The Four-Gated City (Flamingo Modern Classics)
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Product Description
Product Description
The fifth book in the "Children of Violence" series, a quintet of novels tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa through to old age in a post-nuclear Britain. The other books are "Martha Quest", "A Proper Marriage", "A Ripple from the Storm" and "Landlocked".
About the Author
Doris Lessing is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her first novel, The Grass is Singing, was published in 1950. Among her other celebrated novels are The Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark and Memoirs of a Survivor. She has also published two volumes of her autobiography, Under my Skin and Walking in the Shade. Her most recent novel is The Cleft.
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First Sentence
In front of Martha was grimed glass, its lower part covered with grimed muslin. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
In front of Martha was grimed glass, its lower part covered with grimed muslin. Read the first page
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
You must read all the Martha Quest books, because Doris Lessing has charted out a magical journey from stifled yearning in post First War Southern Africa through earnest communist endeavour and the Second War, painting unforgettable pictures of the 'privileged' colonial scene of the time. Thrill to Mr and Mrs Maynard and their Nexus of power. Remember that most of this is highly autobiograpical. The last book in the series -this one- takes our heroine to London in the Fifties, where her adventures are always reasonable until they dissolve into 'madness' and a post apocalyptic future. These novels blew my mind. Miss Lessing is into Sufism and that's where the power comes from in my view. Anyway, read them and see what you think!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Martha Quest, a young woman with a complex personality and various almost childish, barely controlled defence mechanisms in place, flees the South Africa she grew up in to find a new life in post war Britain.
The change from the hedonistic society she knew to the apathy she finds there makes adaptation seem impossible. She is hounded by friends of her family who cannot understand why she won't take a boring office job, or join in their circle which epitomises her life before.
She at last finds a strange job helping an author tidy up his manuscript, and from here gets absorbed into his complex extended family. During the years of the novel this family grows and evolves, the members mature; and Marta's role as mediator super partes puts her in a complicated position of impotent power with responsabilities she would rather not have.
The elder relations still try to influence public life as they did before the war, with parties and meetings. The younger ones seem completely out of touch, becoming whizz kids or drop-outs.
The evolution of the political world, adapting new comunication technologies to their power play, wrong foots the family who lose the grip they thought their birthright. The country slides towards some ill defined catastrophe as the politicians' spin loses contact with reality.
Martha escapes with a number of members of the family to a remote island, where they manage to scrape a living. The dramatic denouement is not mere survival, but the preciousness of abilities that some members of the family had already had, and which had caused them to be institutionalised, in the 50's and 60's.
Lessing's prose handles the intricazies of these relationships with clarity and compassion, her tale seems prophetic, not only of the vices of today's political world but of a man-made catastrophe that we will perhaps face in the near future.
The change from the hedonistic society she knew to the apathy she finds there makes adaptation seem impossible. She is hounded by friends of her family who cannot understand why she won't take a boring office job, or join in their circle which epitomises her life before.
She at last finds a strange job helping an author tidy up his manuscript, and from here gets absorbed into his complex extended family. During the years of the novel this family grows and evolves, the members mature; and Marta's role as mediator super partes puts her in a complicated position of impotent power with responsabilities she would rather not have.
The elder relations still try to influence public life as they did before the war, with parties and meetings. The younger ones seem completely out of touch, becoming whizz kids or drop-outs.
The evolution of the political world, adapting new comunication technologies to their power play, wrong foots the family who lose the grip they thought their birthright. The country slides towards some ill defined catastrophe as the politicians' spin loses contact with reality.
Martha escapes with a number of members of the family to a remote island, where they manage to scrape a living. The dramatic denouement is not mere survival, but the preciousness of abilities that some members of the family had already had, and which had caused them to be institutionalised, in the 50's and 60's.
Lessing's prose handles the intricazies of these relationships with clarity and compassion, her tale seems prophetic, not only of the vices of today's political world but of a man-made catastrophe that we will perhaps face in the near future.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is great because it takes you beyond the usual vision of sexuality, mental health and psychology, in the form of a novel. The characters are complex and interesting. I read it 25 years ago and it is still my favorite work of fiction. Although it has a 60's flavor, I don't think it will ever be outdated. Martha Quest is radically different than in the earlier volumes of the "Children of Violence" series -- and is a much more interesting character in this book. I enjoyed this book more than Lessing's recent work (which seems more heady to me).
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