The third of the Children of Violence novels turns its attention directly to the process of political action, something that's been a running theme since the start but which now lurches sluggishly centre-stage. Unfortunately, the idea that leftwing activism can get bogged down in subcommittees, ideological theorising and petty infighting is now so well understood as hardly to need saying, let alone to need the kind of close, unblinking, beat-by-beat analysis that Doris Lessing brings to all her subjects.

Typically, Lessing hones in unerringly on the central issue: that political principles, however unimpeachable, can always come into conflict with feelings of basic human empathy. That conflict is dramatised here by having the heroine Martha enter into a disastrous relationship with the cold, analytical Anton, the leader of their local Communist faction. Confusingly, she finds it impossible either to agree or to argue with his ponderous, academic assessments of the best ways to address colonial racism, workers' education, or access to abortion.

She felt him to be logically right; she felt him to be inhuman and wrong. There was no way for her to make these two feelings fit together.

Anton's interpersonal failings are underscored by how terrible he is in bed. Martha gives him a chance, but, ‘after half a dozen times the honest voice of her femininity remarked that “Anton was hopeless”. Or, to salvage her image of the man: “We are sexually incompatible”’ – the phrase resounding here, in 1958, as a wonderfully newly-minted euphemism.

The relationship did not seem improbable to me, if only because she so well explains the feeling, during the war, that ‘personal happiness was irrelevant’ because they were all about to be catapulted into a huge and cataclysmic European revolution.

They all of them saw the future as something short and violent. Somewhere just before them was a dark gulf or chasm, into which they must all disappear. A communist is a dead man on leave, she thought.

What I did find a struggle to understand, with the benefit of all the cultural hindsight I've grown up with, was how Martha or her clever friends could have fallen for any of the procedural busywork offered by these political groups, which meant it was a sometimes a bit of a slog working through the minutes of all the endless meetings in this book. Then again, political engagement of any kind was vanishingly scarce when I was growing up, so in that sense perhaps they're rather to be admired.

Either way, one stays for the piercing exactness of her characterisations. Most writers, describing a wife who is at odds with her husband's career choices, would be content to describe her glances towards him as ‘rueful’ or ‘amused’ – but for Lessing, her eyes rest on him ‘not in irony, for this she would never have allowed herself, but with a certain quality of calm quizzical appraisal’. I mean—! Later, a man trying to intervene in an argument is said to be ‘melancholy with the nobilities of enforced impartiality’, while an attractive colleague's face has ‘the smooth prepared surface of a very pretty girl who feels men's eyes play over her like sunlight’. Phrase by phrase, thought by thought, she always impresses. ( )

This is the third novel in Lessings Children of Violence series and picks up the story of Martha a couple of months after she had left her husband and baby daughter and moved into a small apartment. Martha’s story continues to follow closely the life that Doris Lessing led as a twenty two year old woman in Southern Rhodesia who had just abandoned her family. It was 1942 and many of the local men had volunteered or been called up for the war effort, her home town’s social life now tended to revolve around the large R A F base that had been established just out of town. Martha’s progressive views and voracious appetite for reading have been noticed by the various left wing groups who are fighting to gain control of the local political organisations. Martha (Lessing) has thrown herself into political activity and soon finds herself a member of the communist party. The novel follows Martha’s life as a committed member of a communist cell.

While much of the story concerns the power struggle between factions on the left of the political arena, the real story is of the people in those groups, particularly the women. Martha is conscious at all times of the fight for equal rights with the men, but this is not easy in a small close knit community where women are valued as sexual partners first and foremost. Apart from Martha, there is Jasmine a neat super efficient young lady who finds herself nominated to be secretary of any new splinter group that comes into existence; there is twice married Maisie (both husbands killed) who is pregnant and in need of support and the attractive young Marjorie, all seemingly at a loose end in a town that seems to be marking time while the second World war is being fought thousands of miles away. Anton a German Jew is the intellectual and organisational head of the group, a coldly efficient bureaucrat locked into a Marxist blueprint to save the world. He forms an uneasy relationship with the men from the RAF base particularly Andrew who has experience of communist organisations. The other members are working class lads from the RAF, who are desperately searching for something in which they can believe and a couple of men who act more like agent provocateurs. The novel follows this group as they spat and spar and jockey for power and possession, hurrying from meeting to meeting as Anton sets a relentless pace in an effort to keep control.

From my own experience of such groups Lessing paints a realistic picture, it is almost a study of group dynamics, but this group really does believe that a glorious socialist state will come into existence when the war is over, they are so wrapped up in their own dogma that they can see nothing else. Lessing's portrait of Martha is a triumph. This is a woman who knows there is more to life than being a wife of a colonial administrator, but who suffers from the huge guilt that she feels (or is made to feel by the local establishment) for walking away from her Husband and daughter. Her only way through is to plunge into a new group where the workload and the buzz of doing something can make her forget the past and look toward to a different future. Martha is conscious of the liaisons between the men and the women in the group and she examines each of them looking for something meaningful. When she is sick for a couple of days, she finds the men almost queuing up to look after her, Lessing says :

“She was deeply anxious: her stomach was twisting with anxiety. She thought: I’ve been irritated by the way these men just fall for us, from one minute to the next….”

Anton is one of the men who wishes to act as nurse and as a reader I found myself hoping that Martha would avoid his intentions as he seems so “not right” for her.

Through Lessings eyes we see the furious workings within the group as a sort of tragicomedy. She points out that many of the men in the RAF will not survive the war, the relationships they form are bound to be short lived, but there is nothing else to be done, however that does not stop us being amused by the shenanigans that take place, at the attention to detail demanded by Anton and at the groups relationship with the other political players in the town. Lessing’s Children of Violence series continues to be a microscopic examination of life in a Southern Rhodesian town where the tensions of race relations have thrown people into extremist camps from which for most of them there will be no escape and the writing gets better and better and so I rate this at 4.5 stars. ( )

Read during Winter 2002/2003

Ripple is good word for it. Martha is drifting, she has left her husband and child and thrown herself into political work. Most of the society she used to belong to has rejected her and the Communists are in disarray. Once again she is trying to find a life that makes sense for her but keeps acting against her own wishes. She marries Anton when she has convinced herself she will break off the affair and she is drifting apart from the Communist group. I think she is just waiting to see what storm will take her next. Ripple, exactly.

In this third part, the influx of wartime refugees and RAF personnel makes it possible to get a communist group established in the colony (still not named, but more than ever identifiable as Southern Rhodesia). Martha gets involved from the start, and we are allowed to follow her growing disillusionment with the political infighting within and between left-wing organisations, and with their failure - or refusal - to address the colony's real problem, the unequal treatment of the black majority. In the process, we get a very nice (and at times rather amusing) portrait of the way small committees everywhere tend to operate. ( )

I am continuing on with the Children of Violence series by Lessing, and have finished A Ripple from the Storm and begun Landlocked. In Ripple from the Storm Martha has left her marriage, gone back to her office work from before her marriage, and is an active member of a communist group working in South Africa, which also involves being active in several more liberal organizations which the small communist group hopes to influence. In this work Martha seems to be for the first time acting from her true self, independent of whether this work will have much influence in the end. WWII is going on, though it is somewhat remote to South Africa, where it is present mainly through the soldiers stationed there. It is also present in the sense of waiting, waiting for the war to be over, and an impermanence in relationships as relationships are formed with soldiers who ship out, and young men from the town serve in different places. Again Martha drifts into relationships. The leader of the communist group, a German refuge, cares for her when she is sick and they become a couple, and then he is threatened with internment because of the relationship, and she marries him to prevent it. This drifting is presented as partially the result of unsettled times, but also as a sort of falsity or perhaps difficulty in the relationships between men and women, in playing out roles for one another, being the person the other expects, or resisting that. This book contains a lot of information about the political forces in the British colony of Africa. A note - I had identified the colony as South Africa, mainly because of the mention of Afrikaners and Johannesburg at one point. But Lessing actually grew up in Rhodesia, so perhaps it was written about Southern Rhodesia. At one point there is mention of a group as Policy Sub-Committee for the Communist Party of Zambesia, which makes no sense because Zambesia was a Portuguese colony, and this one is clearly British. (Wikipedia to the rescue - "The name Zambezia or Zambesia was also used up to 1895 for the territory later called Rhodesia, now Zambia and Zimbabwe.") I don't know why they used it in the 1940's. Also, there were Afrikaners in Rhodesia as well as South Africa. ( )