FictionEarly New Year, and already a new novel from the great Doris Lessing, writer of The Golden Notebook and other splendid novels, such as Martha Quest, The Four-Gated City, her outspoken autobiography, Under My Skin, and many, many more.
Doris Lessing, almost 90 years of age, brilliantly intelligent, still outrageous, courageous. Still writing. Doris Lessing, who, it is said, was considered for some time by the Nobel Prize committee or those who influence its decisions, but whose name was dropped from the unofficial longlist, the one which is chatted about at Stockholm book launches, after she had written some science fiction novels.
Can one really be barred from the Nobel Prize because one has written science fiction? One hopes that that would all depend on the quality of the science fiction.
Lessing has written some good science fiction and fantasy novels, and some pretty bad. The Cleft belongs to the latter category. It is possibly the worst book she has ever written.
A myth about gender, it is narrated by a Roman historian called Marcus (Marcus being the first name that comes into your head when you are finding a tag for a character in ancient Rome, I imagine). Anyway, this Marcus discovers some ancient documents and bits of "oral tradition". These records contain the story of the origin of humankind.
"In a recent scientific article it was remarked that the basic and primal human stock was probably female, and that males came along later, as a kind of cosmic afterthought," writes Lessing, in a short foreword to the novel, by far the best part of the book. Then comes an account - you couldn't call it a story; it has little or no epic structure - of these original females, the Clefts. The Clefts live in a cleft, or near a cleft, on a lovely island, and flop about in the water quite a lot, and are perfectly happy. They produce children by parthenogenesis (ie, without mating). If the babies are girls, all is well, but if they are male, they call them Squirts (naturally, everyone speaks English, Squirts, Clefts and Romans) and drop them in the sea or leave them to perish on a cliff-top. Eagles, however, take these abandoned Squirts and deposit them in another valley. And a race of Squirts evolves, developing in isolation from the Clefts. Eventually, the Squirts and the Clefts get together, and after certain mishaps and misunderstandings . . . well, they don't get far beyond the mishaps and misunderstandings. But they do mate.
Paradise lost.
SO FAR, SO good. And in its underlying gender psychology the book is convincing enough - Marcus's views on the gender issue largely concur with Lessing's as expressed in the prologue. Men are different from women, he deduces, from the historical evidence and his personal observation of the Roman lads. Women are more cautious and caring, men are more daring and thoughtless. Women keep their cave - or cleft, or villa - tidy, men mess the place up. Women know how to mind the young, men can't be trusted to do the job properly.
In fact, although men have some good traits, such as bravery, they are basically pretty "unstable and erratic".
"I think most people would agree with this," Doris Lessing writes, in her foreword.
Quite. But it is not news, even when articulated by an ancient Roman. It's not profound or subtle. In short, it's not a brilliant enough insight into gender characteristics to be worth writing a myth about.
The frame story, involving Marcus the narrator and his young wife Lydia, is more promising. But it delivers little. They are Romans of the Hollywood variety - going to the circus, watching the legions dash off in chariots to tame Germania, and so on. Their emperor - who is mentioned almost as an afterthought about three-quarters of the way through the book - is the Roman emperor every dog on the street can name (guess for yourself).
THERE ARE NO chapters. Chapters are out of vogue and it is a pity because they help when the going gets tough. Not that this book is tough. Rather, like the Clefts, it is flaccid. Doris Lessing is one of the world's great thinkers but not enough thinking has gone into this work. And not enough invention. It is far too generalised, too lacking in particularity, to engage the reader. It seems lazy.
There may be some point that I am missing, concerning unreliable narrators, the selectivity of historians, or something else. But even if this were the case I would have to pronounce myself deeply disappointed with this book.
Doris Lessing should still be seriously considered for the Nobel Prize. She will be read when many laureates are long forgotten. But the sooner we all forget The Clefts the better.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a novelist. Her latest novel is Hurlamaboc (Cois Life, 2006). A new novel in English, Anna Kelly Sweeney, will be published in the autumn
The Cleft By Doris Lessing Fourth Estate, 260pp. £ 16.99