Women's business
I
started reading The Cleft intrigued by this idea of women
existing in a population without men - spontaneously becoming
pregnant and birthing only girl babies. Then comes the fateful
day when a “monster” is born - a boy baby. How they
react to this change in their circumstances and how it changes
their society is the story of The Cleft.
I haven’t read any Doris Lessing books before
and was expecting something along the lines of Jean M. Auel. Personalised
storyline, detail, descriptions of their daily life.
I was disappointed.
Lessing tells the story through an aging Roman senator
who is an historian. You get a taste of how she can write about
characters through his tale but then she goes from his story to
this buried history of early man. He’s sifting through scraps
of old documents collating the story.
This way Lessing can describe the development of
the Clefts and the Squirts (I imagine you can guess which are
men and which are women) over generations.
But it didn’t work for me. I found it distanced
me from the story. I was more interested in the Senator. I resented
the dry, almost historical sections about the Clefts when that
should have been the focus. I didn’t particularly care about
the various characters (not that there was any character development)
in the early world and while I maintained an interest - I wasn’t
engaged.
I think Lessing missed an opportunity here to bring
the story to life. By treating it as a history she took it out
of the world of fiction and into the world of non-fiction. It
read like a history not a novel and I felt well… pissed
off actually.
It might be your bag, it wasn’t mine.
She won a Nobel Prize for Literature. Meh.
Cellobella
To read more of Cellobella's book reviews, check
out her blog at Red
Sultana.
