Ben, In the World : The Sequel to the Fifth Child

Rating:
Summary: A Toast to Ben, Martha Quest, and Anna Wulf
Review: Ben, in the World is a stunning sequel--a sophisticated study of the "monster" in The Fifth Child whose abnormal behavior disrupts an ordinary English family. In this novel we see the world from Ben's point of view, and come to understand the unbearable loneliness born of difference.

This novel works on several levels: as a novel of ideas; as a parable; as a psychological/social exploration of differences; as an indictment of cruel scientists; as science fiction; as a modern-day Frankenstein. I recognized this as a book I'd enjoy teaching in a frosh comp course, but I also fell into it with such absorbtion that I didn't analyze it at all while reading it.

I didn't like the ending--though I won't give it away. Having met people like Ben, I don't believe he would have taken the action condoned by some of the characters at the end of the novel. People love their lives--and Ben was strong.

But I've been reading Doris Lessing for 30 years, since I devoured The Golden Notebook at age 15, and I revere her work. I always intended to write Lessing a fan letter, but this dashed-off post will have to be it! Though not her greatest book, Ben, in the World is remarkable--worth buying in hardcover. Lessing is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century--still an independent thinker and rebel in the twenty-first.

Rating:
Summary: A disappointment
Review: I loved the Fifth Child. I found it powerful and provocative: as it focused mostly upon Ben's mother and how she dealt with her strange son, it delved deep into questions of love and duty, otherness, and societal bonds. Ben, the savage child, was a catalyst, a mirror held up to our own modern selves, in which we see the savage ways we treat what we fear and do not understand.

Sadly, Ben in the World is a great disappointment to me. Lessing decides here to follow Ben and see who he is, what he wants, and how he hurts. I think this is a mistake; what made the Fifth Child work was Ben as a mirror, a reflection of society. Here, that is so deeply diminished it's hardly worth mentioning. And it's hard to come to any kind of powerful discovery of who Ben is -- a yeti, a throwback, whatever, ultimately another lonely person in a lonely world.

The premise is flawed, the plot is weak and wandering -- there's no real reason why anything happens to Ben -- and in the end, it degrades to a hardly believable B-movie plotline (reminded me of that movie with Matthew Broderick and the monkey. Project X?)

Seems like I've heard a lot of people saying Ben is a parallel to Frankenstein. Hardly, unless you mean the monosyllabic Frankenstein of the movies. Shelley's monster was articulate, passionate, opinionated, and driven. He showed us ourselves at our worst. Ben is simply primal. At best, he shows us ourselves at our simplest.

It took some discipline to finish this book. I won't pick it up again, and I don't recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: an excellent novel
Review: i will start by saying that i truly admire doris lessing and that i thought that "the fifth child" was brilliant. from time to time i would wonder what ever happened to ben and was delighted when this sequel was published. i read this haunting novel in one sitting (not by design -- i could not put it down) and, once again, lessing has lived up to my expectations. i found her initial idea fascinating and felt a great deal of compassion for ben in the world. i see him as a fellow Frankenstein (another of my favorite novels) -- i can easily see the two of them roaming over the northern latitudes, wondering how or if they will ever find a place for themselves.

Rating:
Summary: Requiem for a Monster
Review: Like another famous literary monster, the protaganist of Doris Lessing's trilogy is doomed to wander the earth in search of a place to belong. In this third installment Ben has left his family behind, leaving a wake of bitterness, disappointment, and recrimination. He's found kindness and companionship with an old woman who's taken him in. But the world never leaves him alone, and his tenuous dual footholds in the realms of humanity and bestiality render him incapable of functioning in either.

Ben is a simple soul, with a heartbreaking yearning for human love and affection. But part of him is not human. He was born into a human family, raised in human environments, and hungers for human acceptance. When people see Ben, though, they know he's something else, something apart. It frightens and fascinates them at the same time. He has something that people lack, and mostly want--a connection with goodness that comes with honesty.

To help his benefactress Ben ventures into the world in search of money. His ensuing journey leads him into collusion with low life drug dealers, international film producers, and disingenuous hustlers. He floats from England to France to South America, all with the hope finding a home. Instead he's faced with all the selfish venality that human nature can muster, while he feeds the needs of those who are destroying him.

Along the way he sees glimmers of light through keyholes. He enjoys a startling liaison with a prostitute who so appreciates his bestial sexual style that she pays him. On his odyssey to South America to make a film about a different race of humans he makes a touching connection with another prostitute who sees redemption in him, and tries to save him.

But largely Ben's story is one of betrayal and deceit by those he trusts. His human side is so beautifully rendered, his physical deformities seem like an afterthought. But Ben hunts and eats birds and wildlife with his bare hands. He mates like an animal. He's a creature filled with honest instinct, and that's what people fear about him the most.

Rating:
Summary: Crude platitudes from a writer in terminal decline
Review: Reviewer: [e-mail] from Essex, UK Doris Lessing has written some fine books, but really there is nothing to be said that can possibly redeem "Ben in the World". The theme of alienation is treated with sledgehammer crudeness to the point where the book is nothing more than caricature. The central character, Ben, is a genetic throw-back, physically and emotionally ill equiped for the world into which he is born, but the facile treatment of his trials leaves the reader uninvolved. The plotting is cursory, with little beyond a set of hollywood stereotypes filling in the spaces around Ben. We are expected to believe in, not one, but two "hookers with a heart" (as crass a cliche as one can imagine) and a brutal and exploitaive scientific research organisation bent on using and abusing the eponymous hero. What we asked to take seriously is little more than the staple of cheap television sci fi, kids stuff really, but not worthy of consideration as literature. Evil scientists conducting secret experiments without regard for morals or the human consequences may well have been adequate devices for fiction when Wells wrote "The Island of Doctor Moreau" (though I would argue it was cheap stuff even then), but in this day and age we surely deserve a more sophisticated analysis of the machinations and complex morality of science. In Ben we have a pure hearted and ingenuous hero, trusting and always likely to be exploited, but again he seems little more than a crude symbol of a far more interesting and equivocal figure which Lessing, it seems, could not bring her self to devise. As a study in the alienation of a born outsider the work is superficial and as an examination of society's tendency to exploit and abuse the weak and vulnerable it is laughably simplistic. Such paucity of invention and reliance on standard off the peg signifiers is surely a sign that Lessing is written out. The picaresque element which sees Ben transported around the world to be exploited at every turn, only seems to emphasise how lazy this book really is; no location is drawn with any genuine sense of place and one might be forgiven for imagining that Lessing relocated the action periodically simply to mask her own failure of invention. This is a lazy book in terms of its themes and their development, but it is also quite frankly, a badly written one. There have always been those who argued that Lessing's technique as a writer lagged behind her powers of invention, but now with the cupboard of ideas so bereft her written prose is cruelly exposed. There are sentences in the book which, were they the work of a less celebrated author, would have been edited out long before publication.

It is very sad to see an ageing writer so obviously in decline, but it is perhaps an indication of the cowardice of those around her that they allowed her to publish a work which can do nothing but diminish her reputation. Was nobody brave enough to tell her how inadequate this book really is?

Rating:
Summary: Not a Fulfilling Sequel
Review: The Fifth Child is one of my top five favorite books. Ben, In The World does not reach my top twenty. Although not a horrible book, I was really disappointed with Lessing's lack of focus on Ben. I found Teresa to be the most interesting character in the novel, especially her back-story. I was reminded of the film Run Lola Run because Lessing tried to give us so much story in such small snapshots and then ended them with "their story had a good (or bad) ending." It all seemed just too convenient, Ben's luck making him simply go through the motions in the novel; none of plot resulted from choices he made, rather other characters propelled the story except for the final anti-climactic (and only) choice Ben makes. I wish I had stopped with The Fifth Child and let Ben haunt my curiosity instead of trying to fulfill it with this book.

Rating:
Summary: Not a Fulfilling Sequel
Review: The Fifth Child is one of my top five favorite books. Ben, In The World does not reach my top twenty. Although not a horrible book, I was really disappointed with Lessing's lack of focus on Ben. I found Teresa to be the most interesting character in the novel, especially her back-story. I was reminded of the film Run Lola Run because Lessing tried to give us so much story in such small snapshots and then ended them with "their story had a good (or bad) ending." It all seemed just too convenient, Ben's luck making him simply go through the motions in the novel; none of plot resulted from choices he made, rather other characters propelled the story except for the final anti-climactic (and only) choice Ben makes. I wish I had stopped with The Fifth Child and let Ben haunt my curiosity instead of trying to fulfill it with this book.

Rating:
Summary: Ben -- the Sequel that enlarges
Review: The Fifth Child was a terrific book. It brought up such concepts as separateness, lack of conscience, prejudice, etc. Ben, in the World is a worthy Sequel. In this book we get a more rounded Ben; it would have been so easy for Doris Lessing to write a book about a terrible throwback who didn't fit in anywhere. That is not what she did. Ben is very, very different, but he is human, he has feelings and, most of all, he wants to know where he "fits in" and why is everyone so different from him. Lessing took a good plot, that many pedestrian authors could handle, and made it into a great book by understanding the CHARACTER.

Rating:
Summary: About Ben, you and me.
Review: The first novel about Ben, The Fifth Child, told us about a boy who becomes an outcast and some kind of a 'monster' that doesn't fit in society.
In the sequel , 'Ben in the world', it seems to me that our hero holds a mirror in front of us: how we struggle to give our live a meaning. It's also about how some of us are regarded as The Great Evildoer because we are, say, an artist painter instead of a respectable lawyer.
Will Ben find his place under the sun? Will he fit in society? If he does he will be luckier than many of us.

Rating:
Summary: About Ben, you and me.
Review: The first novel about Ben, The Fifth Child, told us about a boy who becomes an outcast and some kind of a 'monster' that doesn't fit in society.
In the sequel , 'Ben in the world', it seems to me that our hero holds a mirror in front of us: how we struggle to give our live a meaning. It's also about how some of us are regarded as The Great Evildoer because we are, say, an artist painter instead of a respectable lawyer.
Will Ben find his place under the sun? Will he fit in society? If he does he will be luckier than many of us.