Customer Reviews

The Cleft: A Novel

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The Cleft is the new novel by renowned British writer Doris Lessing, author of contemporary classics like The Golden Notebook and Memoirs of a Survivor. This book is the fictional history of a place called the Cleft, a fictional deep cavern that served as the center of a small ancient society composed entirely of women. These women, the Clefts, were the first humans. They reproduced asexually and bore only daughters. But then a new kind of child is born, with unfamiliar appendages; at first, these are called "monsters" and are shunned and mutilated. Eventually the Monsters, or boys ("squirts," as they come to be called), aided by giant eagles, form a separate village and as time goes on the two societies move closer together. This "history" is told by a nameless Roman senator who also interjects with stories about his own marriage and family, since although the story is ostensibly about the history of the place the theme is the relations between men and women. Parallels are drawn between his wife and the Clefts, between his children's development and that of the youngsters of the long-ago time he's recounting.

I'll admit I'm not very familiar with her works (although I'm working to change that as we speak) and I found the book a little tough going at first. It reminded me a little of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, especially that book's coda or epilogue. After a while though I couldn't quite figure out where it was going, and I found the tone to be remote and abstract, and the characters to be almost indistinct. Apart from the narrator and his family, who occupy a very small part of the narrative, there are no more than five distinct characters and they are not terribly well-formed and seem to serve as representatives for entire races and generations of people.

However, when I discussed the book with a friend who is very familiar with the content and tone of Roman histories (that is, histories written during Roman times) I was assured that these very characteristics- abstractness, representative characters and large amounts of speculation- were actually quite typical of the kinds of histories that Romans wrote and that Lessing therefore was doing a very good job of realistically portraying how a Roman would have told this story.

My friend also warned me that abrupt endings were also typical of Roman histories and to be prepared. Good thing, too, because that's exactly what happened.

When it was over I could see better the narrative's arc and understood the overall structure a little better. But did I like the book? Well, yes and no. Lessing is a demanding writer of challenging fiction; to me The Cleft wasn't the kind of book I like, it's the kind of book I admire. I admired it, and I would recommend The Cleft to anyone who is looking for just that kind of reading experience.

I won't go into any detail about the plot of this book because it has already been well-covered by the other reviews. What I will say is that I found this book immensely enjoyable. Where others felt it was dry or meandering, I found it to be interesting, not because it evokes specific imagery like most of the fiction I read, or holds any literary "special effects", but because it amorphous and open. This story reads like something distant. It is a myth, contrived by the author recently, but bearing an aura of a story dusty with age and still somehow relevant. Reading this book is like hearing a well-worn story told by a wise person. It is restrained, but still fascinating from start to finish. Overall, this was soothing to read. It was easy-going, captured my interest, and resonated with my beliefs.

At eighty-eight Doris Lessing has not lost her love of provoking, politicizing, turning traditional beliefs upside down, taking on any topic that she finds interesting and her wonderful sense of humor. THE CLEFT, the newest novel is her ouvre is a very different, though not particularly difficult or long novel, whose premise is that women came first and the creation of men was an afterthought. Needless to say some readers will be deeply offended by this notion and the way Lessing portrays the early inhabitants.
The narrator is a Roman scribe who lives in the time of Nero and has found an ancient set of hidden documents that tell a tale of a world nobody could ever have conceived. He nervously tells the reader who he is and shares bits of his life which humanizes him and adds to his verissimitude.
The story begins ages and ages ago, but time does not exist before and during the copying of the scrolls. He reminds readers that long ago has no real context in trying to date the events that are outlined.
At some time, in some place a community of "sea" women lived on a small beach surrounded by high cliffs and mountains. These creatures had no capacity to think, to be curious, to want to explore, to wonder why about anything. All they knew was to swim, sun themselves on the rocks, eat what the sea provided and give birth at the behest of the moon.
Their only ritual was to climb the rock above them that is called the Cleft because it looks like female genitalia. They push red flowers into the crevice and watch the water that flows through it get red ... then some of them get pregnant. They are called 'Shes' and have always given birth to "babes" who are shes.
Inevitably, one day a boy is born. These vessels had never seen one of these deformed, unacceptable "Monsters" or "squirts" as they were labeled.
As more of them appeared they were tortured, mutilated and ultimately left on the killing rock as food for the eagles, who also inhabited this strange place. Neither the scribe, the "She" telling the story or the reader has any sense of context or time frame.
As the story unfolds readers are privy to the fact that the eagles did not eat the children. Rather they took the infants over the rough mountains to a safe meadow and somehow the first group survived. As more and more babies came to them they approached a doe who lay down and offered her swollen teats to the tiny humans in order to feed them. She licked them and was the only mother/nurturer they knew. They all grew big and strong and in many ways were more industrious than the sea creatures they knew nothing about.
They built primitive huts of branches and leaves, they invented fire, they learned to cook and were always looking for new inventions to work on. Time passed. How much? Nobody knows. And one day a young "She" crawled over the mountains to see where the eagles were taking the squirts. She was frightened, overwhelmed and for the first time saw grown-up "Monsters." These hairy creatures had "sticks" sticking out that didn't look like the squirts of their infancy. From the time of what we know is adolescence these "Monsters" had a yearing and a drive none of them understood until the naked "She" appeared before them. They were begining to realize what their erections were for and as one they allowed their "needs" to guide them. The poor young and oh so innocent creature died during the gang rape.
But since none of the Shes had any curiousity or any allegiance to each other they never missed her. As the tale unfolds more Shes venture over the mountain and the squirts come to spy on them. Eventually the two find intercourse in common and both enjoy it immensely. Eventually as babies are born they make the connection between the "squiet's sticks" entering the Shes has something to do with pregnancy and childhood. The Shes realize that after thier behavior with the Monsters they no longer can get pregnant at the moon's desire. One of the most fascinating themes in THE CLEFT is that sometimes things are not what they seem ... and alternate explanations are fun to play with.
Doris Lessing penned important iconoclastic books like: THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, THE CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE, SUMMER BEFORE THE DARK, BRIEFING FOR A DESCENT INTO HELL and so many others that earned her a place in the pantheon of great writes of the 20th and 21st Centuries. She has written short stories, plays, a libretto, fiction, non-fiction, literary journalism, literary criticism, essays, lyrics and has won many awards.
She has never shied away from controversy and has always written what she believed to be important statements about the relationships between women and men, madness as a way to sanity, mothers and daughters and social injustice in a variety of forms.
She said in an interview that she expects her readers will probably hate this book ... but that did not deter her in writing it. Lessing has a sharp sense of humor and patient readers will understand that it is at work in THE CLEFT. Whether seen as a myth, a parable, a cautionary tale or just plain "weird," one can say only that Lessing, as usual, has written a book that demands attention, discussion and literary respect. In the note at the front of the book Doris Lessing says that after reading an scientific article that proposed men came after women she found this something she wanted to explore. Her inspiration has always come from the world around her and been transformed into some of the best literature etc. ever written.
THE CLEFT should be read with an open mind and valued for its ideas, presentation and value as a story that is certain to leave readers thinking "who knows?"

When an ageing Roman senator agrees to undertake writing a history of the first recorded society, he does so knowing that many questions will remain unanswered, vast gaps in an ancient tale of the beginning of life. Though first recorded via oral tradition, the senator also has fragments of written documents from which he tentatively composes the story of the Cleft. A society composed entirely of women- babies are born through the cycles of the moon- this sedentary group lives quietly in caves above the sea, performing ritual sacrifices, content to remain in the shelters they have always known. With the Old Shes (of indeterminate age) as titular guides, the existence of the women is uneventful until the birth of a male, immediately named a Monster. So remarkably different from the females, with his ugly protuberances, this first Monster is cast out, left on the Killing Rock, where it is expected that the eagles will consume the infant. When more Monsters are born, much to the chagrin of their mothers, the women become curious about their bizarre physical differences, alternately toying with, torturing, starving and abusing the tiny creatures.

Much later (although time has no sense of measurement) it is learned that the eagles have not feasted upon the small carrion, but have delivered them safely to a nearby valley where others of their kind nurture the babes, eventually building a community of Monsters, later to be known as Squirts. As time passes, curiosity prevails and communication between the species, as well as ignorance, ushers in a phase of uneasy coexistence. Nature, of course, prevails and eventually the males become the necessary tools of procreation, the females forced to deal with the males' intransigence to provide more children and a future for the tribes. In Lessing's imaginative scenario, the battle between the sexes evolves, if only in its most elementary incarnation. Age old questions arise, the thoughtlessness of men, the irritating whine of women's complaints ("Don't you care what happens to us?") and the endless cycle of attraction-repulsion that so defines male and female society.

Profoundly simple, yet provocative, Lessing easily engages the reader in a scenario that speaks to the uneasy truce that has always attended male-female relations, the troublesome issues of gender coexistence, combined with an irresistible attraction. Which came first, male or female, is not addressed in this engaging portrait of early tribal identity; the Cleft assumes dominance merely by its existence. Yet the inevitable need for procreation transcends even the most egregious differences, an interdependence that has plagued humanity from the distant unrecognizable past to the present, where "Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars". Luan Gaines/2007.

Doris Lessing has been writing for more than 50 years and has long been considered "the matriarch" of contemporary British literature. Now in her 87th year, she has written THE CLEFT, a very studied and controversial book.

Of it she told an interviewer, "I saw a science magazine which said that the basic human type is feminine and that men came afterward. So I've written a story based on this... I noticed that my typist at the publishing house was shocked by some of the words I used. I can't wait to see what people make of it." She opined upon this notion in another interview, when she said that the work was controversial and "not politically correct. Some people will hate every word."

These comments resound with the confidence and sense of impishness she displayed when the diary of a good neighbor and IF THE OLD COULD, each by Jane Somers, was published. This event came about as the result of a bet wherein she wanted to prove that an unknown writer does not get the same attention as one who is established. When those books barely sold, they were combined into a paperback titled THE DIARIES OF JANE SOMERS by Doris Lessing and it flew off the shelves.

Lessing drastically changed direction when she wrote a science fiction series that resulted in her removal from the list of possible Nobel Prize winners. If she had not been so punished for her courage to explore new fiction forms, then THE CLEFT would have been the one that struck her off the list. Clearly, Lessing has never been afraid to follow her muse wherever it takes her and to write in her own inimitable way about the issues she finds important. As a writer, she has never been cowed.

And her oeuvre can be seen in evolutionary stages: in her very early works she wrote about Communism, which reflected her strong attitudes towards "society" and the mechanisms that make it work --- or not. In novels like The Children of Violence quartet and the golden notebook, her socialist views were entwined with her never-changing take on female-male relationships. Then she published the soft science fiction series, which wove together strong themes about human psychology and Sufism (which is the belief system by which she lives her life) in a new form but not one that changed her core message.

Now, in THE CLEFT, Lessing retells the story of how humankind evolved. This is a satiric portrait of the woman-man conundrums, mistakes, values, etc. that still shape the issues (rightly or wrongly) expressed in men are from mars, women are from venus. Feminist readers and free women hopefully will read between the lines in order to see what Lessing is really trying to say.

The narrator of this highly speculative and provoking tale is an aged senator who lives in ancient Rome. He discovers some ancient manuscripts, gleaned from oral histories, that tell tales that become the stuff of myth and legend. As he works his way through the fragments of the old writings, he finds a compelling but disturbing story: in a prehistoric time, in a "place near the sea," is an isolated community populated only by women known as the Clefts. These "sea creatures" evidently lived very peaceably --- laying in the sun, swimming, residing in caves and having no "intelligence" beyond their primitive survival skills. Any concept of learning, thinking, philosophy, insight or interference by other two-legged creatures --- namely men, a species they have never seen --- is nowhere. Their home is situated under a rock formation called The Cleft, which resembles female genitalia. Their existence seems safe in that they simply procreate at the whim of the moon tides and give birth only to girls.

Then, inevitably, a baby who looks like nothing the "Shes" have ever seen is born. At first this "thing" is thought to be a "deformed mistake," but as they continue to be born, they are labeled "Monsters" or "Squirts" (readers need no gloss to understand this comical reference) and left on the Cleft for the eagles to eat. Others are castrated in a gruesome attempt to transform them into girls. Eventually, they stop torturing those babies, stick to the original plan and leave them to become food for the eagles, a constant presence in this small world. But, unbeknownst to the Shes, the eagles take the infants to a safe place, nurture them (which saves their lives) and allows them to grow up. They mature, learn to build a community of their own, go on to invent fire, and build rafts so they can navigate the river beside their space. For the most part, they are content but feel "some kind" of drive within themselves that needs relief, though they don't know how to find it.

As time passes, one of the young women ventures over the mountains to see what happened to the Monsters. She lands in a place of horror. "Then she was standing in the middle of a large group of Monsters. They were of all sizes, some children, some already past middle age...all of them naked, and when seeing them, the monsters, with their squirts pointed at her...she screamed, as if she had been doing it all her life. [Then] instincts that had ranged free an untrammeled and often unrecognized spoke all at once...the mass rape went on, it went on, they were feeling hungers it seemed they could never sate." Of course, the Cleft died.

As the story moves on, an inevitable coming together of Clefts and Monsters arrives. The Clefts begin to get pregnant and give birth to both Clefts and Monsters. The moon is no longer the means to procreation, and "civilization" now has a footprint. Ironically, a short time passes before the division between the sexes begins. The men see themselves much as men have seen themselves forever; they use their size and physical strength to control who does what. The women are expected to care for the children and feed the men. This makes for dissention between the two groups, but Squirts and Clefts using their bodies seem to quiet things down. Since time is not a concept remotely available to those who tell the history, readers have no way to place any of the so-called "events" in context. The old Roman scribe explains this over and over as he too finds it frustrating not to know when "this" or "that" happened.

THE CLEFT is a frame story that works on several levels. The narrator, who lives in the time of Nero, tells of his life and alludes to the society he inhabits. Between these bits of information, readers are lured into the interpretation of the ancient writings he brings forth --- an alien notion of how the human race began and flourished. Then, we meet a Cleft named Maire who is interrogating a Monster, someplace, sometime. The senator and readers who "get it" will understand that the author is still playing with the "intercourse" between women and men. Lessing comes full circle in her observation that women are stable and men lack the facility to rise beyond the level of being the second and weaker creation. She follows her muse further into soft sci-fi rife with phantasmagoria and heretical notions that have always provoked her readers while clearly enchanting her.

--- Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum

I think Doris Lessing's work is often misunderstood. For instance, this Cleft book seems to be generally regarded as belittling the ways of men. I found her latests exploration of a favorite theme -- "can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em" -- more balanced than not. By positing that females preceded males in the evolutionary arc of humankind she's acting on a scientific hunch, but science is notoriously unsentimental and so is Lessing. To characterize her Clefts as a group they are nurturing, conservative, sluggish cave-dwellers with somewhat of a bunker mentality. As a group they lack the ability to think innovative thoughts; the few Clefts who break this mold still retain their innate caution and mostly abhor risk, which would include exploration of possibilities beyond those most readily apparent. To characterize her Squirt Monsters as a group they are restless, energetic, careless of consequence, and inventive. If any one group is cast as most cruel (arguably, none is) it would be the Old Shes.

I like Lessing's work because, though her language never dazzles, her ideas shine. She works at the very essence of what it is to be human, and she doesn't flinch -- which makes it harsh sometimes, but bracing. It's never gratuitous, this harshness. Sometimes it's not even very entertaining. But her thoughts about how we might be/might have once been humans are nourishing and provoking.

This book is one of her most accomplished fables, and like her other fables it has a structure that seems awkward but, in the end, effective. The narrator is piecing together fragmented accounts from a distant past, and the gender relations of his world are shadowed by the gender-birth tale he tells. The third parallel is our own imperial times, similarly sex crazed and lively of mind. One of Lessing's many refusals to compromise (a major contributing factor to the clunkiness of her prose) is using words as approximations only, when no words exist in English for emerging concepts she wants to speculate upon. Her narrators can step out of the frame, even, and comment on this. They are not omniscient because the author herself cannot be. But she, and they, ask good questions.

I often wait a day or two before writing a review. I find that my appreciation of a work often changes on reflection, sometimes magnifying the experience, sometimes diminishing it. In the case of Doris Lessing's The Cleft, a little distance has considerably enhanced the initial impression, which was less than favourable.

The Cleft is quite a short novel. It just seems long. The language isn't difficult, likewise neither are setting or plot. Not that there's much of either.

We begin with a society that's entirely female and where procreation just happens. When "monsters" appear, babies with ugly extra bits on the front, they are either killed or mutilated. Killing involves leaving the tiny bundles of flesh on a rock for eagles to take. But the cunning birds aren't always hungry.

A community of squirts - grown-up monsters - begins to thrive and the women find they have to interact. New activities are mutually invented and suddenly all is change. A new race or perhaps merely a new society develops via proto-parents, develops at least twice, in fact. Journeys are made. Promised lands reveal promise. New orders establish themselves.

Meanwhile, we realise that this creation myth is being related by a Roman gentleman who has his own domestic battle of the sexes. At first sight this extra layer of narrative seems redundant. Eventually an elemental force binds the myth to the narrator's present. The link is tenuous and as a plot device, its impact fails. It does, however, conceptually link the narrator with the related myth.

After all, Romans were themselves created, they believed, out of a myth where a pair of lads were nurtured by an animal. The military tradition (equals male) by which Rome prospered was founded on the social control of Sparta, not the demos of Athens. Sparta was probably the ultimate macho male society, where the old were revered and women were chattel, though they could own property. Doris Lessing at one point refers to Spartan youth being separated from their families at the age of seven to hone military and combat skills via camaraderie. Such an exile the monsters of The Cleft invent for themselves.

Galling at first reading and later informative were the repeated gender stereotypes that dominate Doris Lessing's narrative. The repeated use of these bludgeoning concepts had more than an air of artifice. Looking back, I now see that this actually enhanced what emerged as the book's overarching idea, which is our need for myth and the necessity of reducing it to the level of populist fairy tale.

The eagles who nurtured the monsters play god. The way we organise our society demands certain role models, while ceremony, often barbaric, such as genital mutilation, allies us to ideals and ideas we prefer not to question. In the end we have to explain elemental forces beyond our control and myth is our refuge.

Stick with The Cleft. It's a tortuous journey, but it is worth it in the end, an end whose only solace may only be found in myth.

I've been a fan of Doris Lessing for over thirty years but haven't read anything of hers in some time. I loved The Golden Notebook and The Summer Before the Dark, and found Canopus in Argos, her science fiction series, fascinating. I was delighted when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. In truth, I was surprised she was still alive.

The Cleft is tale narrated by a Roman senator and scholar about pre-history. He finds his information from myths and fragments of clay tablets written long after the time of the Clefts. It is a "sounds like the truth to me" story. The Clefts were the first community--a community of women living by the sea near huge up-cropping of rocks, one of which had a large cleft, a caldera that steamed with noxious gases. This community of women gave birth only to girls until one day, a "deformed" child arrived--a boy. The first deformed children were given back to the goddess in the cleft until one woman refused. Thus came the beginning of history and the beginning of union between women and men as well as conflict between women and men.

Interspersed between the telling of the tale is the senator's life story, which has many parallels with the history. The senator also speculates as he writes, "We assume that because these people had shapes like ours, were so much like us, that they felt the same. Perhaps no one had taught them loneliness? Is that such a ridiculous question?... There is not much in the records, for instance of love..."

Who knows what tales will be birthed next by the remarkable Doris Lessing? She is the storyteller of the twentieth century and continues her legend into the twenty-first. Her imaginings all hold a kernel of possible truth.

by Judith Helburn
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

Given the fascinating idea behind The Cleft and the author's reputation, I really didn't see how it could miss. I guess I should have realized what we readers were in for when I discovered what the title meant. Yes, an octogenarian Nobel laureate is indeed capable of that sort of immaturity.

Nevertheless, I'm glad I read it. For one thing, it will probably garner unfair accusations from anti-feminists of being sexist against men. Having slogged through the book, I can safely say it isn't: it serves up just as many stereotypes about women as about men. Sexist or not, the story of how mankind rose up to oppress womankind could have made for some great historical fiction. But we don't even get that. The meandering, rather confusing final chapters lead to nothing but a garden variety battle-of-the-sexes tale that happens to take place thousands of years ago.

Even the one truly great aspect of the book, the early pages' portrayal of an all-female society and how it changed with the appearance of the first males, suffers from underdevelopment. Just how is it that prehistoric women could reproduce without men? Lessing herself doesn't appear to have figured it out. How did they lose that ability? It seems to be vaguely related to the "discovery" of sex; men became necessary only after women realized that they could be necessary, or something.

In short, Lessing begins to set the stage for a terrific story, and doesn't even finish setting it, much less deliver the story.

The Cleft is a speculative look at how the first humans split into female/male gender and developed individuality and free will. I found the primordial world evoked by Doris Lessing and her hypothesis that the female gender predated the male fascinating and believable. (Spontaneous conception? Why not?) In the beginning all was female, an amorphorous, chthonian mass, living in and out of warm caves and rocky pools at the edge of the sea, a soft-edged, slow-brained tribe focused on feminine reproductive cycles and animal sensation. The interplay between these ancient humans and the wild earth, fire, water and nature spirits around them is elemental, poetic and inspiring. The appearance of baby boys ("squirts") brings the missing principle that activates the potential of the feminine, the active "yang", into the world. That these female creatures were generally obese ("their flesh all about them in layers of fat, shapeless things lolling about, sea slugs enclosed by skins of jellified water") makes me think that Lessing has stumbled upon a scientific fact, that there must be an ancient "obesity gene". This would explain why some people cannot lose weight no matter how hard they try! The flabby, waddling, manatee-like "Old Shes" are our ancient Ancestors. Unfortunately, I have a problem with the narrator/historian of the story - how could such a compassionate, humble, perceptive and sensitive man be a product of the militarized patriarchy that was Rome? Impossible. A must-read (especially for those who honor the Divine Feminine) by a Master of speculative fiction, myth and fable.