Word: novels
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...novel opens, Martha, in her thirties and a white refugee from colonial Africa, is wandering through a dislocated London where cellars are damp and paint is blistering and wood is rotting. In evoking a gray, totalitarian world, and in showing how, no matter what minor fluctuations the government undergoes, the poor never escape that world, this novel reflects Orwell's paternal influence. Politics, particularly the opposition politics of the Labour Party and those groups to its left, become the novel's initial concern. Yet, for Mrs. Lessing, politics are now something of a dead end. She sardonically delights in unearthing...
More seriously, the novel documents the assimilation of whole radical movements into impotent forms of institutionalized dissent. The various peace and ban-the bomb movements become so large they are powerless. In the midst of self-satisfied, ineffectual dissenters, one baffled American...
...second emphasis, in its examination of insanity, The Four-Gated City offers one such vindication. For Lessing, the Coldridge townhouse is an elaborate metaphorical conceit--at its base, in its cellar, it house Linda, Mark's mad wife. In another novel produced during another time, Linda would have probably been left to her solitary fate--most probably, like Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, Linda would have simply destroyed herself. At best, she could only hope to remain locked up for life, half-mad, in a Gothic tower. But, in this novel, Linda is treated as a prophet as she conducts Martha...
...role as a letter-day Mrs. Dalloway peering into the crevice that separates two eras, discovers that she shares certain affinities with Linda. From that point, it is not long before Martha is voluntarily undergoing harrowing experiments in order to determine the limits of her consciousness. As the novel closes, she is stranded off the Scottish coast, England having been decimated by poison gas and radioactivity. She has also become a member of a telepathic community whose members speak to each other across great distance through the power of their own shared thoughts. In doing so, Martha attains a perspective...
...quite far-fetched? Yes. Perhaps. Yet, in the context of this otherwise doggedly realistic novel, the mutant children are a surprisingly compelling solution. After all, it is a reworking of the Noah myth. Mrs. Lessing, because of her careful analysis of modern society, sees fit to purge mankind in a grand psychic, as well as physical, deluge. Only the extrasensory survive...