Dorsi Lessing -The Fifth Child ....anybody read it

[ComeScareWithMe]

I read this over the weekend and found it quite distressing TBH -didn't like it all but can't stop thinking about it.

*Doris.

Yes, read it for a uni module ten years ago. It is a distressing book. I found it very hard to be sympathetic to the mother.

So did I it was a nasty read especially the institute bit :(.

Is that the one where the mother has a child with pretty severe behavioural problems? I vaguely remember it if so.

It's very vague as to whether the child is the problem, or the mother. I tended to think that Ben was the victim because he didn't fit in to the parents' idea of 'normal'. Not sure if there was anything actually wrong with him, though.

I thought so too he didn't match the other perfect children so she rejected him.

It is nasty, isn't it. I didn't really understand the point of having such a hostile pretend version of a 'different' child. Was it so that she could express her hatred for the social problem of 'feral youth' -- if so why the spurious idea that such youth are some genetic product? Was it to punish the greedy idealism of the pareents who so much wanted a warm and wonderful family? If so then why? Was it to explore a mother's ambivalence about her children, in the manner of We Need to Talk about Kevin? If so then it fails to do what WNTTAK does, i.e. to question where the fault lies, in parent or child or both.

It just makes a horrible mythic version of disability which is uncharitable to all concerned. Above all it speaks of resentment in relation to the role of mother. Lessing always seemed drowned in resentment. Not surprisingly given that she was conscious of women's lot at the time, but still at cost to her fiction.

She has wrote another where Ben is an adult but I don't think I will bother. I know it sounds silly but even the author seemed to hate him.

The bit in that book that always struck me was when the mother is remembering her relative having a baby with Down Syndrome and hiding it's face in a blanket because it was 'upsetting'. That told me they were all bonkers.

Very nasty I agree and it is classed as a horror too! Which made me go as there is nothing supernatural in it and the only terrifying thing is the treatment of Ben.

I have read it and I too read it for a uni module about 13 years ago. I found it quite a sad and upsetting book to read. I just wanted to scream birth control at the parents when they got the fourth baby and they clearly couldn't cope.

I didn't know that she had written another one about Ben as an adult

Product of its time, I think. thankfully those attitudes are fading away.

I liked the start - the foreboding - but that social disgust that crept in at the end. Isn't the premise that Ben was some sort of genetic throwback to the Neanderthals? and he fits in so well with wc youth. Another disgusting attitude on a par with the treatment of the girl with Downs.

I read it 20 or years ago and it haunted me for years - the thought that I might have this evil cuckoo child that destroyed my life. I don't really remember the social disgust or the DS refs (I was a teenager at the time and probably quite shallow), I just remember the child in her womb kicking her hard and everything going wrong from then on. Didn't she palm him off on the local Hells Angels?