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Overview
At eighteen, Ben is in the world, but not of it. He is too large, too awkward, too inhumanly made. Now estranged from his family, he must find his own path in life. From London and the south of France to Brazil and the mountains of the Andes. Ben is tossed about in a tumultuous search for his people, a reason for his being. How the world receives him, and, he fares in it will horrify and captivate until the novel's dramatic finale.
Synopsis
At eighteen, Ben is in the world, but not of it. He is too large, too awkward, too inhumanly made. Now estranged from his family, he must find his own path in life. From London and the south of France to Brazil and the mountains of the Andes. Ben is tossed about in a tumultuous search for his people, a reason for his being. How the world receives him, and, he fares in it will horrify and captivate until the novel's dramatic finale.
Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction
This "clear and horrific" sequel to Lessing's best-selling The Fifth Child "inspires true sympathy for her less-than-appealing Ben in this fish-out- of-water story. The reader is left wondering who the true savage is - modern man or the primitive?" "Another of Lessing's indictments of our species." "Surprisingly clumsy plotting for a writer of Lessing's stature." "It just didn't grab me."
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
A Review of Ben, in the WorldBorn in Persia and raised in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Doris Lessing made her literary debut in 1950 with a novel about interracial tensions in Africa entitled The Grass Is Singing. Since then, Lessing has delivered more than 30 major works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, most notably her massive experimental novel, The Golden Notebook, published in 1962. A common theme threading through her oeuvre, as Lessing herself noted in her 1994 autobiography, Walking in the Shade, is a rejection of "the human condition," which means to "be trapped by circumstances."
Nowhere did she probe the dark contradictions of the human condition more deeply than in The Fifth Child, a short novel about Ben Lovatt, a Neanderthal-like genetic throwback born to "normal" parents in modern-day England. Ben is marked as an outcast from the day of his birth because of his monstrous appearance. "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." Then there is the matter of Ben's equally bestial behavior. He terrorizes siblings and kills family pets. He is automatically assumed to be a demon seed and a scourge to society. Although slight, the novel was a taut springboard for Lessing's most pressing concerns—the insurmountable differences between men and women, the bind between the individual and greater society, and how society both celebrates and castigates "the other."
In Ben, in the World, Lessing again takes up the narrative of Ben's life and unsentimentally depicts his education in the ways of the wider world. At 18 he has grown into a werewolf of sorts, hirsute and homeless, renounced by his family. He barks when happy, grunts when annoyed, and dines on small birds. Gainful employment, let alone romance, has proven a challenge. Ironically, Ben winds up with more caretakers as an adult, including Rita, a prostitute who thrills to his animal ways in bed. But although she means well, Rita is the first in a series of people who manipulate Ben for selfish purposes. Construction foremen rely on him for heavy lifting, then cheat him out of his wages; Rita's pimp gives him money and then uses him to smuggle dope to France; a fledgling filmmaker drags Ben into a movie about prehistoric creatures, then cruelly promises to reunite him with similar-looking people. By the novel's end, Ben predictably flees a group of frenzied scientists.
Lessing's genius here is to embody the otherness of Ben's point of view without condescending to him. In unadorned prose, she dramatizes Ben as he wrestles with his animal nature, his need to inflict harm as well as his desire to repress that impulse. In his travels, she writes, Ben "looked hard at faces for that surprised stare that might turn out to be dangerous."
Ben's humanity stands out in sharp relief. Like his caretakers, who congratulate themselves on shepherding him through the world, Ben gets lonely and hungry, and he misses his family. In the end, like them, he commits desperate acts because he feels the sorrow of consciousness, "the knowledge of his aloneness."
In The Fifth Child, Ben, like the monster of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, reflects the hubris of his creators; in this sequel he becomes, like Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan, a "perpetual exile." And as with Burroughs's apeman, Ben's tragedy is that his caretakers are too busy exploiting him to realize they can learn from his predicament. Thanks to Lessing's deep understanding of Ben's world, however, it will be difficult for readers to make a similar oversight.
—John Freeman
About the Author
Doris Lessing was born to British parents in Persia in 1919 and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She went to England in 1949 and has lived there ever since. She is the author of more than 30 books—novels, short stories, reportage, poems, and plays—and is considered among the most important writers of the postwar era.
Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction
This "clear and horrific" sequel to Lessing's best-selling The Fifth Child "inspires true sympathy for her less-than-appealing Ben in this fish-out- of-water story. The reader is left wondering who the true savage is - modern man or the primitive?" "Another of Lessing's indictments of our species." "Surprisingly clumsy plotting for a writer of Lessing's stature." "It just didn't grab me."Publishers Weekly -
When it appeared more than a decade ago, The Fifth Child, Lessing's powerful novel about a boy who was a freakish throwback to a primitive stage of existence, was justly praised as a shocking and memorable speculation about what happens when society is confronted with a human anomaly. This sequel continues Ben Lovatt's story, but with decidedly inferior narrative resources. Ben has run away from his upper-middle-class British family, who were humiliated by this genetic aberration. He is now 18, but with his fearsomely developed chest and arms, his squat and hairy body and his feral face, he appears to frightened observers to be a man in his 30s. Ironically, Ben himself is terrified of society. Unable to read, to handle money, to decipher even the simplest of situations, he is helpless, lonely and desperate. He realizes he must control the blood-red tides of rage that engulf his brain, lest he kill the adversaries who torment him. But in a series of lurid adventures in a plot that seems to have been made up in fits and starts, Ben is betrayed by nearly everyone. Only three women are kind to him: one is old and terminally ill, the other two are prostitutes. People who have power and money abuse him, notably an American scientist doing research in Rio de Janeiro, where bewildered Ben has been transported by a down-and-out filmmaker, who picked him up in Paris after Ben was used as a dupe in a cocaine smuggling operation. It's obvious that Lessing is making a social statement about how intellectuals acting in the name of art or science cruelly exploit simple people who can't defend themselves. The plot achieves bathetic melodrama in the deserted mining country of interior Brazil, where poor Ben, "knowing [he is] alone, used but then abandoned,'' meets his grisly fate and brings this soap-operatic story to its long-foreshadowed, tragic close. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|Library Journal
This is a sequel to Lessing's acclaimed Fifth Child, which featured Ben Lovatt. Ben's abnormal appearance and strength distinguishes him from other people. Rejected by his older siblings, he is now homeless in London. He has been fed and sheltered by the sickly Mrs. Biggs, but when she enters the hospital, Ben ends up staying with a prostitute named Rita. Rita's boyfriend enlists Ben's unknowing assistance to transport drugs to Paris, where he meets Alex and is taken to Brazil to make a movie. There, Ben meets a scientist who wants to run genetic tests on him. Ben is treated inhumanely but is excited when he hears that he may meet more people like himself. The ending is, predictably, tragic. Powerful writing from an author noted by for dealing effectively with difficult human issues, this book admirably continues Ben's story. Recommended for all public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/00.]--Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., MD Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\Michael Pye
...what Ben is, mostly, is a character who comes wrestling and reeking off the page, a monster whose humanity we must recognize when we least want to. We start off identifying with the nice family; we end up wanting to see the world through those goblin eyes. So Ben, in the World, which tells his other story, the one that belongs to him alone, is a most unusual kind of sequel: the absolutely necessary one...At times, Lessing's spare, sharp prose lets you see things as Ben sees them, as you have not seen things before. The book shares that uncanny effect with the best fiction.—The New York Times Book Review