Capture الطفل الخامس Curated By Doris Lessing Conveyed As Electronic Format

Quién es el villano aquí Es realmente Ben un changeling Harriet y David son pésimos padres Creo que nunca encontraré respuestas satisfactorias a estas preguntas, pero sí reafirmé el miedo que me da la maternidad en todas sus etapas.
RESPECT a todos aquellos que gestan y crian un hijo, “We just wanted to be better than everyone else, thats all, We thought we were. ”

Well this was an interesting little story about the perils of parenthood, We have Harriet and David, two people who feel oldfashioned in the world of thes because they want to have a lot of children, They have the audacity to think everything will turn out wellthat they deserve to have what they want, But life isnt like that, You just dont know.

“Then something bad happened, ”

It took me a little bit to get over my disappointment at the ending, I really wanted some big metaphoric event to occur, But the author doesnt answer any questions hereshe only asks,

Doris Lessing lived through two world wars, One question I think shes asking is what do we do about the violence, the primal ferociousness from our animal nature that is obviously still present in our culture in our DNA

What do we do to come.
The book took a while to heat up, but what a powerful, devastating ending, As a devoted Trekkie from the age of, I've particularly valued the original Star Trek because of the social themes laced within the creative visions of scifi, A race of people, each with faces that are equal measures of black and white, who have destroyed each other because the black and white are on opposite sides of the face is much more than a fanciful representation of an odd culture in decline.
A moving rock that kills ceases to be an enemy when we discover it is protecting offspring that have mistakenly been "mined" as something valuable to other races.
For me the best of scifi is that which bends our credulity without breaking it that which blends the impossible with the possible in ways we can recognize.


The Fifth Child did not read as a scifi to me, but that is what the author claims it to be, Lessing reports that the inspiration was something akin to a fairy tale where a child from another world lands within an otherwise "normal" family, and she explores the possible outcomes as this fifth child changes the dynamics and nature of this family.
In retrospect, I can see these elements in the story, but my own background and life heavily influenced my interpretations as I read it before knowing her intention.


The story I read was one experienced by many families, where the ideal of family life is significantly challenged by the reality of birthing unique human beings.
The first four children appear to meet all the romantic expectations held by the parents, and then comes Ben, who was difficult from the moment of conception, He doesn't fit in. He struggles, and his struggles ripple out to cause disruption to his parents, siblings and the extended family, We watch as that disruption leads to difficult choices, and remedies, which further isolate and alienate family members from each other, But we also see Ben achieve a degree of success in unlikely places, and find a way to belong, even if not in ways envisioned by his parents and may or may not be healthy.


Beneath the fairy tale quality of where Ben came from and what's "wrong" with him are threads of parental expectation and disappointment, the struggle to deal with truly challenging children, the path to belong somewhere, the gray dance between loving our children and simultaneously being horrified by them, acceptance versus rejection, and the necessity of giving up on our dreams sometimes.
It might even have hinted at how our own hidden darkness could affect how we see and treat our young,

This seemed much more real and possible than I usually find in scifi, but it did fit the overall bill of providing a fanciful blend of the two.
I think my experience of knowing many challenged and challenging kids and what their parents experienced colored my read on this one, To others, it simply appeared somewhat horrifying, To me, it mirrors the real life of many, A somewhat simplistic tale, told without adornment, but offers a lot to think and talk about, Spoilers

Luke explained, "They're sending Ben away because he isn't really one of us, "

What a slippery, opentoambiguity, little story this is! I've seen review after review that reads this as a horror story of the perfect family destroyed by a monstrous child, with the inevitable gestures towards sitelinkWe Need to Talk About Kevin and sitelinkRosemary's Baby.
But, to me, Lessing is doing something far smarter and more politicallyengaged here: Harriet and David may not be narrators but we do see the story via their viewpoints, especially Harriet's.
The extent to which we choose to share their values, worldview, implicit politics and, by extension, their understanding and placement of Ben will inflect, even control, the way we either accept and are complicit with their story, or resist and destabilise it, finding an altogether different narrative nestled within the book, one congruent with Lessing's

own unashamedly leftwing politics.


From the second sentence of the opening page, Harriet and David are skewered: they are both 'conservative, oldfashioned, not to say obsolescent', and while David is 'better' than Harriet in class terms his father builds yachts flitting around from the Riviera to the Caribbean, of course David was educated at feepaying schools, the two of them agree they want to have hordes of children.
. . five six ten. Accordingly, and despite David's mediocre salary, they buy a hugefloor house plus loft conversion, natch! in the suburbs of London with six bedrooms,rooms on the floor above and 'an enormous attic' and David's yachtbuilding father picks up the entire mortgage, as well as dropping off additional cheques throughout the story.
And when Harriet has four children in four years and can't get on with any of the local 'help' because they're all 'lazy', she coopts her mother as a home help unpaid, of course till even her mother rebels: 'I'm your servant.
. . you're very selfish, both of you, You are irresponsible'.

And if that weren't enough to make Lessing's views of her characters clear, there's their whole response to Harriet's sister's Down's Syndrome baby:

Harriet said to David, privately, that she did not believe it was bad luck: Sarah and William's unhappiness, their quarrelling, had probably attracted the mongol child yes, yes, of course she knew one shouldn't call them mongol.
But the little girl did look a bit like Genghis Khan, didn't she

This is made especially heinous since Amy is probably the nicest, sweetest, most loving, unjudgmental and accepting character in the book and the others could learn much from her.
William's rejection of his daughter 'he was distressed by physical disability, and his new daughter, the Down's Syndrome baby, appalled him' is a foretaste of David's own disowning of his son about to be born:

"He's a little child," she said.
"He's our child. "
"No, he's not," said David, finally, "Well, he's certainly not mine, "

The point, then, is that in no way did I ever buy into the surface scenario discussed in the blurb and review after review that this is a perfect family about to be blown apart they are reactionary, obnoxious, selfish, irresponsible, entitled and quite vile.
Harriet's sisters and mother call them out at times, especially in Angela's mocking asides on how rich people live, but it's subtly done,

Into this privileged world comes baby Ben: rough, tough, huge, loud, and insatiably hungry, And I'm going to put the next chunk in spoilers, And this is where Lessing gets even more cleverly oblique: does Ben deliberately mangle Harriet's nipples or is he just a baby with a large appetite Does he strangle the dog and cat, or is he simply fascinated by them and unaware of his own strength Is that really malice and malignance in his eyes or is he rejected by his parents for being the opposite of their four pretty blonde children Are we really to take seriously Harriet's claim that the child is 'like a goblin or a dwarf.
. . one could easily imagine him, in the mines deep under the earth, with his kind', even a Neanderthal throwback or is it the very fact that this is how she thinks of and treats him which shapes his psychological and social development

Because the story also shows us a different Ben: terrified as any preschool child would be locked in a padded room in his own dirt, swaddled in a straitjacket, drugged constantly, in a cruel institution where unwanted children seem to be incarcerated paid for by David's father, of course.
We see Ben socialised by John and his unemployed teen biker friends who all have an easy affection for him, and his own mother is shocked to see him laughing and happy when he is away from the home and his family.


We see Ben at school, not rejected by his teachers 'he's a good little chap, He tries so hard', even if he struggles to learn, We see him turn against his bourgeois family as a teenager with his gang of friends who chant revolutionary slogans, It's not insignificant that from early in the book, Harriet and David wring their hands over how their area is degenerating with growing crime and thugs turns out, they might have created the very 'thug' who already haunted their nightmares, and who might even undermine their cosy bourgoisie world.


At one point, Dr Gilly tells Harriet a truth: 'The problem is not with Ben, but with you, You don't like him very much' but Harriet rejects her in favour of her own comfortable theory which removes all agency from herself: 'He's not human, is he'

Lessing is even careful to lay comparisons with the other 'perfect' children: 'Paul was even more difficult than Ben.
But he was a normal 'disturbed' child, not an alien' and as eleven and thirteen years olds, the two older kids write secretly to their wealthy grandparents to go and live with them and be sent to the private schools that their parents can't afford and Lessing notes slyly, 'Luke was living with the rich, and thriving'.


So, for me, this isn't a supernatural horror or Gothic story but instead one which looks at how a family turns against its own, creating an alienated individual who is the scapegoat for all kinds of ills.
Is it also an allegory of 'class war' Lessing was a member of the Communist Party for years, and though she did get disillusioned with, especially, Stalinism, she never lost her social activism or sense of social justice.
Is Ben, then, an avatar for the forces that might, from the inside, disrupt bourgeois values, standards and mores Harriet and David were already described as 'obsolescent' from the opening page is this the harbinger of their demise Or the start of their fightback Is this, I wonder, a covert response to the Thatcherite government which, inwhen this was published, had been in power for eight years

A marvellously cunning and ambiguous piece of writing, short on pages but rich, dense and I'd suggest far more socially engaged and politicised than might at first appear.
The core dilemma

This is a horror story exploring what happens when a monstrous child is born to a perfect family, When there is no way for everyone to be happy and safe, who must sacrifice what, how does one choose and what happens when the parents cant agree It is essentially a variant of the sitelinkTrolley Problem, where you see a runaway train at a fork in the track, with people at risk on both: you can either do nothing, knowing five people will die, or actively divert it so that just one person dies.




The plot is simple and told chronologically by an omniscient narrator: Harriet and David want to fill their enormous house with a huge family.
They have four beautiful blond, blueeyed, rosy cheeked children in quick succession, in between hosting popular house parties at Christmas, Easter, and the summer holidays, Then Ben is born.

“If I had let him die, then all of us would have been happy, ”

There is no supernatural aspect, though it never feels quite plausible either: not the original idyl living “happiness in the old style”, counter to “the greedy and selfish sixties”, nor the horror of Ben, and certainly not the degree to which some things are ignored by those around, including the authorities.
That made me increasingly question the accuracy of Harriets fears and observations, whilst also feeling bad about not believing her, when she already felt so judged,

“She wanted to be acknowledged, her predicament given its value, ”

What is wrong with Ben

I dont think Ben is a subhuman “throwback”, changeling, troll, or alien as Harriet often says.
Although hes hyperactive and shares some traits with autistic people, his issues are not so easily defined,

Is he slow and misunderstood, irredeemably evil, or just not as loved and loveable as his siblings
Is he as horrendous as Harriet claims
To what extent is she to blame should we instead ask whats wrong with her But despite her fear and revulsion, she goes to great lengths to protect him, to the detriment of herself, her husband, and their other children.


The covers of various editions imply radically different answers:



There are also difficult questions about what punishments, containment, and threats are justified for the wider good.
It may be useful to compare this with sitelinkWe Need to Talk About Kevin Ive not read that, though I saw the film several years ago,

Differing disabilities

Bens existence fractures relationships all round, and forces choices that no parent wants to make, How can you be “fair” when your children have hugely different needs How do you cope with not loving your own child with sometimes wishing he were dead

I had my only child when I was, so when my routine scans sonograms were fine, I was not offered testing for Downs or anything else though we could have insured against a disabled child.
The odds were good, it would be our child, and wed do our best, However, it would have been different if we already had a child whose life could be hugely and detrimentally affected by the birth of a severely disabled sibling.
That was long enough ago that I read this with understanding, but the safety of distance, This is not a book to read if you're thinking about having another child any time soon!

While Ben arouses fear, his cousin with Downs Syndrome referred to as a “Mongol child” more than once! is generally loved except by her own father “distressed by physical disability” and “appalled” by her and Harriet who assumes Amy is a symptom of an unhappy marriage.


Parental sacrifice and childrens sense of entitlement

Most parents make sacrifices for their children, but how far should they go “A mother is fed by watching her children eat” is a guiltinducing phrase I sometimes heard in childhood when money was tight: my mother would treat us to something nice to eat, while eating toast herself.


“Its either him or us, . . Hes our child. No, hes not well hes certainly not mine, ”

Harriet and David make sacrifices for different combinations of their children, but their passive sense of entitlement towards their own parents is staggering: they choose a huge house and family, but can only do so because Davids father pays for it all, and Harriets mother becomes a fulltime childminder and skivvy.
Both parents have other calls on their money and time, but go largely unthanked,



When

It spans twenty years, from the mids to around the time it was published, but despite the odd mention of rising crime, it always felt stuck in thes, and certainly not like the lates I remember.


Nevertheless, Im glad I read it, Its quite brutal, but raises profound questions, without suggesting answers, However, the little I've read about the sequel ensures I won't go on to that,

Quotes

“There was an ugly edge on events: more and more it seemed that two peoples lived in England, not one enemies, hating each other, who could not hear what the other said.
” Written of, but applies today,

“His taking possession of the future in her” making love, intensely,

“She knew the cost, in every way, of a family, ” Harriets mother, Molly.

“When he bent to kiss her, and stroked Lukes heat, it was with a fierce possessiveness that Harriet liked and understood, for it was not herself being possessed, or the baby, but happiness.
Hers and his. ”

“Her heart was hurt as it would be for one of her own, real children, ”
“Ben was Harriets responsibility and his was for the children the real children, ”

“When she put her arms around him, there was no response, no warmth it was as if he did not feel her touch, ”

“She had been drained of some ingredient that everyone took for granted, ”

Inspiration for, . .

This novel is part of the inspiration for Claire Oshetsky's brilliant, raw, and disturbing novel, Chouette, which I reviewed sitelinkHERE,
.

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