A truly beastly hero
Miranda France BEN, IN THE WORLD by Doris Lessing Flamingo, £16.99, pp. 178 Twelve years ago, Doris Lessing pub- lished a cautionary tale about a kind, liber- al couple with a large house, four well- loved children, friends and holidays galore. Into this happy home is born 'the Fifth Child', a violent, monstrous boy whose presence threatens the family's stability and raises dreadful philosophical questions. How can his parents love him? How can such a creature ever find his place in the social order?
Miss Lessing, now in her eighties, pro- vides few answers in this sequel. Ben is 18, though he looks much older. He isn't a normal human being, but what is he exact- ly? The old lady who looks after him for a while and teaches him how to keep clean and brush his unruly hair, thinks he might be a Yeti. Others call him a 'throw- back' or a 'beast'. Sometimes he cannot restrain a bark or growl, but, when he speaks, Ben has an educated accent (a posh Yeti, then?).
From the start, we see how Ben's inabili- ty to understand the world makes him prey to the abuse of every chancer he meets. After being exploited as a labourer, he becomes an unwitting drugs courier, to France. There he is stranded until a direc- tor spots him and takes him to Brazil to star in a film about a primitive race.
In this novel, the men are bad, the women good. In other ways too, it reads like a fable. The style is simplistic; Miss Lessing dispatches more than one storyline with the observation that it had a 'happy ending'. There are leaps of narrative, moreover, that would do Evil Knievel proud.
As a strange moral tale, Ben, in the World is certainly intriguing — the writing is good and there is no part of it that drags. At the start of the book we learn a bit about Ben's hopelessness, his conviction that he will be cheated, his need for love, especially maternal love, the sense of free- dom he can occasionally get, for instance on the back of a motorbike. As the plot advances, however, Ben becomes increasingly distanced. In Brazil, where the would-be film-makers meet over long, cheerful suppers, he can be heard in the next-door room, banging his head against the wall.
Having put Ben's loneliness and alien- ation at the heart of the novel, Miss Less- ing does not give much insight into them. Characters who meet this semi-human creature make little effort to examine the feelings of discomfort or fear he provokes. The philosophical dimension of Ben's condition is barely explored. Finally, the author herself seems to lose interest in him as she turns her attention to the more appealing story of a Brazilian girl — the Beauty to his Beast — who tries to befriend him. In a strange way this deser- tion by his own creator compounds Ben's isolation.
This is a book about him, and yet he doesn't occupy centre stage. The reader never really gets beneath his hirsute skin.
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