This is the last of the five-novel "The Children of Violence" series by Doris Lessing. The series spans the life of Martha Quest, from her birth and childhood in South Africa, through her involvement with the Communist movement, and to her death in a bleak prediction of the fate of society. In The Four-Gated City, we find Martha as a middle-aged woman, drifting in search of a purpose. She has "grown up" and out of the strong political leanings she had as a youth, but ultimately finds herself involved in the new Communist movement of England, circa 1950.
Lessing struggles with many troubling themes throughout this novel, one being the questionable value of mass movements / mass demonstrations against a government or society that refuses to allow dissenting voices to be heard -- a society in which status quo is defended with frequently violent outcomes. Martha struggles to reconcile her desire to "do good" with her increasingly jaded view that the kids just don't know what they're demonstrating for anymore:
"In other parts of Britain on that Easter Monday, groups of young people, mostly young men, were engaged in violently rushing from place to place, in gangs, either on motor-bikes, or on their feet, but what they were for or against was not clearly stated or undestood. . .
. . . Most of these poeple on this march were teenagers . . . In parts it ran fast - violent; people shouted slogans, and generated anger; the temperature was high. A few minutes later it ran quiet again. Those who needed the high temperature, were attracted to the parts of the column where the slogan-shouting and the aggressive singing took place. Others moved away to parts where people chatted, or sang indifferently. The fact was, the people on this March, united by the black and white banners, were extremely different from each other, had little in common except for the leaven of organizers."
I was reading this novel during the week of the protests at the World Bank in Washington, DC, (where I live and work), and saw how easily Lessing's writing transcended time and place, and how universally applicable her ideas are:
"[B]ut what event does not get swallowed in lies and half-truths within weeks?"
and
"[F]or this new resurgence of the left, like every blossoming of the left before it, ran true to the rule that more time must be spent on fighting allies and comrades than the enemy."
Towards the end of the novel, we get a glimpse of the "four-gated city" utopia that Lessing has been building up to. And in this ending, Lessing echoes some of the same concepts that Ayn Rand fought against in Atlas Shrugged:
"My personal feeling is that these so-called simple life places should be forbidden. I can see the attraction of course -- who can't? But it's a very selfish way of living. It withdraws much-needed skilled labour. If some of the riff-raff and trouble-makers would only go off and occupy themselves on the farms -- but no, it has to be people who could give something to the country if they didn't think they had better things to do."
During the course of her writing career, Lessing has also written a science fiction series, and that bent can also be seen here in this novel as she introduces some fantastic concepts of the nature of mental illness and its treatment. However, in her predictions of the future, she was not very far off when she wrote about:
"the most sinister development of all: the docketing of every kind of information on citizens, not by government and police, but by business firms (on centralized computers) which information was used by police and government. It was a logical development in a society where the needs of industry came before anything else."
This is not an easy book to get through -- both because of its size (671 pages) and its thought-provoking themes. But then, nothing worthwhile is ever easily gotten; and reading The Four-Gated City is an endeavor with many intellectual rewards.
