Lessing's work has always been dominated by her powerful sense of self. This combined with her political and sociological pre-occupations have tended to make her fiction more polemic than story. However Ben, in the World is a powerful and profound parable that succeeds brilliantly as a novel. It is also a sequel to one of her finest achievements, The Fifth Child (1988), a modern horror story with subtle echoes of Victorian gothic. In that earlier novel, a smug, selfish couple, determined to create a domestic paradise populated by children and sustained by other people's money, are thwarted by an apocalyptic fifth pregnancy. The birth of little Ben heralds the arrival of a monster. Twelve years on, Lessing re-joins Ben, now 18 and clearly dangerous, a devil-angel who somehow becomes an object of pity and sympathy. Both novels are narrated in a neutral, detached tone. While remaining true to her career-themes of personal freedom and the role of the individual, Ben's story is exactly that - an account of one individual, an outsider at the mercy of his vicious temper and bizarre innocence. Tightly plotted and terrifyingly convincing, Lessing here explores justice and morality with shrewd candour, humanity and a well-judged sense of drama.
