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Intelligent, sensitive, and fiercely passionate, Martha Quest is a young woman living on a farm in Africa, feeling her way through the torments of adolescence and early womanhood. She is a romantic idealistic in revolt against the puritan snobbery of her parents, trying to live to the full with every nerve, emotion, and instinct laid bare to experience. For her, this is a time of solitary reading daydreams, dancing — and the first disturbing encounters with sex. The first of Doris Lessing's timeless Children of Violence novels, Martha Quest is an endearing masterpiece.
| ISBN-13: | 9780060959692 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 01/23/2001 |
| Series: | Children of Violence Series , #1 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 642,445 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.76(d) |
Hometown:
London, EnglandDate of Birth:
October 22, 1919Place of Birth:
Persia (now Iran)
Two elderly women sat knitting on that part of the veranda which was screened from the sun by a golden shower creeper; the tough stems were so thick with flower it was as if the glaring afternoon was dammed against them in a surf of its own light made visible in the dripping, orange-coloured clusters. Inside this coloured barrier was a darkened recess, rough mud walls (the outer walls of the house itself) forming two sides, the third consisting of a bench loaded with painted petrol tins which held pink and white geraniums. The sun splashed liberal gold through the foliage, over the red cement floor, and over the ladies. They had been here since lunchtime, and would remain until sunset, talking, talking incessantly, their tongues mercifully let off the leash. They were Mrs Quest and Mrs Van Rensberg; and Martha Quest, a girl of fifteen, sat on the steps in full sunshine, clumsily twisting herself to keep the glare from her book with her own shadow.
She frowned, and from time to time glanced up irritably at the women, indicating that their gossip made it difficult to concentrate. But then, there was nothing to prevent her moving somewhere else; and her spasms of resentment when she was asked a question, or her name was used in the family chronicling, were therefore unreasonable. As for the ladies, they sometimes allowed their eyes to rest on the girl with that glazed look which excludes a third person, or even dropped their voices; and at these moments, she lifted her head to give them a glare of positive contempt; for they were seasoning the dull staple of their lives - servants, children, cooking - with a confinement or scandal of some kind;and since she was reading Havelock Ellis on sex, and had taken good care they should know it, the dropped voices had the quality of an anomaly. Or rather, she was not actually reading it: she read a book that had been lent to her by the Cohen boys at the station, while Ellis lay, like an irritant, on the top step, with its title well in view. However, there are certain rites in the talk of matrons and Martha, having listened to such talk for a large part of her life, should have learned that there was nothing insulting, or even personal, intended. She was merely expected to play the part 'young girl' against their own familiar roles.
At the other end of the veranda, on two deck-chairs planted side by side and looking away over the bush and the mealie fields, were Mr Quest and Mr Van Rensberg; and they were talking about crops and the weather and the native problem. But their backs were turned on the women with a firmness which said how welcome was this impersonal talk to men who lived shut into the heated atmosphere of the family for weeks at a time, with no refuge but the farmwork. Their talk was as familiar to Martha as the women's talk; the two currents ran sleepily on inside her, like the movements of her own blood, of which she was not conscious except as an ache of irritation when her cramped position made her shift her long, bare and sunburnt legs. Then, when she heard the nagging phrases 'the Government expects the farmers to . . .' and 'The kaffirs are losing all respect because . . .' she sat up sharply; and the irritation overflowed into a flood of dislike for both her parents. Everything was the same; intolerable that they should have been saying the same things ever since she could remember; and she looked away from them, over the veld.
In the literature that was her tradition, the word farm evokes an image of something orderly, compact, cultivated; neat farm-house in a pattern of fields. Martha looked over mile or so of bush to a strip of pink ploughed land; and then the bush, dark green and sombre, climbed a ridge to another patch of exposed earth, this time a clayish yellow; and then, ridge after ridge, fold after fold, the bush stretched to a line of blue kopjes. The fields were a timid intrusion on a landscape hardly marked by man; and the hawk which circled in mile-wide sweeps over her head saw the house, crouched on its long hill, the cluster of grass huts which was the native compound huddled on a lower rise half a mile away; perhaps a dozen patches of naked soil - and then nothing to disturb that ancient, down-peering eye, nothing that a thousand generations of his hawk ancestors had not seen.
The house, raised high on its eminence into the blue and sweeping currents of air, was in the centre of a vast basin, which was bounded by mountains. In front, there were seven miles to the Dumfries Hills; west, seven miles of rising ground to the Oxford Range; seven miles east, a long swelling mountain which was named Jacob's Burg. Behind, there was no defining chain of kopjes, but the land travelled endlessly, without limit, and faded into a bluish haze, like that hinterland to the imagination we cannot do without - the great declivity was open to the north.
Over it all curved the cloudless African sky, but Martha could not look at it, for it pulsed with light; she must lower her eyes to the bush; and that was so familiar the vast landscape caused her only the prickling feeling of claustrophobia.
She looked down at her book. She did not want to read it; it was a book on popular science, and even the title stiffened her into a faint but unmistakable resentment. Perhaps, if she could have expressed what she felt, she would have said that the calm factual air of the writing was too distant from the uncomfortable emotions that filled her; perhaps she was so resentful of her surroundings and her parents that the resentment overflowed into everything near her. She put that book down and picked up Ellis. Now, it is hardly possible to be bored by a book on sex when one is fifteen...
Plot Summary
We first meet Martha Quest, the heroine of Doris Lessing's insightful, visionary novel, sitting on the veranda of her parents' farm, listening with irritation to a conversation between her mother and a neighbor. Martha's frown, the intensity of her annoyance, and the fact that she is reading-and bored with-a popular book about sex, set the stage for this extraordinary young woman's coming-of-age story. As Lessing's novel takes her away from her parents' home and into an independent life in the city, Martha will frown almost incessantly; feel irritated by the frivolous nature of her fellow citizens; contemplate deeply the world around her; and read voraciously. In many ways, Martha Quest is a typical teenaged girl. And yet, in so many other ways, she is not. Set in a particular time-the eve of World War II-and in a particular place-the British colony of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)-the novel offers countless opportunities for the reader to reflect on issues that continue to plague us today: racism and religious prejudice, gender roles and stereotypes, the dominance of one society over another, and the encroachment of modern thinking on established tradition. But it is Martha's own struggles with these issues that give the book its power and insight. Martha is, like many young people, trying to make sense of the conflicts that are inevitable in a country simmering with social unrest, and in a world on the brink of war. She has developed most of her beliefs from books she has read-everything from fairy tales to sophisticated political tracts-but, living within the sheltered confines of her parent's colonial farm, has yet to apply these beliefs to real life.
WhenMartha does get the chance to put her principles to work, her experience is both heroic and woefully tragic. Like any young person striking out on her own for the first time, Martha is lured by the temptations of material goods, of being accepted by a popular crowd. Nor is she immune to the effects of alcohol or the mystery of sex. With immense compassion Lessing portrays Martha's struggle to balance her strong idealistic beliefs with the realities of adult life, and with the general apathy of her social group. Stunned into confused silence by the brutality she witnesses in her friends' treatment of the Africans and each other, Martha escapes to her rented room filled with remorse and self-loathing. Determined to change the world tomorrow, she throws herself into bed-only to find herself the next morning drawn back to a carefree life of dancing, drinking, and romance. Carried like a twig through the whirlpool and eddies of adult life, Martha ultimately ends up engaged to a man she barely knows. She is determined to be happy, yet she is nagged by an inner voice that tells her she is following in the footsteps of her mother's own unfulfilling marriage. What will happen to Martha Quest? Lessing leaves us wanting more-and does indeed give us more in subsequent novels about Martha. But even if we read only this first installment in the Children of Violence sequence, we have met an unforgettable character, one whose perceptions about and sensitivity to her changing world reflect the burgeoning consciousness of a passionate young woman.
Questions for Discussion
Lessing's life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against the cultural and biological imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood. Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing is a process of "setting a distance," taking the "raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general."
Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individual's own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good.
Over the years, Lessing has attempted to accommodate what she admires in the novels of the 19th century -- their "climate of ethical judgment" -- to the demands of 20th-century ideas about consciousness and time. After writing the Children of Violence series (1952-1959), a formally conventional bildungsroman (novel of education) about the growth in consciousness of her heroine, Martha Quest, Lessing broke new ground with The Golden Notebook (1962), a daring narrative experiment in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing depth and detail. Anna Wolf, like Lessing herself, strives for ruthless honesty as she aims to free herself from the chaos, emotional numbness and hypocrisy afflicting her generation.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing began to explore more fully the quasi-mystical insight Anna Wolf seems to reach by the end of The Golden Notebook. Her "inner-space fiction" deals with cosmic fantasies Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971), dreamscapes and other dimensions (Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974), and science-fiction probings of higher planes of existence (Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979-1983). These reflect Lessing's interest, since the 1960s, in Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufi mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation can come about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of society.
Lessing's other novels include The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Fifth Child (1988); she also published two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers (The Diary of a Good Neighbor, 1983, and If the Old Could., 1984). In addition, she has written several nonfiction works, including books about cats, a love since childhood. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 was recently joined by Walking in the Shade: 1949 to 1962, both published by HarperCollins.
I’ve long admired Charlie Jane Anders’ work—both her reviews and cultural commentary over on io9, where she is editor-in-chief, and her award-winning short fiction. Her first genre novel, All the Birds in the Sky, is a perfect synthesis of both sides of her writing life: a deeply felt story of love, magic, science, growing up an […]
