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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A disappointment,
By
This review is from: Ben, In the World: The Sequel to The Fifth Child (Hardcover)
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.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not a Disappointment, But Instead a Gift to Readers,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Ben, In the World: The Sequel to the Fifth Child (Paperback)
It's true that Ben, In the World is not half the book that The Fifth Child is. But it's not really meant to be. It's aspirations are smaller, and (ironically, given the character) more individual, more singularly human.Since I first read The Fifth Child, I've often wondered what would happen next, when that strange little boy became a man and went out into the world. This book delivers, and in so doing, it makes you feel for Ben in much the same way you originally felt for his mother. It's a gift to readers who loved The Fifth Child to offer this strange and wonderful book, and it's evidence, too, of Doris Lessing's remarkable range.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ben -- the Sequel that enlarges,
By
This review is from: Ben, In the World: The Sequel to The Fifth Child (Hardcover)
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.
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