The Four-Gated City

1969, 1991 Plume edition
Doris Lessing
The Four-Gated City
Bought new for $9.95
Very worn paperback
B-

I remembered this book as better than it is, probably because I forgot most of it.  Set from Martha's 1949 arrival in England ("five years after the war," Lessing says in another of her maths mistakes) to sometime around 1967, with an appendix of letters and journal entries covering up to 2000, it could well have been split into two volumes.  Indeed, it's the longest of the Children of Violence books, although like the others it has a four-part-with-four-chapters-each division.

Martha gets a "temporary" job as secretary to an upper-class writer with a mentally ill wife and a small son.  This being Martha, she stays for almost twenty years, becoming the writer's mistress and den mother to the extended family who visit and sometimes live in the house.  If this were a less depressing writer than Lessing, say Atwood or Vonnegut, there would be an element of farce here, even midst the tragedy, but of course the family suffers everything from suicide to government and press harassment to mutation.  Not that Lessing is completely humour-free, but she does offer a bleak vision of the then recent past, present, and future.

By the end of the novel, it's turned from a social document to what the character named Jimmy calls "space fiction."  Along the way, we learn that the mentally ill may actually be mind-readers and hence our hope for the future!  And the best method to be known as both a Communist and a reactionary is to be a writer whose politics never change yet are usually out of sync with the zeitgeist.

For several novels, it's bothered me that Lessing has so many characters whose names start with "Ma."  But maybe they're supposed to be different sides of one person.  Certainly, Martha's lover/employer/friend Mark is as passive as she is.  Ironically, the next generation has no serious goals or ambitions but they seem to do more with their lives.

Mark's wife Lynda is not only the "madwoman in the basement," she also has a "Yellow Wallpaper" phase where she goes around and around her room, touching the walls.  Lynda grew on me, as she does on Martha, even while I wished Mark would divorce her and get on with his life.  (He does eventually divorce, to marry Rita, Maisie's daughter, but he never gets over Lynda.)

What I liked best about the book was actually the fiction within the novel, particularly Mark's story about the four-gated city and his book about his "Tory hostess mother," which sounds charmingly Mitfordesque.

Overall, it's a big, messy book, with too many characters and too many issues.  Yet I'd put it on a level with Martha Quest.  I found it both a tough read and an intriguing one.  And there is closure of sorts, even if it's things like Martha's mother showing up, still a nag but a less racist one, and then dying offpage as her husband did.  At one point, there's a flashback to Mr. Quest's last illness, when he tried to convey how strange laughter is, and later Martha thinks that aliens would wonder why we laugh, and conclude that it's because humans can't deal with complexity.  In this case, I don't laugh but instead sigh and know I probably won't return to this series again for another 20 or 25 years, when I'll read it as an old woman, and probably shake my head at Martha's middle-aged naïveté.