[In the following review, Simon contrasts the protagonist and themes of Ben, in the World with those of The Fifth Child.]

“It would be a good thing if man concerned himself more with the history of his nature than with the history of his deeds.” This remark by the nineteenth-century German dramatist Friedrich Hebbel serves as an epigraph for Doris Lessing's Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (1987), a collection of five essays that reflect on the causes—biological or social—of human behavior, essays that consider how often and how much we are dominated by our savage past, as individuals and as groups. What, Lessing asks, is our inherent nature: Are we barbaric, brutal beasts who must be socialized into civility? Or have we, as a species, evolved genetically from our bestial past to transcend our animal nature?

These questions are central to much of Lessing's writing, especially to her latest novel, Ben, in the World. In The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975), she created an apocalyptic future in which gangs of children rage and plunder, “feckless and irresponsible, hopeless, futureless, uneducated and ineducable,” but having no choice because all means of socialization have been destroyed. There are no families, no community, no nurturing. The result is a society of ruthless monsters.

FAMILY VALUES

Yet for all her apparent faith in the power of nurture over nature, in 1988 Lessing published The Fifth Child, a grim tale offering a harrowing possibility: the birth of a savage, primitive human being, a throwback, a Neanderthal. Unlike the children in Memoirs of a Survivor, Ben Lovatt seems to have been born bad; he is aggressive, violent, unloving. Some members of his stunned middle-class family believe he is evil and should be destroyed. Only his mother is compelled by a sense of moral responsibility; only she rescues him from certain death, even at the cost of her other children's well-being, even at the cost of her marriage.

The Lovatts, Harriet and David, fiercely defend what has become known as “family values”: both refuse to engage in premarital sex, both condemn what they believe is the hedonism and self-indulgence of their contemporaries. Seeing the breakdown of families all around them (David's parents have divorced and remarried), they want to create a stable homelife, to buy a large, rambling house and fill it with many children. But when the children come too often—first Luke, then Helen, then Jane, then Paul, within a few years—the Lovatts feel the disapproval of their parents, relatives, and even of Harriet's physician. Yet Harriet and David are adamant in defending their choice, hard though it is to maintain “their belief in themselves when the spirit of the times, the greedy and selfish sixties, had been so ready to condemn them, to isolate, to diminish their best selves.”

As much as the Lovatts cherish their children, they do feel the strain of raising a large family—economic, emotional, and physical. David is forced to take money from his wealthy father; Harriet must depend on her mother to help care for her young brood. And she is physically exhausted from a succession of pregnancies and nursing. When Harriet realizes that she is pregnant for the fifth time, both she and David are deeply distressed. They did not want this child—not yet, perhaps not ever. As Lessing follows Harriet through her difficult fifth pregnancy, we wonder if her depression and physical symptoms result from overall exhaustion or if this fetus is, indeed, different from the others. Harriet feels assaulted from within by a violent, aggressive, huge child battering her uterus: “Sometimes she believed hooves were cutting her tender inside flesh, sometimes claws.” She resorts to tranquilizers to quiet what she thinks of as “the enemy,” her own unborn child.

Perhaps it is no surprise that when her son is born, she hates him. It does not help that he is ugly, even repulsive. “He's a funny little chap,” David comments. To Harriet, he is something more sinister: “He did not look like a baby at all. He had a heavy-shouldered hunched look, as if he were crouching there as he lay. His forehead sloped from his eyebrows to his crown. … His hands were thick and heavy, with pads of muscle in the palms.” When she tries to nurse him, he bites her mercilessly. When he drinks from a bottle, he is insatiable. As he grows, it is clear that he is not like other children. He is unresponsive to petting and cuddling. He is strong and quick to anger: The family's dog is found dead; he nearly pulls his brother's arm out of its socket.

Harriet's family colludes to send Ben to an institution where he will surely die. But Harriet is overcome with guilt and compassion. Despite her family's entreaties, she saves him and somehow manages to raise him so that he learns to repress his violent urges. As the book ends, Ben is fifteen, the center of a gang of young drifters, living on the streets or squatting in vacant buildings. What, we wonder, is his future?

THE PRETENSE OF CIVILIZATION

In an interview after publishing The Fifth Child, Lessing explained that she never intended Ben to be evil, only misplaced. “If he is in fact the result of a gene which has come down through many centuries, all he is, is a different race of being that's landed up in our somewhat complicated society. But what I got fascinated by in writing that book was, how would we cope with it if it happened?” That question also informs Ben, in the World.

As in The Fifth Child, Lessing insists that Ben is different, surely, but not psychopathic; his aggression is caused by atavism, not malice. He manages, in any case, usually to keep his behavior in check—and when he becomes violent, it is always because he has been provoked by inhumane behavior in so-called civilized humans. Although he has grown up rejected by strangers merely on the basis of his menacing appearance, apparently his mother's love and the reliable home she provided kept him from becoming antisocial or even pathological.

Ben, who remembers his mother with nostalgia and gratitude, is capable of tenderness. As the book opens, he is eighteen and has been on his own for three years. He has been hired to do odd jobs requiring brute strength but often is cheated out of his earnings. At times he has found a home, but no one has truly cared for him until now, when Ellen Biggs, an aged pensioner, discovers him homeless, welcomes him into her small flat, feeds him, bathes him, and offers him emotional support. At Biggs' urging, Ben is trying to negotiate British bureaucracy and apply for financial benefits, but he is frustrated in this quest. Then, when Biggs becomes ill, Ben is cast out once again.

This time, he takes up with a prostitute who enjoys his brutal, unfettered sexuality and doles out money to him. Her pimp, though, sees other possibilities and manipulates Ben into serving as a courier to smuggle drugs into France. Ben is provided with a false passport, indicating his age as thirty-five and his profession as actor.

Unlike The Fifth Child, which focused on Harriet's response to her strange and difficult son, Ben, in the World elucidates Ben's psychological and emotional state. Lessing sensitively creates a being who is at once less than and more than human: He craves raw meat and competes with Mrs. Biggs' cat for an occasional bird; he is overwhelmed by encounters with strangers. Strong light bothers his eyes; car rides make him nauseated. He can, literally, smell danger; and his sense of intuition never fails him, even when he cannot intellectualize his feelings.

Lessing's supporting cast though, with the exception of Mrs. Biggs, seems to come from a cache of stock characters: not one but two prostitutes with hearts of gold; the conniving pimp; the greedy American filmmaker and his entourage of hangers-on; the evil scientist. And since Ben is not a character who can develop insight into his own behavior, his misadventures do not allow Lessing to create a bildungsroman. It's hard to know what Lessing did intend in this novel. At times, the book seems closer to Jerzy Kosinski's Being There than to The Fifth Child. In Kosinski's novel, the protagonist's identity and personality—class, profession, intellectual capacities, even ability to empathize—are invented by the people he meets, a reflection of their expectations and desires.

By giving Ben the identity of a film star, one might guess that Lessing meant to satirize Hollywood's cult of personality, or our salacious interest in some entertainers' outrageous appearance and behavior, or our tendency to conflate an actor's identity with the parts he plays. But she fails to explore the implications of Ben's absurd professional label. Although a slimy director sees financial gain in contriving a film around Ben, the idea fizzles out, and the director, once Lessing sends him scouting for locations, never appears again. Since Lessing makes a point of Ben's ability to feel affection and loyalty, it seems surprising that she does not allow any of his relationships to deepen. The first prostitute is left behind in London when Ben goes to France; Ben never will return to her. Teresa, the second prostitute, will live happily ever after, we are told, with another minor character.

Besides the desultory handling of characters, the novel's pacing seems odd, with some sections (such as Teresa's social background) vividly detailed, and others abruptly attenuated, as if Lessing herself lost interest in her subplots. And the climax of the book—which she means to be shocking—is both contrived and unsatisfying. Lessing seems on surer ground in The Fifth Child, where her acerbic critique of class prejudices and expectations, of the limits of psychological and sociological explanations of behavior, of the ways we make and rationalize moral decisions, occurs in a world she knows intimately and renders with conviction. She seems to lack that conviction in this new work of fiction, however deeply she cares about the profound philosophical questions at the novel's heart.