About this title: 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".
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. bottom tip soil marks. 2 inch tear bottom front cover. surface wear back cover. No creases in spine. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books
Date Published: 1980
ISBN-13:9780553139679ISBN:0553139673
Description: Acceptable. MAY HAVE COVER WEAR, SPINE CREASES, HIGHLIGHTING, UNDERLINING & PAGES YELLOWED FROM AGE. FASTER SERVICE FROM US! ! ! read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Panther, London
Date Published: 1972
ISBN-13:9780586036204ISBN:0586036202
Description: Fair. No dust jacket as issued. Book seller stamp in inside front cover. 669p.; 18 cm. Children of violence / Doris Lessing; vol.5.. Originally published, London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1969. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Very Good. 0060976675 Earlier smaller paperback same content exactly-Aside from newer introduction/Afterward, original text has never changed, Standard Used Condition, some cover wear, different cover, No writing or Highlighting, some minor spine creases, minor age tan-well bound and solid, sold for content. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Bantam
Date Published: 1970-01-01
Description: Good. Mild shelf and corner wear; Mild tanning to pages with mild browning and soiling to edges; Minor yellowing, soiling, rubbing, and wear to covers and spine; Mild water damage starting on page 535 to the end of book on bottom page edges and part of spine-3/16" depth but did not reach text; Good Reading Copy; ** Free USPS tracking and confirm on US orders ** read more
Edition: 1st Printing
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: New American Library, New York
Date Published: 1976
Description: Good. No Dust Jacket as Issued. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. Book shows moderate wear/ spine tight, pages clean/ covers creased and scuffed; a few small tearsmoderate edge wear/ corners and spine creased/ several pages and page tips creased. read more
Edition: 2nd Printing
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Bantam, New York
Date Published: 1970
Description: Very Good. 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" tall. Numbers written on wraps in pen and pencil in a few places. Light shelf wear. Solid copy with clean pages. read more
"One of Lessing's better books! Beginning in bleak post-WWII London, where Martha lands after finally leaving Africa and ending in a post-apocalyptic pile of letters passed on clandestinely, this book is one hell of a ride. The inner landscape is explored fully and with a personal nature unlike a lot of other Lesssing novels. It's the story of a family, a culture, and a world expressed intelligently and prophetically. From Cold War paranoia to cult paranoia, the pulse of the world is transmitted into the minds of the inner explorers of the mental institutions who foretell the apocalypse. I wouldn't put this on my apocalypse shelf just because it is only post-apocalyptic for the last 20 of its 650+ pages. This book is more about the Cold War and McCarthyism on the British front, it's effect on the lives of an extended British family of influence, than the impending end of civilization. Lessing portrays the post WWII mindset with clarity. Really an amazing piece of literature. I didn't expect the end, pleasant surprise (ha - if that can be said about the apocalypse)."
"Three whole novels of non-story later (I assume they are non-story considering the nature of several flashback/updates present in this installment), we find Martha Quest newly arrived in London in the 50's as England slowly rebuilds.
700 more pages of non-story and we arrive at the end of the Children of Violence series and in a post-apocalyptic world in which humans are scattered around the globe in huddling terrified poisoned tribes of mutant scavengers and some have adapted by evolution into telepaths.
Helluva way to turn the corner from a fem-/socialist-lit author into a science fiction author, but I suppose that depending on how you look at it the leap is not so far.
I'm being unnecessarily snarky. There are major things about this book that I really, really liked, and I didn't just finish it because I'm obsessive compulsive and HAD to, though that's always in play.
Lessing continues many threads that I can only assume were continuous throughout this series--questions about social organization, politics and anti-politics, gender issues, group-think, hatred, violence; then questions about family, sex, sanity and insanity, perception, education and indoctrination...and her observations on all of these topics are exceedingly interesting and insightful, whether the characters through which she presents them are particularly credible or not.
At the end of the day, I like her voice, I like her perspective, and even in areas of political and social theory where it's clear she and I basically already agree, she provokes thought in directions I never considered before. Not too shabby.
Meanwhile she provides a unique picture of dynamics at work in British society through a period of upheaval in the 50's and 60's which for obvious reasons I associate normally only with the United States and, to a lesser extent, Eastern Europe. She examines British modern historical phenomena of which I have heard but with which I am not terribly familiar, for example: the anti-gay clamor of the 50's and the counter-movement it spawned; the twilight of empire and the incredibly fraught independence movements in Africa; widespread fear of the Soviet nuclear threat heavily laden with shadowy stories of spying and treason and the concomitant McCarthy-style social repression, accompanied nonetheless by a head-shaking dismay at the unenlightened way the Americans were dealing with the same stuff. Etcetera.
This is not to mention what seems to be one of the more central themes of the novel, which is the devastatingly inhumane way that the British (and they are not alone) treated and in many cases still do treat the mentally ill as a result of decades of quackery in the field of psychoanalysis.
A lot of ground to cover, clearly. But she brings all these threads to what I suppose is their only logical conclusion, which is the near-destruction of the world followed by chaos and darkness and fumbling attempts at renewal. There you have it!
"Doris Lessing has remarkable insight into group dynamics and individual traumas in the aftermath of war. Her observations consistently left me in awe of her eloquence. I was thinking "oh, of course..." in passage after passage which make the most complex ideas seem so obvious.
The story spans decades chronicling Martha Quest's struggle to find her role as an ex-Communist, woman, daughter, lover, survivor, and (as she later discovers) as an empath. Not having read any of the other "Children of Violence" series, I was in the dark about a few minor details such as the character of Thomas, who haunts Martha. Trauma begets tragedy and farce as depicted by the ever-expanding household that Marth finds herself a part of.
Though Lessing's apocalyptic vision of the future at the end of the book has not come to fruition, it serves as a warning to avoid the patterns of human folly. These include political positioning, and Leftism and Communism are used as examples throughout the book. The way to avoid war for Lessing is the dangerous act of turning inward and of acknowledging the Self-Hater within us all. When Martha faces her Self-Hater in a nightmarish sequence of events, she understands how things like rape and the Holocaust can happen. All evil acts are born out of us not being truly self-aware.
Her vivid, careful descriptions have a deep dark humor about them; certainly not directly humorous. Fascinating, earth-shattering stuff."
"this is a book that it took me years to read. i was continually reading other books while reading it. one the whole, it is not an extremely interesting book, although it does have a somewhat more interesting content than the previous four books in the series, entitled Children of Violence. The strange thing about it was that when i finally finished it (because i am a tenacious reader, i will finish a book eventually), i read the epilogue. the epilogue seemed completely out of the blue and i felt that nothing in the book had hinted at this ending. the story had seemed a bit boring. a middle aged woman who had formerly been a communist taking a job as a live-in nanny of sorts. nothing in the story was at all connected to that epilogue, which was more like something i'd expect in a science fiction book. so i went back and re-read the book. i could see where there had been some small hints along the way, but it didn't add up. so i read the first four books in the Children of Violence series. there was even less there to indicate that this epilogue belonged in any way as the ending to the main character's life story. then i discovered that later in life doris lessing started to write science fiction and have some strange ideas about where humans were going and where they'd been. i have yet to read her later books. i've always wanted to to see just where she did go after that incongruous epilogue."
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