Customer Reviews

Ben, in the World

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Doris Lessing proves her literary genius in her novel, Ben, In the World. The author manages to draw her reader into the story of the miserable, friendless main character, Ben Lovatt. His story is memorable and relatable. Likewise, the chain of themes and literary devices Ms. Lessing moves the novel in such a profound and intelligible way.

Ben is a "different" character from the average protagonist in a novel. Many of his traits resemble Grendel in the John Gardner novel of the same name. He is tall, and questionable in looks. Other characters do not believe he is completely human or completely an animal. The New York Times Book Review says, `"He is more poignant than Frankenstein's monster just because he has hope"' ("Critical Praise") Ben Lovatt is a character like no other; Doris Lessing's depiction of the main character of this story is exceptional.

Ben, In the World is a novel everyone should read. Doris Lessing is an amazing storyteller. She captures her reader in well-expressed, interesting stories. She helps the reader to empathize with the outcasts of society. Ben, In the World is a classic in its own right.

At times there seems to be a complete disconnect between "The Fifth Child" and Lessing's sequel. In the first installment, Ben is a monster, physically, emotionally, and morally; he is the epitome of inexplicable evil and an evolutionary "throwback"; he proves to be unredeemable. He seems barely human, and with Lessing offering hints of genetic alteration, perhaps he isn't. One dominant theme is how such a child tests the love of a mother; how can parents retain their love for a murderous criminal, an unrecalcitrant scourge?

But something has happened to Ben between the last page of the first book and the first page of this one. He now seems human, more like Frankenstein's monster rather than the nefarious hooligan we originally met. While the original novel is told mostly from the point of view of Ben's mother, here we see the world through his eyes. Yet the change in his essence is far more than what might be justified by a shift in perspective. Ben, who used to terrify and dominate those around him, now wants to find his way in a society that frightens him; he wants, perhaps, to find his own kind, even to be loved and petted. "You're a good boy, Ben,' one of his newfound guardians says, and "tears came into his eyes . . . expressing his love and gratitude for those words"--sentiments that would have been out of place in the first book. He has been broken in, turned from a tyrant to a victim, a source of pathos rather than horror--and what's missing is why. Or is Lessing simply trying to say we misunderstood Ben all along? Perhaps.

As a sequel, then, "Ben, in the World" seems off-kilter--almost as if we had missed an installment in the journey of Ben's life, and I think it very nearly upsets the themes and power of Lessing's original fable. But this later novel stands on its own--if the reader is willing to imagine that this is somehow a different young man than the one we had originally conjured. We follow Ben as he travels from the streets, to the "love" of a prostitute, to an unwitting existence as a drug mule, to the promise of a film career, to life in South America, to the perils of being a freak in a society that must put everything abnormal under a microscope. The final chapters even read as if they were scenes from a suspense thriller.

This novel, then, can be read as a powerful indictment of the way civilization demonizes the "other"--anyone ugly, misshapen, or somehow different. Ultimately, however, since Lessing has built this novel as a sequel, it's still difficult not to be somewhat disappointed by the nearly Hollywood-inspired plot of "Ben" to the uniqueness and unexpectedness of her previous book.

Doris Lessing may be a skillful writer but to anyone who has ever been made to feel like The Other, especially those who may presently feel cruelly estranged and alienated from those around you, SKIP THIS BOOK. It's definitely not going to encourage you or help your life get better.

I was looking forward to Ben's story and the epilogue to "The Fifth Child" by the same author. I have enjoyed this book even more than I had its predecessor. This is a book about being different. About acceptance and understanding. A book that pierces the heart.
Ben Lovatt. Who was he? What was he? As vulnerable as a newborn baby, yet at times very wild, instinctive, almost... feral.

May I suggest to read "The Fifth Child" first. This sequel stands on its own perfectly but I still feel that the reader would understand Ben's tale better by reading about his birth and family beforehand.

Once again I have admired Ms. Lessing's writing style (just like before, no chapters in this book, just a few pauses) and her ability to convey an emotional pathos with a simplicity that captivates deeply. This book was gripping, powerful and really sad. The quote from a British newspaper on the book cover -I bought the UK book edition- summarizes my feelings "A wonderful novel, flawless as a black pearl".

An intense read, that convinces you the undercurrent of the Fifth Child's malevolence is about to break the surface, which it does not. I originally thought that Ben was autistic and not a genetic throwback, in this case the transitional form (if there was one) from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnum. The book suggests more than it delivers. But the moral/ethical drama of what road Harriet, Ben's mother, should have taken, hangs over her, the broken family, and read, like an executioner's ax.

The Fifth Child worked so brilliantly because every page breathed the conflict between the "nice" normalcy of Ben's family with the horror of this misbegotten child. The opening portrait of this novel continues this tension, in the story of his life with an elderly woman who takes him in from the streets. But from there Ben falls in with socially marginalized characters, some nice, some nasty, but none of whom provides a worthy foil to Ben's anomoly. Here he is nothing but victim, either exploted or pitied, and the story takes on a flat, cartoonish, soap opera quality. Perhaps the author intends some sort of parable in the turn of events that casts Ben as an ersatz film actor, but I found that whole situation witless, derailing what could have been a challenging and engaging story.

Reviewer: david.r.watson@btinternet.com 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?