar applied to Victorian prototypes.

Not that Lessing has wandered very far from the "Victorian," mind you.

The "madwoman in the basement" is at the bottom -- not the top -- of the household hierarchy. She is the foundation, the stability, in a weird way. For example, I thought at first that Lynda was a wrecker. She hates to be touched by her husband (and he pines pathetically for her), she is incapable of being a proper mother to her son Frances, she even seems to desire her bouts of "insanity" to a certain extent. These characteristics seem, on the surface, to wreak havoc on the home. Then I came to understand that she is, in fact, the glue that holds the family -- the "self," if you're Martha Quest -- together. Maybe she's doing a shabby job. After all, the "family" is not what anyone would call functional. Yet, its disfunction is precisely the thing that dymystifies the "haunted" house. Lynda's madness is, really, the only functional thing. It is so functional that Quest adopts it -- uses it -- in order to find her way out of psychological imprisonment. The story ends and she leaves the house. True, she may be the only one (Paul and Frances may have moved to new homes but they are the same as Mark's), but Quest has finally found a way out.

When Quest's quest ends, one thing seems clear. There are no children.

Thirdly, The Four-Gated City is about the absence of children. This is strange, because children populate the plot. There's Frances, the son of Mark and Lynda who eventually marries Phoebe's daugther and has children with her -- and raises her two children from other relations -- before she leaves him for a new lover. There's Paul whose mother has killed herself and whose father has fled the country and remarried to have children in Russia. Lessing takes time to tell the stories of these children and all of their friends. Children plague the pages of the novel. Yet, she is quick to acknowledge that "England was no longer a place to bring children up." The earliest scene of the novel finds Quest noting the proliferation of signs that read "Danger: No Children." Children are restricted from the nation, yet they overun the pages of the novel.

Lessing's series is called the "Children of Violence" but The Four-Gated City frames children whose violence dwindles to a barely audible meow by the end. The lack of violence screams almost as loudly as the lack of children. At the end, the children are gone. At the end, the nation is sick. At the end, there is an Appendix in which Lessing has included letters from grown children to grown children.

The novel is a hodge-podge that sometimes is brilliant. Are children the nation? Is the nation violent? Lessing suggests that the answer to both questions is yes. Martha Quest has no identity. She ends by maintaining that. She also has no children.

[Greta · Rating 4 out of 5]

While her writing is often fascinating, the story of family life in its many dimensions gets less surprising and more familiar as the years go by. A familiar or predictable story is easy to read unless the author is Doris Lessing. Similar to the Golden Notebook the topics of communism, socialism, conservatives and Tories are in constant foment within the family and among friends and associates. Therein lies the story.

[lyny · Rating 4 out of 5]

(I first read this in 1975 and it made a huge impact on me. It was the first Doris Lessing book I read, and I went on to read the rest of the Children of Violence sequence in order, and most of the rest of her novels, and also followed her career with interest. We made a decision to re-read this for my book group, interested to see how we would now see this, so many decades later and at a very different age and in a different world.)
On this reading I was initially confronted by the sheer length and effort involved in getting through the book – 660pp of tiny print on yellowing pages. In a post-script, Lessing says ‘This book is what the Germans call a Bildungsroman. This kind of novel has been out of fashion for some time: which does not mean that there is anything wrong with this kind of novel.’ We were all struck by the quality of Lessing's writing - her ability to make subtle observations about changes in politics, and cultural mores, including fashion, psychiatric treatments, and many more) and also the way in which readers are expected to do some work and not have a story or position that is straightforward and readily summarized in the way of many more recent books we have been reading.

The book is told through the perspective of Martha Quest, the subject of the previous four novels, all set in Africa, and to some extent parallelling experiences in Lessing's own life. In the first section Martha is encountering grim post War London – poverty, devastated buildings, poor food, class practices and judgements. She is an astute observer particularly of class and of the different expectations of people about her own behaviour. It seems Martha, having been involved in various political movements, sexual relationships, and she abandoned in Africa, is now trying anew to work out what she wants to be and do. She has little money but deliberately produces a kind of fugue state by walking the streets for hours with little to eat. She deliberately rejects some different possibilities of a more stable situation – staying on with working class café owners, or staying with Jack, the man she sees as a soulmate, and with whom she has almost mystical sex where they build up for hours to get on the same wave-length; and rejecting also an opportunity to have a more middle-class job as a secretary in a law firm. But she is sent by a South African contact to another possibility, as helpmeet to a writer, Mark Coleridge, where she senses his desperation and stays on. He lives in a house in Bloomsbury or similar, with a mad wife, Lynda, in the basement; and unsatisfactorily tries to care for his son. Compared with the earlier books, it is a strangely passive Martha, who seems to go on for much of the book trying to help other people's situations, without working out who she wants to be nor getting much happiness from her current situation.

One part of what Lessing does is an ongoing reflection on the changing state of politics – the ways in which certain positions are in or out, as well as the recurrence of what happens with political organizations. For example she depicts changing attitudes to Marxism or Communism or even socialism, as these are disowned totally then become fashionable; and also British liberals' judgements on struggles in Rhodesia and what Martha, an African observer, sees as their naivety. the writer Mark's books are also ignored or valued as the context changes. Martha is also an astute observer of fashion and style and appearance, and the ways this is received by various groups and times. We see the rise of television and changing fashions in theatre. There is a broad sense of cycles of change in politics and the like with little impact on anything.

One of the things I remembered from the first reading is the breadth of the issues Lessing is interested in - not just politics in the usual sense, but sexuality, new perspectives on madness, cultural shifts etc. Particularly striking is her portrayal of Martha's initial almost perfect sexual liaison with Jack, which is portrayed there as an exceptional sexual sensitivity on his part, initially portrayed as an almost perfect communion of bodies and minds, but later (when Martha re-encounters Jack some time on) turns out to be part of a personality which is astute at giving different women what they want (ie the slow build-up soul-mate communion described earlier is Martha’s fantasy – with others he behaves differently), and gradually reveals a narcisissm and almost sadism, where Jack breaks down women to live with him, by getting them to transgress things that are important to them, and then sets them up as prostitutes, with his house as a brothel (including the scene where they are required to be naked and aroused by dogs that he controls). But Martha also sees not only what he is doing, but elements in herself that that appeals to – though she resists joining the household.

The other thing that is very central is the interest in madness and psychiatric treatments (it is the period of Laing). Here we are shown some of Lynda’s and others’ behaviour when they experience breaks, down both from outside (how an observer would see them) and from inside, as Martha gradually begins to share and appreciate some overlap with Lynda – being able to hear voices and others’ thoughts, or not bearing to be touched, or trying to keep the overwhelming voices out by headbanging. Martha goes to Dr Lamb for advice before a visit from her mother whom she had always rejected, but the outcome of that visit is that both maintain politeness without being able to cut through their separation, and the mother returns to Africa.

In a final long appendix, it is the world of the future, when England has been over run, and destroyed and a few have escaped to little communities. There is much about people not recognizing how bad things were getting, as business took on more and more fascistic qualities – and we also see characters who in earlier times had been in opposition, now in government but with no better outcome.

I don’t know how much this is due to current circumstances, but this time I found it a very grim book and hard to recapture the excitement I felt when I first read it in my mid-twenties - though I do still admire and respect the quality of the work. I liked the long view of political and cultural fashions, but all the characters and their relationships seemed unrelentingly sad. There is a lot about cross generational and family difficulties and these struck a bit of a chord while also just seeming very sad. Compared with the earlier books, Martha no longer seems like a strong and iconoclastic and agentic figure, but rather someone who despite herself spends all her time burdened looking after others without satisfaction or pleasure or a sense even of where she wants to go in her life. I don’t think I read the book this way the first time, when I was in my 20s and in the period being described – I think I found it exciting because of the things it was touching on and noticing about psychology and politics and life, rather than judging it in terms of the arc or outcome of the narrative.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some vivid and thought provoking parts to this book but after an engaging opening there ceases to be any real storyline to get hold of. Most of the book is centred around Martha and her stay with the a contemporary writer and the relationships between him, his family, friends and Martha. Unforunately save for some occassionally stimulating passages and streams of consciousness this is the least interesting part of the book and is rather dull.

There are a number of different themes throughout the book which do serve to provide a common thread to the story. One relates to how madness is understood and defined. Linked to this is an attempt to reflect on the stifling nature of the scientific method and how the medical profession can serve to promote conformity. However the underlying messages related to these felt too garbled to pack any real punch. However, the aspects of the book which deal with the political sphere and particularly the effect of the Cold War are far more coherent and interesting and these are interspersed throughout.

The concluding part of the book is dystopian and dramatic but it seems entirely detached from what went before and is presented in snippets rather than as part of the main body of the book. The overall feel is of a sprawling incoherence which intrigues in fits and bursts but too often is rather heavy going.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is superb. The series is incredible. All five novels about Martha are worth a read. If you read other Lessing, you also recognize other themes...even later novels: Mara and Dann, Griot the Snow Dog, The Fifth Child, and Ben In the Real World. Doris Lessing is a goddamn master of a writer.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Folks interested in the formation of 60s liberation themes Cld find no better guide guide than Doris Lessing. This magnificent five volume series traces the path from WWII to the collapse of progressive optimism in the 70's. Lessing changed many young readers lives, including this one.

[Aurélie · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite reading of the year! So true, so powerful and it still applies to today's society. It made me think a lot about how society has driven each and every character crazy. I didn't read the previous books but I thoroughly recommend this last one of the saga!

[Murphy Daley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is INCREDIBLE. I could re-read it multiple times. It talks about adult life, and does it so beautifully.

[Michael Trigoboff · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I ever read.

[Jason R · Rating 5 out of 5]

This series will stay with me for the rest of my life...

[Rita · Rating 4 out of 5]

1969
[Note: Number 4 of the series I don't have and haven't read yet.]

This final volume is very good, also very long and densely written, it took quite a while for me to sort out who everybody was and what was going on. We follow Martha from the moment of her arrival in London [from southern Africa] in 1950 up to the time of writing, let's say 1967 or 1968. There are actual historical events referred to, like the Aldermaston Nuclear Protest March, p 406 [the first march was in 1958].

This is not a book I am capable of describing, so see Warwick's review.

The 'Appendix' at the end predicts the future of the characters in the book, and turns into science fiction; the excellent review by 'Warwick' suggests this bit was a forerunner of Lessing's later sci fi books.

Sharp observations and commentary on British politics, politicians, other elite behavior, journalists, elite families.

The main character [sort of Lessing] is always thinking hard about who she is, what she wants, what she is doing and why. And observing what everyone around her is thinking and feeling.

pp 402-405. I was interested to find a short but seemingly accurate description of a specialized kind of male sex worker who selects and primes women for prostitution, using very clever and deep psychological process/techniques. It matched quite well the method summarized in a newspaper review of a recent Dutch book by a Dutchman who formerly spent years doing exactly this kind of work in I think it was Serbia or thereabouts [his trainees, when ready, were flown to the Netherlands, passports taken away, to work].

474 [sometime in the 1960s] "....that occupation essential for authors, being currency in the literary world.....There is probably nothing one can do about this except, as some writers seem to have discovered, to write novels and call them autobiography.
It has literally become impossible for anyone to read a work of fiction except in terms of the author's life. Since they have learned to read at all, the 'lives' of artists, the experiences of artists, the opinions of artists, have been offered side by side with the work of artists, which has become infinitely less important."

99 A short, excellent description of her weeks on a cruise ship coming to England. Late in the book she [the main character] says one of her guiding principles has been to make sure she did NOT end up living as people on a cruise ship.

181. "There is a certain kind of Englishman who, on learning that his country (like every other) employs spies; or (like every other) taps telephones, opens letters and keeps dossiers on its citizens; or (like every other) employs policemen who take bribes, beat up suspects, plant information, etc. --- has a nervous breakdown. In extreme cases, such a man goes into a monastery, or suffers a sudden conversion to whatever is available.
...Mark was looking at defects in his own country that previously he had not noticed, minimised, or thought could not exist. His previous self he was regarding as hypocritical, or wilfully blind and certainly as callous to the sufferings of others. He had a new viewpoint, a new vocabulary, new [Communist] friends....."

341: "Mark then developed his view, which was that on these occasions, when Britannia our mother is in a state of moral indignation, the less said the better.
'Well, really, you're not suggesting we should simply not do *anything*?'
'Not at all, you should do as much as possible, as quietly as possible. Because then it will all blow over --- otherwise heads will roll, and scapegoats will have to be found.'
'Blow over! The whole situation is disgraceful.'
'I dare say. But when they're tired of homosexuality they'll start on something else, there's always got to be something.' "

366: "Mark's attitude was that when any cause at all has become safe, let alone popular, then that's when it can be counted as lost --- what was happening in South Africa and in Rhodesia proved his point."
367: "It seemed that of television one was going to have to say what one said of the newspapers: it was the price one had to pay for democracy."
366: "Mark did not believe that this [protest march], or indeed anything, would halt the manufacture of weapons for war: too many people made money out of it, or wanted war. He did not believe that any government cared a damn about popular opinion, except insofar as it could be manoeuvred. He believed that within one decade, or two or three, there would be some kind of war."

Psychiatry, psychotherapy come into the book quite a bit through the character of Mark's wife who is in and out of asylums and therapists and on heavy medication. Martha eventually becomes very interested in Lynda and concludes Lynda is *not* insane but rather has psychic powers that others lack. Or something like that. This is a very interesting and unusual aspect of the novel.

[Henrik Hernández-Villaescusa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Termino The four gated city, la extraordinaria descripción que Doris Lessing hace de la evolución de Londres desde la posguerra mundial hasta 1969, año de publicación de la novela … pero con sorpresa final en forma de anticipo en clave de ciencia ficción de lo que acaecerá a nuestro mundo hasta 1997.

La perspectiva que adopta la narradora es fundamentalmente la de Martha, protagonista también de los 4 volúmenes previos de Children of Violence, en los que narra su vida The Four Gated City (Children of Violence)como miembro de la minoría blanca dominante en una colonia europea indeterminada en África. En este último volumen, Martha, ahora una divorciada de mediana edad, emigra a Londres sin decirnos en busca de que, y allí se integra en una familia pudiente y bien relacionada en círculos artísticos y políticos de los dos bandos dominantes que le otorga una perspectiva privilegiada y segura. Desde ahí verá la ciudad crecer desde la miseria y la ruina inmediatamente posterior a los bombardeos hasta la fiebre inmobiliaria de los años 60, que hoy sabemos que solo era el inicio de un crecimiento tumoral todavía sin detener. También seguiremos la utopía socialista que mueve a los laboristas de familia bien y su desesperación ante la dificultad de llegar al poder y ante la transformación pragmática del partido una vez en él. Ese ambiente queda perfectamente retratado en su percepción del ambiente dominante en las reuniones laboristas:

Oh how charming everything was! How urbane! How tolerant! What enchanting clothes people wore! What good cooks we were, what food we ate! How delightful that in any room were bound to be half a dozen black or coloured people, exactly the same as ourselves, and half a dozen working-class people, all as talented and as progressive, everyone effortlessly harmonious … which fact in itself seemed to proclaim the truth that soon, when the Labour Party got in, anybody at all, from Land’s End to John O’Groats, man, woman, Negro or docker, would have all the benefits of society that previously were associated with somebody like Mark Coldridge or like Graham Patten.

Pero no hay una crítica al alejamiento con respecto al “pueblo”, porque el “pueblo” es una construcción política de la que solo cabe esperar lo peor:

The fact is, anybody who has been tempered at all by the politics of the last fifty years is in a state of mortal funk because of ‘the people’ and what they (we) are capable of. The history of the twentieth century as far as we’ve got with it is of sudden eruptions of violent mass feeling, like red hot lava, that destroy everything in its path-First World War, fascism, communism. Second World War. There isn’t an administrator or politician anywhere that isn’t playing whatever hand he holds with one terrified eye always on the next emanation from ‘the people’ – yet he appears to hide it even from himself.

Es en este contexto que Lynda, la enferma mental de la familia, se revela poco a poco como una visionaria con una fructífera capacidad de introspección. Tras una discusión política, se da cuenta de que las opiniones, en el fondo, son solo el disfraz accidental de una fuerza espiritual mucho más profunda:

You can watch a thought in your head,’ said Lynda. ‘You see the impulse that starts it. Then the thought trickles across your mind, strongly or weakly according to the strength of the first impulse. But the impulse needn’t necessarily have bred that particular thought. Perhaps it could have bred another thought.’

Por eso el brutal instinto de conservación de nuestra sociedad la hace incapaz de mirar más allá de sí misma y, por tanto, de conocerse, destruyendo cualquier opinión:

… society’s never having been more shrilly self-conscious than it is now, it is an organism which above all is unable to think, whose essential characteristic is the inability to diagnose its own condition. It is like one of those sea creatures who have tentacles or arms equipped with numbing poisons: anything new, whether hostile or helpful, must be stunned into immobility or at least wrapped around with poison or a cloud of distorting colour.

Martha no pertenece a estos círculos sociales, su especial atalaya consiste en el empleo/relación que la liga a una influyente familia. Esta ambigüedad le permite estar presente a la vez en dos mundos que para los demás parecen mutuamente excluyentes: la sociedad y la familia. Si de las interioridades de la primera comparte con el lector su inapreciable conocimiento de primera mano, sus responsabilidades con respecto a la otra, y con respecto a sí misma y su siempre incierto proyecto vital la llevan a desarrollar numerosas reflexiones de gran valor. Por ejemplo, cuando ya hemos deducido que ha desterrado de su vida un nuevo proyecto matrimonial, nos explica por qué tal proyecto le parece insensato:

When you get to the point when a man is a sort of thing for keeping you quiet-do you know what I mean? You know, you’re in a bad mood, you just want to scream and throw cups, then you think, oh for God’s sake, why doesn’t he sleep with me and shut me up … Well, what I think is, it’s the end. I mean, who needs it?’

Well, quite so, when a woman has reached that point when she allies part of herself with the man who will feed that poor craving bitch in every woman, then enough, it’s time to move on.

When it’s a question of survival, sex the uncontrollable can be controlled. And therefore had Martha joined that band of women who have affairs because men have ceased to be explorations into unknown possibilities.

Más adelante insiste en que es la diferencia, la incompatibilidad, y no la similitud el cemento del enamoramiento:

Certain beliefs united them. One was that they were all absolutely unlike each other, since they came from various classes and one or two countries. This meant that they met with that curiosity held in check by well-exercised aggression that is the first requisite for falling in love.

Acerca de cómo el cuidado de los adolescentes revive la propia juventud:

How very extraordinary it was, this being middle-aged, being the person who ran and managed and kept going … it was as if more than ever one was forced back into that place in oneself where one watched; whereas, all around the silent watcher were a series of defences, or subsidiary creatures, on guard, always working, engaged with-and this was the point-earlier versions of oneself, for being with the young meant all the time reviving in oneself that scene, that mood, that state of being, since they never said anything one hadn’t said oneself, or been oneself.

La distopía final, leída hoy, supone un bajón en la enorme calidad del resto de la novela. Sí resulta en cambio sorprendentemente actual un agudo diagnóstico incluido como sin querer, de la trascendencia de la invasión de nuestros hogares por la televisión. Recordemos, en 1969:

For it was on television that had been created a continuous commentary or mirror of ‘real’ life. To switch on the set when the day’s viewing started, with one’s mind slightly turned down, or in a bit of a fever, or very tired, and to watch, steadily, through the hours, as little figures, diminished people, dressed up like cowboys or like bus drivers or like Victorians, with this or that accent, in this or that setting, sometimes a hospital, sometimes an office or an aircraft, sometimes ‘real’ or sometimes imaginary (that is to say, the product of somebody’s, or some team’s imagination), it was exactly like what could be seen when one turned one’s vision outwards again towards life: it was as if an extreme of variety had created a sameness, a nothingness, as if humanity had said ‘yes’ to becoming a meaningless flicker of people dressed in varying kinds of clothes to kill each other (‘real’ and ‘imaginary’) or play various kinds of sport, or discuss art, love, sex, ethics (in ‘play’ or in ‘life’). For after an hour or so, it was impossible to tell the difference between news, plays, reality, imagination, truth, falsehood. If someone—from a year’s exile in a place without television, let alone a visitor from Mars, had dropped in for an evening’s ‘viewing’ then he might well have believed that this steady stream of little pictures, all so consistent in tone or feel, were part of some continuous single programme written or at least ‘devised’ by some boss director who had arranged, to break monotony, slight variations in costume, or setting (office, park, ballet, school, aircraft, war), and with a limited team of actors-for the same people had to play dozens of different roles.

[Lorraine Tosiello · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yes, I'm going to do it...going to give a magnificent writer a "2" rating for a monumental book. Doris Lessing writes about important concepts, with a broad historical sweep, in elegant yet precise language. I could read her words all day every day. But, stop and consider what she is saying with these words...and the language becomes tedious. It is the same episode over and over and over...a woman is labelled unstable, she destabilizes, she rights herself through sheer force of her will and intellect. The first time it's fascinating, the second time, it's familiar, the third and fourth time...At 650 pages there was room to edit this into a tight and sophisticated story. I admit I did not read the 4 preceding books in the "Children of Violence" series. Life's too short! Especially, I am glad I did not devote any more time to this protagonist...Martha Quest remains a muddled, ineffective, innocuous, banal, uninspiring character. The book has not aged well either, even though Lessing's prediction that psychiatric care which focuses on psychotherapy would be revealed ultimately as a sham has become a fact. Her alternate conclusion that people who hear voices are clairvoyant doesn't ring a bit true.
2- because (a) I would not recommend a dear friend to read this bloated, disheartening mess (b) I could barely complete it myself, and I never give up on a book! (5 months of reading on and off...mostly off...there's really no plot...like Proust you can pick it up or put it down and it makes no difference to the thread), and (c) the finale episode, tacked on as a series of documents about an apocalyptic disaster seemed as if the author had happened on another genre altogether and thought she would try it out as an ending to this tedious book she couldn't finish...

[Steele Wotkyns · Rating 5 out of 5]

It takes awhile to get back into the main character (Martha's) life; but, once the reader does it seems you are peeking into her very soul, as close as a reader can get to a character. Then the author immerses us in the drab, stingy, grey streets of post-WWII London. There's a fascinating, revealing, eye-opening exploration of sex and relations between the sexes: how men and women see sex and themselves and use sex in some of its myriad, oftentimes super confusing meanings. Lessing also explores the conflict of freedom (via artistic expression or seemingly aimless explorations) vs. needing to find work, hold a job, feel "useful" particularly as seen by others. The protagonist's world shifts to a London house (a theme Doris Lessing explores in another of her fine books, The Sweetest Dream). The main character, Martha, feels trapped, stuck by her pathos and circumstances (including those circumstances of other well-developed characters around her). Then there's Martha's ongoing fraught relationship with her mother, Mrs. Quest, the latter who takes overbearing to new, unprecedented lows. Lessing delivers an insightful, in-depth glimpse into psychotherapy through the eyes and experiences of several main characters. This is a hard book too, a tough, tragic novel as seen through the experiences of some of the kids, the children of violence. The author's literary device at the end is brilliant -- however, this reader wishes that that end portion of the novel might have been longer. The Four-Gated City is a marvel, a must-read; this novel is the triumphant conclusion to an extraordinary series.

[Reader Rabbit]

I read this book while in my early 20s, in the 1970s. The world was quite a different place then. I had read the first four in the series, and loved them — especially Landlocked. I recently re-read the first four, and with the same relish of 50 years ago. But when I got to The Four Gated City my pace slowed and it has taken me weeks to keep going. I am now about 3/4 through. Much of it I do not remember at all; maybe I felt the same way all those years ago - that it was just too much to muddle through. I thought maybe I would have more insight, reading it now at 70, than I did in my 20s. I thought maybe I just could not relate to Martha as she went through middle age and beyond. My opinion now is that it’s just a dog compared to the first four. I found it dull and sometimes over complicated then and probably don’t remember much because I probably just put it down and gave up on it. Such long meandering passages, so verbose…never really coming to anything that made it worth sticking with it to the end of a chapter. Even if it picks up now that I am so far into it, it will not have been worth it.
Read the first four - still great and enjoy - but skip the last, and longest one.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

I rather enjoyed the first 4 volumes in this Children of Violence series, but this final volume where Martha has finally arrived in London has left me cold. In this volume, unlike the others, Ms. Lessing engages in so much description of thoughts and feelings of her subjects that I became bored. As boredom increased, I thought, why should I plow through this when there are other more interesting books I could be reading? Consequently I set The Four-Gated City aside, something I rarely do with a book. This means the value of this short review is compromised and should be treated with caution since perhaps things pick up later in the book. But for me the sacrifice required to get though the first part of the book is more that I'm willing to make. My loss, since now I will never know (unless someone more stoic than myself finishes the book and reveals it to me in a comment) whether Martha finally recognizes the folly of embracing communism and abandons it as did Ms. Lessing.

[BoBandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me this is like reviewing three different books, the one I expected and didn't get, the one that is there, a story of a divorced woman who goes to England from Africa and ends up being kind of a family lynch-pin, and an appendix in which the world has gone completely to hell in a slight connection to what came before.

I really enjoyed the first four books in the The Children of Violence, liking each one a little more, so I had high expectations after finishing Landlocked. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I cannot imagine that when she wrote Martha Quest back in 1952 she imagined ending the series like this. I get the feeling that sometime shortly after Landlocked she had some sort of epiphany. Or maybe she was just tired of the series.

There were parts that were really strong, but there were other parts that just dragged on and on. As far as the conclusion goes, I don't know what to say. Perhaps what is there was once considered a novel in itself, and she slapped it on the end.