The Fifth Child – Doris Lessing

Not the book that most would pick as their first Doris Lessing read, but my wife found a surplus copy of The Fifth Child selling for 30p at the Barbican library and – understandably – just had to buy it. So one afternoon I read this novel, expecting it to be soft and romantic before grabbing it from the bookshelf, then actually reading the comments on the back-cover and realizing that it would have been darker than I had expected, and ending up being completely weirded out by it within a couple of hours.

The novel is about our identity (identities?), I suppose, about our darkest aspects and about our animalistic instincts, or, even more generally, about human nature (and also what constitutes a human, I guess). Yet, read as one half of a young married couple, to me it was more about the instability of even the most perfect love and family, about the affection and protective instincts a mother feels towards her children no matter what, and about the destructive power of every one of us.

Probably the novel had an even bigger impact on me because I read it shortly after watching We Need to Talk About Kevin. It’s a book that I’m really glad I’ve read, but maybe not one I would really recommend.