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When it comes to bizarre horrors, though, there is no place like home. Harriet's fifth pregnancy disrupts the insular domestic bliss: "David saw her sitting at the kitchen table, head in her hands, muttering that this new foetus was poisoning her." Harriet complains to her doctor, but he refuses to see anything wrong: "He made the usual tests, and said, 'It's large for five months, but not abnormally so.' " After long agony, the child is born. Seeing him for the first time, the mother says, "He's like a troll, or a goblin or something." Harriet names him Ben and brings him home to his father and siblings, who learn to shun and fear him. The infant is physically precocious and incredibly strong, and he betrays no trace of human sympathy or fellowship. A dog and a cat about the premises die mysteriously, apparently strangled. David and Harriet come to view Ben as an enemy, one who "had willed himself to be born, had invaded their ordinariness, which had no defences against him or anything like him."
The Fifth Child can be read simply as a hair-raising tale; the struggle $ between the Lovatt household and the "alien" who comes to live there is as full of twists and shocks as any page turner could desire. Lessing's style is straightforward, sometimes almost telegraphic: "In September, of the year Ben became eleven, he went to the big school. He was eleven. It was 1986." This spareness suggests parable, a single accessible version of complex truths. Yet beneath its clear surface, Lessing's novel roils with several possible meanings. Perhaps David and Harriet, in their zeal to create a haven for themselves and what they call the "real children," have blinded themselves to humanity that lies "outside the permissible," beyond their constrained definitions of themselves. Maybe Ben represents a dangerous, violent streak in the species that must be either tamed or excluded from the realm of civilized life.
Lessing is much too canny to answer the questions her story so teasingly raises. Her artistry here, as it has so often been in the past, remains provocative. Family and society represent attempts to ward off all that is wild, destructive, unreasonable. But Lessing suggests that these controls, these apparently benign attempts to make life secure and bearable, may in fact spawn the monstrous.