Five by Doris Lessing

This 1953 collection of five (hence the title) short novels slash novellas slash long short stories by Doris Lessing is a real treat… well, four out of five are…

Yes, there’s one piece that’s kinda a dud here, and unfortunately it’s both a) the last one in the book and b) twice the length of all the rest (not combined).

That one, ‘Hunger’, was by far (for me) the least enjoyable, but this isn’t because it’s poorly written, isn’t because the description is lacking and the narrative isn’t exciting and interesting and engaging, and it also isn’t because there’s no emotional potency to it, but instead it’s simply that my personal politics made enjoying it almost impossible…

Reading ‘Hunger’ created a real feeling of awkwardness and discomfort because it is, bluntly, a (comparatively) privileged white woman’s attempt at evoking the mind, life and personal history of an impoverished young black man from a small village.

Obviously, we’ve all heard those right-wing literary types who believe that “anyone should be able to write anything”, and defences for this idea sometimes arrive from less explicitly right wing figures with the addendum “provided they write that anything well,” and this would supposedly be the defence for the (generally) progressive Lessing, here…

But I don’t like that.

(I acknowledge, yes, that there are plenty of texts that are entirely works of imagination (i.e. with no relation between authorial self and the work) that can and do provide great literary joys, but – particularly given the clear anti-racist intentionality of Lessing’s early writing – it didn’t quite feel right here, and the discomfort with which I approached the story made it difficult to read…)

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The first story in the book is typical of early Lessing’s South African-set work, and is titled ‘A Home For The Highland Cattle’.

It is about a young English woman and her newish husband who emigrate to South-Southern-Africa-Rhodesia (terms and exact locations vary, I think) for “a better life”, only for the young woman to be shocked and scandalised by the realities of the racist people and institutionally racist state that exists there (and would continue to explicitly exist for many decades more)…

This one is a relatively simple narrative about someone who arrived in a racist state as a naif and is surprised and disappointed by what her peers have decided to normalise.

The story follows her initial, confrontational, responses to the reality she finds, but as she moved to Africa (basically) in order to have a bigger house than she could afford in London, Lessing undercuts all of the moments of confrontation between this character and her community by mentioning in narratorial asides that these are principles the protagonist will soon abandon.

Lessing depicts someone who seems to have principles and a heart, but makes it very clear that she only has these things while she’s unsettled and house-hunting and will acclimatise to the bigotry soon enough… this young woman will not be bothered by moral consciousness related to racism for long at all, and these initial discomforts are shown to be hangovers from the habits of liberal England (imagine such a place!), and not ideas she can hold on to (and hold space for, as they say online nowadays) while also holding onto a house, servants and a position in the community. The banality of evil, essentially, innit.

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The second piece is ‘The Other Woman’, and it’s the only one not set in colonial Southern Africa.

This one takes place in London during the Second World War, and it opens with a young women, engaged but bored, calling off her wedding when her mother dies in an accident. This woman then lives a sad life with her father (her ex-fiance lives locally and marries someone else, who he quickly gets pregnant), until her father dies in a bombing during the Blitz and then she hooks up with a local guy who turns out to be a shit, basically.

This story is ultimately about how the limited prospects of the poor are similar across the globe, and resonates in this volume of stories by positioning the working class white Englishwoman as similar to the working class black man or woman of South Africa, a sentiment less eloquently and more infamously expressed by John Lennon in a song, the title of which I’m not going to type here.

Lessing, you could argue, introduces intersectionality by the positioning of protagonists.

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The third piece – ‘El Dorado’ – is set on a remote farm, though I couldn’t tell you where it is as all of the locations are either intentionally vague or they’re specific in such a way that someone (me) who doesn’t know that part of the world and its colonialised place names wouldn’t recognise the geography…

This story is about a family that lives on a farm and also moved from the UK in order to try and get rich easy, but the dad is a terrible fucking farmer, super lazy and he keeps fucking up his land because he doesn’t know anything about agriculture… After a while, when he realises that his neighbour to one side is a moderately successful gold miner, he becomes obsessed with the idea of becoming a diviner for minerals, like you would see someone doing with a stick and water to this very day.

The land falls into even more disrepair, his family splinters, and his son – who he’d hoped would grow up to respect and love him – instead becomes great friends with the miner on the next farm, and the two of them (together) strike gold on the land owned by the original farmer, but in such a way that the original father (the dad) is not involved in getting rich from it, though obviously gold being found on his land does give him some money, but he doesn’t get wealthy from it because he didn’t prospect his own land properly.

I don’t really understand the legalities involved in this one, but the story makes sense. Greed and sloth, innit.

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The fourth story – ‘The Antheap’ – is also set in and around a gold mine, but this one is huuuuuuge and very successful, and run by another shit.

This mine operator only employs one other white guy on his mine, who is a drunk, but – between drinking bouts – is a very organised and effective chief foreman or chief engineer or whatever, and the mine owner treats this man’s family as if it’s his own, even though he has a huuuuuuge amount of unacknowledged illegitimate children who he has conceived during his regular romps with the women of the native community that do all of the mining.

The novella focuses on the child of the chief engineer who befriends (and teaches to read) the illegitimate son of the mine owner who is the closest in age to him.

This white boy gets a fancy education paid for by his father’s boss, but teaches the actual son as much as possible during the long private school holidays. This means that some of the benefits of the education do end up getting shared (against the owner’s wishes) with his actual son instead of with his quasi son.

This one’s really well done, actually, and is all about the inequalities and the hypocrisies and the meaninglessness of biological familial connections when not culturally acknowledged. Who is whose literal parent means nothing when they’re not any meaningful parental figure to them, right?

Very good.

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The last one, then, is about a poor native boy who has taught himself to read, then moves to the big city on his own and bounces between various positive and negative influences and he encounters many strangers.

Yes, it is evocative, and it is exciting and (almost?) emotionally moving in its depiction of this wayward youth with no understanding of the realities of major conurbations and institutionalised racism…

Lessing dramatises the boy/young man and the various ways in which his naivety is both a help and a hindrance to his attempts to make connections and enjoy himself while also living.

Criminal gangs attempts to recruit him cuz he’s very good at stealing, but political activists try to recruit him, too, because his self-taught literacy, self-confidence and near-eloquence make him a possible contender for being a great activist…

In the end, the criminals make the heavier and sexier impression (one of them is a sexy woman who has sexy sex with him (her job in the gang is to have sex with the local police officers and make the sex so sexy that the criminal gang can operate unimpeded without paying literal cash bribes)) and the protagonist gets involved in increasingly serious crimes, which comes to a head with a botched attempt to rob the leader of the political activists who initially tried to befriend him…

All exciting, picaresque literary play…

But…

What’s difficult about this is that although obviously Lessing’s intention in evoking the life of this young man is to increase representation and show the realities of life for someone like this, it is difficult to see it (70 years on) as something that could be helpful…

This is scandalous, sleazy, thrillery, fun…

It’s gritty and “raw” – sex and booze and violence – and not necessarily sensitive and sympathetic…

Yes, although Lessing would have had first person contact with Black political activists during her time as a young communist in Rhodesia, realistically, she would not have had any in-depth conversations at length with people who were career criminals, with people who were young prostitutes doomed to death, with people who were dying in the dirt, who were addicted to poisonous intoxicants…

She might have met people like the characters in this novel, but she was never of them, but she certainly would not have known them well enough to write their lives accurately, unless the depiction of her life in the non-fiction and fiction of hers I’ve read was not accurate…

So all of this means that ‘Hunger’ feels a little patronising, a little outside of its own wheelhouse.

Which makes it complicated, because Lessing wasn’t writing this from a “look at these hideous disgusting people” kind of perspective, which many other picaresques written by white people about non-white people have been…

It’s that kind of sex and booze and dancing and violence kinda fiction… So it’s fun, but it’s pulpy…

And Doris Lessing was writing from an anti-racist perspective, but it doesn’t really come across like that, perhaps, right?

It sorta comes across as like exploitation-type writing…

It’s an exciting story with good emotive and narrative beats, which is why it’s complicated…

Why my feelings about it are complicated, because I didn’t dislike it as a story, or even as a piece of writing… But I disliked it as an idea.

And yes, these ideas that I’m writing in response maybe aren’t necessarily great ones either…

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Yeah…

Yeah, I enjoyed Five. 

I have quite a few Doris Lessing books unread at home and I will try and get onto those in 2025 as… I… do… I do very much enjoy her writing… even though her books often are very sad, very melancholic and leave one with a mind full of images of the sad realities which we all live among…

Great stuff.