Briefing For a Descent Into Hell by Doris Lessing

Some sort of a divorce there has been somewhere along the path of this race of man between the "I" and the "We," some sort of a terrible falling-away, and I (who am not I, but part of a whole composed of other human beings as they are of me) hovering here as if between the wings of a great white bird, feel as if I am spinning (though it may be forwards, who knows?) yes, spinning back into a vortex of terror, like a birth in reverse, and it is towards a catastrophe, yes, that was when the microbes, the little broth that is humanity, was knocked senseless, hit for six, knocked out of their true understanding, so that ever since most have said, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, and cannot, save for a few, say We.

Like Stalin Peace Prize winner Paul Robeson, Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, and Academy Award winner Quincy Magoo, I attended Rutgers University.  But in the '80s RU offered me an opportunity that these heroes of communism, capitalism, and astigmatism* didn't have--the opportunity to take a class entitled "Science Fiction."  Of course, I'm the kind of person who squanders opportunities, so I didn't actually read most of the books assigned for class.  One such neglected volume was Doris Lessing's 1971 novel Briefing for a Descent Into Hell. This week I made good this lacuna in my education, reading a library copy of the 1981 paperback edition of Briefing put out by Vintage.  

*Poetic license--"myopia" don't rhyme!

Lessing doesn't break the novel (which is 278 pages in this edition) into parts or chapters, but I think it is fair to talk about the novel as consisting of two parts of approximately equal length, Part 1, which I think of as "The Dream Part" and Part 2, which I think of as "The Epistolary Part."

PART 1: THE DREAM

First of all, I have to say that the first hundred or so pages of Briefing was some of the most unappetizing reading I have done in a while, maybe years; reading it was a chore, like washing the dishes or vacuuming the floor, something I knew was worth doing but was hardly fun or even interesting.  I often found it difficult to focus on the text, and every time I picked the book up it was with some level of resignation.  Most of these pages are written in a dreamy "stream of consciousness" style, with long paragraphs, long sentences, and lots of "word play": repetition, puns, lists, metaphors. I think page 34 provides examples of the things I am talking about:

Click for a larger version

The plot moves slowly, the characters are uninteresting and serve as spectators instead of participants in the story, and there is limited excitement or emotion or suspense, which left my mind to wander hither and yon.  Most of the philosophical ideas presented are tired and obvious--war is crummy, we are all brothers and sisters and should learn to get along, modern man is too materialistic and should be more in tune with nature like primitive people allegedly are--so I felt there was no real reward for trudging through all those tedious sentences and hacking through those boring poems.

Medical records form a small part of this opening half of the novel.  It is late summer 1969, and the cops have brought a disheveled guy with no ID who seems to be out of his mind into a London hospital.  We readers get recorded conversations between the patient, a nurse, a Dr. X and a Dr. Y (don't worry, we get the "Doctor Why" pun you were expecting) as well as doctors' notes.  Dr. Y is a softie, while Dr. X is a hardass, always prescribing shock treatments and radical experimental drugs.  The patient has not only lost his memory but spends almost all of his time asleep, experiencing an adventurous dream that, while awake, he thinks is reality.

These medical records are interspersed with a first person narrative of the dream.  The dreamer starts on a boat in the Atlantic, one of twelve men.  A nearly invisible apparition, a crystalline disk (the narrator calls it "the Crystal"), appears and whisks away the dreamer's eleven comrades.  Heartbroken over being left behind, the dreamer, now hating the lonely boat, builds a raft and drifts off.  Shipwrecked on a rock, he is rescued by a porpoise who helps him get to the shore of a mountainous jungle region.  Lessing spends page after page describing terrain, flora and fauna in excessive detail.  The dreamer is guided by big cats (pumas or something) up a plateau to an ancient ruined city.

Back of copy I read

The roles played by the porpoise and the cats reminded me of the sympathetic view of animals in Ben, In the World--the dreamer even refers to experiments done on animals, experiments the narrator, and presumably Lessing, think are needlessly cruel.  A related theme of the jungle sequence is that the natural world is a paradise, one ruined when exposed to mankind and its violence and pollution.

As happens in dreams, or when people travel through time or between dimensions, at first the dreamer doesn't even notice the city, seeing only a field of wild grass atop the plateau.  But then the city abruptly becomes apparent, first as nothing but a flat carpet of rubble, but then well preserved, with many intact, though roofless, houses that offer shelter to the dreamer.  A few days later he notices ("it was very strange indeed that I had not noticed this before...") a sort of town square, a flat expanse with geometrical designs carved into the stone.  He clears and cleans this area, and after a few pages of scenes about three ghostly witches who kill cattle and a baby (this scene, which reminded me of the dream in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, is perhaps Lessing telling us that "meat is murder") the Crystal, during a full moon, lands in the square.  But again the dreamer is rejected, apparently because he ate meat with the witches.

Two tribes of semi-intelligent creatures take up residence in the city, a tribe of semi-bipedal dog-like rat people, and one of apes.  These vegetarian groups get along at first, but then a war erupts, and they degenerate--they begin eating meat, abandon bipedal posture, and even fight amongst themselves. A huge bird arrives to give the dreamer a ride over the ocean, which is polluted by the corpses of the ape-ratdog war, and then guard him as he cleans the square again, in preparation for the next full moon.      

So, on page 92, a third of the way through the book, the dreamer is absorbed into the collective consciousness of the Crystal.

In that dimension, minds lay side by side, fishes in a school, cells in a honeycomb, flames in a fire, and together we made a whole in such a way that it was not possible to say, Here Charles begins, here John or Miles or Felicity or Constance ends.

We get a ten-page description of what the Earth looks like from space--with his newly Crystal-enhanced vision the narrator sees every living thing as a different color/sound. We also get lots of astrological jazz about how things happen on Earth because "the balance of the planets had shifted, or a comet came too close--or the moon spoke, voicing the cold, the compulsion...."  The Moon is very important to the first half of the novel, and is mentioned frequently.  A comet is blamed for introducing individualism to the human race when it crashed into the Earth and poisoned the air; this bad air inhibits brain function, and makes everybody forget the unity of the universe and hate instead of love.

In a self-consciously "whimsical" section the planets are personified as the Greco-Roman gods (the Sun is the Father of All, presumably analogous to the God of the Bible), and they have a conference on what to do about the Earth, where there are so many wars and so much pollution.  At this conference a team that is to visit the Earth is briefed (the briefing to which the title refers)--their mission is to help the human race remember that they are not truly individuals, but part of the cosmic unity.  The Briefing is implanted in the team member's brains, and they are sent to Earth, where they arrive as babies in the womb, their previous existences forgotten.

PART 2: EPISTLES

Halfway through the book, page 144, Doctors X and Y learn the dreamer's name, Professor Charles Watkins--the police have found his wallet on the street.  About the same time the reader realizes that Watkins must be one of the alien agents, his collapse and insanity a result of the sudden reemergence of the knowledge of his mission. Watkins stops sleeping so much, and there are no more dream sequences.

Briefing for a Descent Into Hell becomes much more enjoyable in its second half, as characters and human feeling come to the fore.  The text consists mostly of letters and memoirs written by Watkins and his family, colleagues, and acquaintances, and these are in a readable, affecting style.  Through the letters we learn about Watkins' life and personality, and about other characters; the letters are full of clues suggesting that these other characters are, like Watkins, alien agents who only have an inkling they are on a mission to teach humanity that we should be at one with each other and nature. Lessing's more interesting philosophical ideas, like her skepticism of science and equation of science with religion, and her suspicions that civilizations existed before those 20th century people know about, get an airing.  These ideas were present, in a cursory fashion, in The Fifth Child and Ben, In the World, but in this novel Lessing expands on these ideas at length in a way that is compelling and is well integrated into the lives of the characters she has created.

One of the doctors convinces Watkins to write a memoir of his 1940s war experiences, and reading this account we learn what, perhaps, are the sources of his wild dream.  After seeing much action in North Africa and Italy (in which he was more than once the only survivor of a squad of infantrymen, prefiguring the way he is left alone on the boat in his dream), he was parachuted into Yugoslavia.  Watkins and/or Lessing engage in some romanticizing of the war in Yugoslavia, how communism united people across barriers of gender, ethnicity and religion:

The Red Star on their caps or on their breasts was what linked them....This group of young soldiers contained Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Catholics, and Moslems.  Nowhere but in these mountains, among these soldiers, these comrades, could it be possible for two people to meet, take each other's hands, call each other by name, Miro, Milos, Konstantina, Slobo, Vido, Edvard, Vera, Mitra, Aleksa...take the Red Star as their bond and forget the rest.

(Because it could be to some extent disassociated from the monstrous tyranny and unrepentant imperialism of Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, I think Tito's Yugoslavia had an important place in the hearts and minds of many Western lefties.)

Watkins' memoir of Yugoslavia gushes over with talk of how the individual is meaningless and the group is everything, prefiguring all the collective consciousness and unity stuff from the dream.  And like the jungle of the dream, Yugoslavia is beautiful and unspoiled by modern man's pollution.

Even though his war memoir is full of vivid detail, it turns out Watkins never actually served in Yugoslavia!  (His battalion went from Italy to NorthWest Europe, and he went with them.)  Is this another dream?  Or has he tapped into the minds of men, alien agents like himself, who did serve in Yugoslavia?

Watkins has recovered sufficiently enough that he is able to circulate with the other patients, and he befriends a beautiful young woman who walks around in a skirt so short her privates are exposed (she eschews panties.)  Drugs having failed to restore his memory, he finally agrees to shock treatment.  The treatment works, and Watkins returns to his family and college professor life, his hazy knowledge of his mission to restore unity to mankind expunged.

It is left to the reader to assess how much of that business about aliens and prehistoric civilizations is true, and how much mere insanity.  I think we might think of Watkins as a Don Quixote character, a man whose noble old-fashioned values mark him as insane in our corrupt modern world.

***********

While I was reading the first 140 or so pages of Briefing For a Descent Into Hell I didn't think I was going to be able to recommend it.  But the second half is good in every way.  And while the style of the first half is not at all to my liking, the first and second halves are in fact well integrated--the whole novel is well structured, with all kinds of things in the letters and Watkins' homage to Yugoslavia reminding you of details from the insane dream.  All that trudging and hacking did finally pay off.

I think the blurbs on the back of the edition I read (see above) are overselling it, but this is a good novel, and if you get assigned Briefing For a Descent Into Hell in a class I recommend you read it, even if it takes you 20 or 30 years to get around to it.    

Ben, In the World by Doris Lessing

"He couldn't manage an aeroplane, he couldn't manage luggage, what's he going to do in a place where people don't speak English?"

"I've thought of everything, Reet."  And he detailed his plan.

The same day I brought Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child back to one public library I borrowed the sequel from another, eager to see what happened to Ben, the monstrous child introduced in the 1988 novel.  Ben, In the World was published in 2000; I read the public library's first edition of the Harper Collins hardcover.

The tone of Ben, In the World is very different from that of The Fifth Child.  The 1988 novel was a kind of horror story, primarily confined to a single setting, full of claustrophobic menace--at any moment Ben might commit some atrocity, and even when he wasn't killing a pet or attacking a sibling, you could feel the fear and psychological damage suffered by his middle-class family's members as his mere presence ruined their happy lives and strained their formerly warm and loving relationships with each other.  Ben, in the World is a sort of sad sack Candide thing about the downtrodden and income inequality, stuff you can read in any newspaper or magazine any day of the week, in which Ben travels around Europe and Latin America associating with various criminals who take advantage of him and prostitutes who sympathize with and help him.  There is also a pretty conventional animal rights angle and one conventional but effective comic scene which I thought the highlight of the book.

In The Fifth Child the story, while its narration was a detached third person, was more or less told from the point of view of Ben's family.  Ben was a mysterious, menacing "other," a force (perhaps evil, perhaps just alien) which wrecked people's happy lives.  This sequel is told (again, albeit somewhat coldly and distantly) from the point of view of Ben and the poor people who love him.  In this telling Ben is a stranger in a strange land, a lost soul in an evil world; Ben is the victim, and the world the villain, unlike in the first volume, in which Ben was the menace who shook the world of his family, shattering everybody's peace of mind.  The Fifth Child was about a family and its harrowing story, Ben, In the World is about the world and how crummy (middle-class) people are, and is full of the bourgeoisie-exploiting-the-proletariat stuff and laments that it is money that makes the world go round that you might expect from a former member of the British Communist Party.

The start of the novel reminded me of horror and science fiction stories in which we see the world through the monster's eyes, briefly inhabit its alien values and desires. (I'm thinking of A. E. van Vogt's "Black Destroyer" and "Vault of the Beast" specifically, but it is a pretty common device.)  Ben stalks through London, in fear of everybody, driven by hunger so that he catches birds and eats them raw, animated by a hatred for his brother Paul, so that when he sees Paul in a park he has to restrain his manic lust to murder him.  But then the novel shifts its focus to other characters.  In The Fifth Child those who observed Ben, middle-class people, did so with fear; in Ben, in the World there are several lower-class characters, mostly women, who sympathize with and help Ben.

One such character is Rita, a seventeen-year-old prostitute.  She likes Ben because of the violent way he has sex with her, ripping away her clothes and entering her from behind before she can provide affirmative consent.  "This experience--a rape, that was what it amounted to--ought to be making her feel angry...but she had been thrilled by that double rape...the teeth in her neck...the grunt like a roar."  In The Fifth Child Ben was repeatedly compared by characters to a goblin, troll or gnome; in Ben, In the World he is again and again described by people as a "yeti."  When he is naked, women notice how unnaturally hairy his back and thighs are.  Less cryptozoologically, his behavior, his barks and roars, his fondness for raw meat, liken him to an animal.  When Rita describes her experiences with Ben she relates that "...it hadn't been like being with a man, more like an animal.  'You know, like dogs.'"

Ben is stupid and ignorant, and easy prey for manipulative characters who apparently represent the middle class.  When doing casual work, building contractors and Polish college students cheat Ben of his wages or just pick his pocket.  Rita's pimp, a former thief who gets in a bind when he invests in the stock market, becomes a millionaire by sending Ben to France on a risky mission as a drug mule.  The pimp even joins the aristocracy by purchasing a title!  (Lessing spends lots of time describing secondaty characters' backstories, mostly how they came from broken families living in poverty and took up petty crime or prostitution, and on how their lives proceed after their connection with Ben ends.  The book, as the title hints, is about "the world" as much as it is about Ben.)

The most entertaining part of the book is the tense and comic sequence covering Ben's trip to France with the massive shipment of hard drugs.  Ben is so childlike, so ignorant and stupid, he doesn't even know what he is doing, and almost queers the deal--other characters have to strive to keep him on course.

Once on the coast of France, Ben, who can barely communicate in English much less French, and who hates the bright seaside sun, is at a loss (Rita and her pimp didn't arrange for their patsy to return to England.)  Then an American film-maker spots him and decides to make Ben the star of a movie about a primitive race of jungle dwellers!  He takes Ben to Brazil, where Ben meets another seventeen-year-old prostitute, Teresa, a peasant whose family left their village because of some dustbowl thing and moved to the favelas of Rio.  Teresa is beautiful, and made money and met the movie guy turning tricks at a hotel.  Much to Ben's frustration Teresa won't have sex with him, but Teresa does take Ben under her protection.

And Ben does need protection!  An American mad scientist learns of Ben, the genetic throwback, and, like in E. T. and the recent tedious remake of E. T. with the interminable train crash scene, Ben is seized so experiments can be conducted on him but then rescued by Teresa and her new boyfriend, a guy from an abandoned village like hers.  It is easy to rescue Ben because the mad scientist doesn't put a guard on Ben.  Ben is in a cage, in a filthy room full of monkeys and cats and dogs who are being experimented on, a scene which reminds the reader of the "institution" from The Fifth Child.    

One of the more interesting aspects of the novel is its skepticism or even hostility to science; Lessing compares science to a religion, and portrays not only fanatics like the American scientist but a disillusioned worshipper in Teresa, who once held science and scientists in awe but then sees the way they treat animals and Ben in pursuit of their faith.

Another good thing Lessing does with Teresa is portray her relationship with her new boyfriend.  Not only is their love sort of touching, but the way Teresa's self-appointed role as guardian of Ben interferes and inhibits this new relationship is a subtle reminder of how Ben ruined the once happy relationship of his parents back in England.

Teresa and her love interest take Ben to the Andes, where there are rock paintings of people much like Ben.  I thought maybe Lessing was going to give Ben a happy ending and have him discover a lost tribe of people like himself.  (This kind of thing happened in Michael Bishop's Ancient of Days.)  Instead Ben throws himself off a cliff to his death.  Teresa and company decide this is for the best, and the book's final line is Teresa's teary confession: "...we are pleased that he is dead and we don't have to think about him."

Ben, In the World is well-written and has plenty of good scenes so I don't hesitate to recommend it, but it was not really what I was hoping for.  The Fifth Child was an atmospheric, mysterious, tense work about people that I could identify with who were in trouble; Ben, In the World is a brightly lit satire primarily concerned with banal hot button issues.

I'll definitely read more Lessing, probably Briefing for a Descent Into Hell or one of the Canopus in Argos books next.  We'll see what the area libraries have to offer.

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

She said to her own children, "Please look after Amy.  Never leave her alone with Ben."

"Would he hurt Amy the way he hurt Mr. McGregor?" asked Jane.

"He killed Mr. McGregor," Luke said fiercely.  "He killed him." 

"And the poor dog," said Helen.  Both children were accusing Harriet.

"Yes," said Harriet, "he might.  That's why we have to watch her all the time."  

Front cover of copy I read

At Rutgers University back in the late '80s I took a class on science fiction, and was assigned to read Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell.  I did not read it.  (As I think I have mentioned before, if we judge a student by his grades, I was a good student--I graduated with High Honors--but if we judge a student by how much important knowledge, how many valuable skills, and what sort of work habits he acquired, I was a terrible student.)  Since then, of course, I have seen Lessing's books on the shelves (the hardcover editions of those Canopus in Argos books are very handsome) and heard about her occasionally in the news (she was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2007, died in 2013) and have wondered when and if the time would come when I would give some of her work an honest try. Well, the time is now!  At the West Des Moines Public Library I saw the slender paperback The Fifth Child, a 1989 Viking edition of the 1988 novel, and found the back cover text enticing. It was time to take the plunge.

It is the Swinging Sixties!  David, a thirty-year-old architect, and Harriet, a twenty-something graphic designer working in sales, meet in London and marry.  David and Harriet are "eccentric," considered "oddballs" by their peers because they are not sexually promiscuous (Harriet suffers the contempt of women her age because she is a virgin) and have old-fashioned ideas about family life being the foundation of happiness.  They marry and buy a big Victorian house in the country and set out building a large family.

David and Harriet's house becomes a gathering place for their extended families, where legions of relatives will come for weeks-long visits around Easter and Christmas and during the summer.  Of one picnic outing we are told "The house party filled five cars, children wedged in or on the adults' laps."  David and Harriet are happy, their belief in the primacy of family life vindicated, their massive home a fortress of safety in a world, that of the early '70s, which is sinking into a period of rampant crime and instability.  Of course, sacrifices must be made for family; David spends four hours a day on the train commuting between their haven and London, and brings extra work home; Harriet and David must endure everybody's criticisms of the couple for having too many kids (four in six years); and they become financially and psychologically indebted to those family members who give them money and stay with them for months at a time helping look after the four darling children, little Paul, Jane, Luke and Helen.

Back cover of copy I read

Then comes Harriet's fifth pregnancy. The fetus is unusually large and energetic, causing Harriet such pain she comes to considers it "a monster," and "an enemy." In the face of the skepticism of her doctor and family she insists this pregnancy is "absolutely different" from her earlier babies. Exhausted and irritable, her relationship with David, once so close and warm, is strained ("At night, David heard her moan, or whimper, but now he did not offer comfort, for it seemed that these days she did not find his arms around her any help") while the criticisms leveled by the extended family and from those outside the family are redoubled.      

Harriet's fifth child, named Ben, is born in a hospital, unlike the four previous children.  Harriet declares that he looks like "a goblin," or "a troll," or "an alien."  Ben is very strong and seems to develop at an unusually rapid rate, rarely crying and learning to stand and walk without going through any intermediate crawling stage.  On the other hand he seems to be of low intelligence.  From day one Ben gives everybody the creeps, and his sinister escapades as he grows vindicate their instinctive fears--he harms one of his siblings, then stalks and kills a small dog, and then a cat! The people who used to throng the big house for weeks during holidays stop coming. The four "normal" kids live in terror of their weird and violent little brother.  Harriet is bombarded by insistent suggestions of what to do about Ben that leave her feeling that people blame her for the problems the little freak presents.  Ben has ruined David and Harriet's happy life together!  

David and his wealthy relatives take charge and Ben is briefly sent to a mysterious institution in the moors of northern England, liberating the family from the monster's oppression.  But Harriet is guilt-ridden, and when she visits the institution and sees the hideous conditions Ben is living in (constrained in a straight jacket and by powerful drugs, spending all day mindlessly lying in his own excrement) she brings him home. David and the four normal kids feel betrayed by Harriet; she has chosen the monstrous Ben over them.  As the years pass the four normal kids contrive to move away to boarding school and/or with relatives, while David buries himself in work, leaving Harriet alone in the huge house with her fearsome offspring.  

First edition cover

As a teenager Ben becomes involved with a violent gang of thugs, not returning home for days at a time, and as the novel ends Harriet wonders if he will end up in prison, or somehow survive by his wits a member of the criminal underground.

The Fifth Child is a good mainstream novel about the family and maternity and the choices and sacrifices people (women in particular) make, the dilemmas individuals and families face in their efforts to achieve happiness while trying to stay true to their values and do the right thing. Harriet, by leaving Ben in the institution where he soon would have died, could have preserved for herself, David, and their four ordinary kids the happy and healthy life they had before Ben burst onto the scene.  But, as a mother, and as a decent person, she felt compelled to rescue Ben, sacrificing her own happiness, psychologically damaging her other children and even putting the rest of the community at risk (Harriet has every reason to believe teen-aged Ben has been organizing robberies, participating in riots, and even raping women.)  

Lessing was not shy about associating herself with the science fiction community, and The Fifth Child has at least one major SF theme.  Harriet strongly suspects Ben is some kind of genetic throwback, representative of a forgotten race that flourished thousands of years before Homo sapiens, a people who perhaps lived underground and raided and raped human settlements, tainting the human genetic pool.  I'm not sure this element was well-integrated into the book as a whole, which is very realistic; it kind of comes off as hinting Harriet is some kind of crackpot.  

The Fifth Child seems pretty strait forward, and Lessing doesn't use difficult words or employ any unusual or challenging narrative techniques. But is there some kind of point, some kind of symbolism or statement I am missing?  Lessing was a member of the Stalinist British Communist Party in the 1940s and '50s--does this suggest we should see Ben as representing the proletariat, acting out because he is smothered by the middle classes?  Is Ben the product of the bourgeois decadence of the '60s or the neoliberalism of the '80s?  (Clues: adolescent Ben hangs out with uneducated young men who can't or won't find steady work, and members of teen-aged Ben's gang of criminals mouth revolutionary slogans.)

Could Ben represent the Third World, the inexplicable and oppressed "other?"  The many descriptions of Ben as some kind of alien or goblin brought to mind Kipling's phrase "half-devil and half-child" and the idea that misbehavior by non-whites is evidence of white responsibility, either that whites (as Kipling suggested) have a responsibility to civilize non-whites or that such phenomena as revolution, terrorism, and corruption in the Third World are the result of Western meddling and exploitation (what people sometimes call "imperial blowback.")  There is a scene in which we see that teen-aged Ben's gang eats, almost exclusively, foreign food (pizza, tacos, Chinese, Indian), perhaps a signal that Ben is analogous to non-British peoples in some way.

(The problem with these theories is that I didn't notice David and Harriet doing anything that led to Ben being a dangerous monster or suggested they deserved to have their family life wrecked.  The novel could perhaps be seen as a refutation of "society made me do it" explanations for crime--Ben was just "born bad" and his parents and siblings, and all those animals, are just his innocent victims.)   

Another possibility is that The Fifth Child is "about" the decay of English life, the rise in crime and social unrest suffered from the late '60s to the '80s.  Rather than being a throwback, perhaps Ben represents the bleak future of England.  The centrality of motherhood to the novel, and Harriet's essential blamelessness might be a response to commonplace arguments that poor parenting is to blame for the social ills (crime, drugs, teenage pregnancy, single motherhood, etc.) that dominated discussion in late-20th century society.  I thought Lessing was using television as a sort of indicator of societal decay.  Before Ben is born the family almost never watches television, but Ben and the fourth child, Paul, who is arguably the character most psychologically damaged by Ben (among other things, Ben tries to strangle him at one point), watch TV religiously, as do Ben's gang of violent thieves.  

An entertaining novel that has me digging for clues.  The direct, understated, even detached, style is quite effective.  A worthwhile read.  After finishing it, it came to my attention that in 2000 a sequel to The Fifth Child appeared, entitled Ben, in the World. I'll try to get my hands on a copy soon; I'm curious to see how Lessing portrays Ben in a different milieu.