The Fifth Child

The Perfect Family and Ben

Harriet and David Lovatt meet at a party in the late 1960s and immediately recognize each other as people out of time: they want a large family, a big house, traditional values, the warmth of extended kin gathering at holidays. In a decade of liberation and experimentation, their vision is deliberately retrograde, and Lessing presents it initially with something like sympathy. They find a large Victorian house in the English countryside, they have four children in quick succession, the extended family fills the house at Christmas and Easter, and for a few years the project works exactly as intended.

The fifth pregnancy is different. Harriet feels the child fighting inside her—she uses that word—and the birth is violent in ways that are hard to categorize. Ben arrives in the world already somehow wrong. He is physically strange: yellowy skin, heavy-browed, unnervingly strong for an infant. He does not respond to affection. He kills the family pets. He terrifies the other children. He does not develop emotionally in any recognizable way. Lessing describes him with deliberate ambiguity: he is possibly a genetic throwback, possibly mentally disabled in some undiagnosed way, possibly—the novel allows this reading without endorsing it—something not quite human that has arrived in a human family.

What happens to the family under this pressure is the novel’s real subject. The other children withdraw. The relatives stop visiting. Harriet and David’s marriage strains under the weight of their different responses—Harriet cannot stop feeling responsible for Ben; David retreats into work. When Ben is institutionalized—sent to a facility where, it becomes clear, the practice is to leave difficult children to deteriorate—Harriet brings him back. This decision, and the domestic catastrophe it produces, is where the novel becomes genuinely unbearable.

What Ben Represents

The allegorical readings of The Fifth Child are multiple and not mutually exclusive. Ben as atavism—the genetic throwback, the pre-human intruding into civilization—was how Lessing herself sometimes described the novel. Ben as the child who falls outside every social support system: too strange for care, too human for disposal, left to the family that produced him with no resources and no acknowledgment that the situation is impossible. Ben as the foreigner the tolerant liberal family produces and cannot accommodate: the novel is set in the period of British immigration debates, and Lessing was aware of the parallel. Ben as the limit case of parental love: how much can you love a child who cannot love you back, who frightens everyone you care about, who will not become someone you can recognize?

The comparison to Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) is inevitable—both novels ask what a mother owes a child who has caused suffering, both refuse to resolve the question morally—but Lessing’s method is quieter and more allegorical where Shriver’s is confrontational and psychological. Kevin is fully human and fully comprehensible in his monstrosity; Ben is neither. This is what makes The Fifth Child stranger and, for some readers, more disturbing: the horror is not explainable, and the novel does not try to explain it.

Lessing wrote a sequel, Ben in the World (2000), which follows Ben into adulthood and attempts to show the world from his perspective. Critical opinion was mixed; most readers find it less successful than the original, and it works best read as a coda rather than a necessary continuation. The original novel is complete in itself.

Reading Lessing’s Late Fiction

Doris Lessing received the Nobel Prize in 2007 at the age of eighty-eight, having spent a career resisting categorization: she was a realist, then a communist who left the party, then a Sufi mystic, then a science fiction writer (The Canopus in Argos sequence), then a realist again. The Fifth Child belongs to the late phase of her work, published in 1988, after the science fiction sequence and after the autobiographical volumes, and it represents a return to the domestic realism of her early novels—The Grass Is Singing (1950), The Golden Notebook (1962)—but transformed by everything that came between.

It works well as a companion to The Golden Notebook, which is her most celebrated and most ambitious novel, because the two books illuminate each other: The Golden Notebook describes the possibilities available to a woman of intelligence and political consciousness in the 1950s; The Fifth Child shows what happens when the same social contract—be reasonable, adjust, make it work—encounters something it cannot adjust to.

Content note: the institutional sequences, in which it is implied that the facility Harriet sends Ben to is essentially a place where unwanted children are left to die, are the most disturbing in the novel and are handled obliquely rather than directly. Lessing’s restraint here is correct—to show it would be to make it sensational—but readers who are sensitive to content involving harm to children should be prepared for these sections.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Lessing’s most unsettling novel: a domestic horror story that is also an allegory for every family’s unacknowledged limits, every society’s inability to accommodate what it cannot assimilate, written with the same unflinching precision she brought to all of her best work.