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.

Harriet and David exemplify a modern bourgeois ideal--lots of kids, big house, station wagon and such. But the ideal is built on dependency and is oblivious to the world around it.

BY focusing on the irresponsibility of the middle class, Lessing is able to comment on the nature of class conflict in Britain. most of the Lovatt children conform to society, but Ben's malevolent presence forces them out of the house to live with relatives. David and Harriet are left with only their youngest children--Ben and the sensitive Paul. Ben becomes a force for revolution within the home, and a window on the discontent around it. His rebellion causes Harriet to neglect Paul, whose quiet grace infuriates Ben. Lessing's parable of class conflict demonstrates that in a society which is determined not to accept deviance, everyone suffers.

The birth of this strange, violent, misfit child into a "normal" family is Lessing's way of observing that the middle-class is responsible for the existence of the underclass and must accept responsibilty for its behavior, whether brutal or apathetic. Savagery, according to Lessing, is a direct result of the selfishness and blindess of middle class existence. By choosing not to involve themselves in the social changes of their era, David and Harriet are guilty of an attempt to ignore the imperative for those changes.

"We are being punished," Harriet says, "For presuming. For thinking we could be happy, Happy because We decided we would be....And who paid for it? James. And Dorothy... We just wanted to be better than anyone else, that's all."

This selfishness is couched in a desire for so-called normality. The paradox that Lessing uncovers is that the violence and brutality of society, embodied in Ben, has its origin in the deceptive calm of the bourgeoisie.

Ben's presence shatters that calm, and awakens Harriet to the blindness and hypocrisy of her life. When her family casts out her child, duty forces Harriet to remain loyal. His rejection by society, by his family, brings to an end Harriet's illusions. Ben's marginalization mirrors Harriet's isolation.

LESSING is a canny observer of the role of Woman in society. As in her last novel The Good Terrorist, the female protagonist in The Fifth Child is unaware of her subjugated state. Harriet is the caretaker of the family. She is constantly pregnant, constantly trying to run the household and organize the endless stream of guests that come to stay in the spacious suburban paradise. She is sometimes "pale and strained because of morning sickness and because she had spent a week scrubbing floors and washing windows."

Unlike Alice Mellings in The Good Terrorist, however, Harriet comes to understand her mistakes. Children are a "challenge to destiny", a contract not to be entered into hastily. Lessing makes the point that that the profligate mating of David and Harriet's marriage was as wasteful as the excesses of the flower children.

Ultimately, Lessing sides with the Lovatts' all-suffering parents. It is hard to resist identifying Lessing with Dorothy, Harriet's mother. Dorothy, the kind, sage, grey-haired granny is forced to rescue her daughter from the implications of her fertility. Dorothy "knew the cost, in every way, of a family, even a small one." She dispenses advice just as Lessing provides us with a cautionary tale, a morality play. Lessing observes the irresponsibilty of her society and echoes the sentiment Dorothy has about her daughter. She says, "Sometimes you scare me."

An astute critic of a sedentary society that pretends to be perplexed by the problems of its underclass, Lessing offers a message that is both progressive and reactionary. Dorothy emerges as the hero, but she is a throwback to a time when women and the lower classes were, if anything, worse off. Lessing's depiction of the post-feminist world of the 1970s offers the vision of a grand-mother, rather than that of a young crusader. Lessing's nostalgic proposal looks backwards and is, ultimately, no proposal at all.