The Fifth Child

By Doris Lessing

Alfred E. Knopf, Inc.

133 pp.

$15.95

IN The Fifth Child, Doris Lessing once again explores the political by describing the personal. This new novel focuses on how society relinquishes responsibility for outcasts and the lower classes. Lessing's story is a fairy tale with a point, and her vision of British society is stern, satiric, and bleak.

The novel tells the story of David and Harriet, whom Lessing describes as "conservative, old-fashioned," in the midst of the rebellion of the 1960s. David and Harriet are "made for each other," a fact Lessing makes abundantly clear. The first sentence of the novel informs us that the moment they met, they "knew that this was what they had been waiting for."

Like their generation, David and Harriet engage in a rebellion, but it is a reactionary one. They disapprove of the lax morality of their era and the feeling that "the spirit of their times, the greedy and selfish sixties, had been so ready to condemn them...to diminish their best selves."

Lessing has a keen eye for the paradoxes of the free love decade. She notes, not without humor, that Harriet, as a 25-year-old virgin, was treated with the type of bitchy solicitude usualy reserved for women with "loose morals."

David and Harriet aspire to a life of "pleasant suburbia." They are not swept up in the social causes of their peers, and their rejection of the sexual freedom offered by late 20th century society is symbolized by their denouncing of the Pill. Instead, they dream of a life of quiet domesticity directed toward making a large, happy family named, appropriately, the Lovatts.

BUT the apparent modesty of their dream is illusory. David and Harriet take on the burden of four children in six years with insufficient means and experience. They survive mainly with money from David's parents and help from Harriet's mother Dorothy. Still, they manage to achieve the largest part of their dream, a huge house that becomes the place for the family to congregate.

Soon, however, David and Harriet are forced to deal with the the realities of the dream. Harriet becomes pregnant again, this time with Ben, a monstrous child who takes over the household and infects the entire family with the stigma of abnormality.

It is a painful, complicated pregnancy. The unborn child, whom Harriet refers to as the "enemy," is so strong it feels as if it is trying to "tear its way out of her stomach." Harriet is being beaten from the inside. She takes to running back and forth, trying vainly to escape the battle within her. When the child is born, looking like a "little troll", Harriet is devoid of the nurturing love she lavished on her other children.

David and Harriet's dream begins to crumble. Never really self-sufficient, they are not able to deal with the intrusion of the unusual child and the ramifications of his existence. They send Ben away to an institution, but Harriet is unable to leave her child to die with strangers.

Despite her repulsion, Harriet saves Ben. She, not David, holds fast to her parental bond. But in the process of saving her child, Harriet is punished by a family that feels betrayed, and the domestic sanctuary soon disintegrates.