Word: harriet
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...London office party in the mid-1960s, boy meets girl. David Lovatt, 30, and Harriet Walker, 24, share the same unfashionable dream of settling into married life and having lots of children. David, whose parents divorced when he was seven, wants to create the stable home he lacked while growing up; Harriet, a virgin, hopes to replicate her untroubled childhood. They find a huge Victorian house within commuting distance of London. It costs more than David's salary as an architect can provide, but his wealthy father agrees to take on the mortgage payments...
...Lovatts' experiment gets off to a brilliant beginning. In quick succession, four healthy children are born. Over Christmas and Easter vacations and during the summers, the house overflows with in-laws: "People came and went, said they were coming for a couple of days and stayed a week." Harriet's chores and recurrent pregnancies are eased by the almost constant presence of her mother, whose labor subsidizes this enterprise just as thoroughly as the money from David's father. But cost hardly seems to matter, measured against what it has helped to achieve: "Happiness. A happy family. The Lovatts were...
Immersed in the coziness of their own creation, sensing themselves admired by their less fortunate houseguests, David and Harriet succumb to smugness. "We are the center of this family," David informs his mother. "We are -- Harriet and me." Harriet chimes in, "This is what everyone wants, really, but we've been brainwashed out of it. People want to live like this, really...
When it comes to bizarre horrors, though, there is no place like home. Harriet's fifth pregnancy disrupts the insular domestic bliss: "David saw her sitting at the kitchen table, head in her hands, muttering that this new foetus was poisoning her." Harriet complains to her doctor, but he refuses to see anything wrong: "He made the usual tests, and said, 'It's large for five months, but not abnormally so.' " After long agony, the child is born. Seeing him for the first time, the mother says, "He's like a troll, or a goblin or something." Harriet names...
...almost telegraphic: "In September, of the year Ben became eleven, he went to the big school. He was eleven. It was 1986." This spareness suggests parable, a single accessible version of complex truths. Yet beneath its clear surface, Lessing's novel roils with several possible meanings. Perhaps David and Harriet, in their zeal to create a haven for themselves and what they call the "real children," have blinded themselves to humanity that lies "outside the permissible," beyond their constrained definitions of themselves. Maybe Ben represents a dangerous, violent streak in the species that must be either tamed or excluded from...