The Four-Gated City (Children of Violence, 5)

I read this book, made into a Kindle version by Harper Collins. There were so many mistakes! I was able to get through the story, but there were so many errors it gives this publisher a horrible reputation. Multiple times an "I" was rendered as a numeral 1. So many problems like this plagued the book I am not sure I got the whole story.THAT aside, this book is a magnificent story. I used kindle to underline dozens of passages and may very well begin to read it again right away.

This was one of my all-time favorite books when I first read it almost forty years ago, and it still is. It has everything: wonderful characterization, interaction with the politics of that time and all times, astute observations about mental illness, and beautiful intimations of spirituality, of what is beyond our everyday mundane lives.My only criticism is not of Lessing, but of the Kindle version. This book is FULL of typos: McArthy, missing words, numbers where there should be letters. If I were Doris Lessing, I would be really pissed at the lack of proofing.

The greatest English writer of this century. Not comfortable but showing again and again what it is to live a genuinely reflective life within engagement. Quite a feat. Amazingly having read it twice before, over a long period admittedly, I found chunks that previously I had not absorbed at all - highly recommended if you don't mind thinking about life the universe and everything

This is still a wonderful read, but I liked the science fiction parts much less now than I did the first time around.Besides, we are all still here!

The Four-Gated City (1969) concluded Doris Lessing’s semi-autobiographical Children of Violence series of novels , which she had begun almost two decades earlier. The previous four installments were of fairly standard novel length but this last book is elephantine without, frankly, any real justification other than that Lessing must have felt self-indulgent.The biggest problem is that Martha Quest, the central character of the series, is, frankly, a dud. She had shown early promise in the first couple books with her interest in radical politics and her affiliation with those working for racial equality in “Zambesia,” the fictional stand-in for Rhodesia, Lessing’s home during her early years. Martha’s early struggles between leading a conventional life—she had married a dull but amiable man in book two, A Proper Marriage—and her interest in pursuing social justice issues as well as developing her own talents, gave the series a strong narrative arc in the early going, but by the fourth book (Landlocked), her character had regressed to prosaic self-indulgence, whiling away the time on a sexual dalliance while her political activities ground largely to a standstill. This might have been interesting, but Lessing never seemed to be able to raise it above the commonplace.The Four-Gated City follows Martha from her coming to England at around age 30 in 1949 through the end of her life in the 1990s, or about 30 year’s in the future when the book came out. She spends most of that time in a rather nontraditional household worthy of an Iris Murdoch novel of that period, serving as live-in amanuensis/maid/mistress for the eccentric author and aristocrat Mark Coldridge, and as companion/mother-confessor for his family.Martha ends up spending several decades in the Coldridge household, where not much really happens despite the radical changes that go on in the world around them. The family does dabble in politics but little of it seems to touch Martha, the former leftist firebrand. Lessing then throws a curveball down the stretch by slanting the narrative into a sci-fi-ish paranormal direction (though it could also be taken that Martha is simply going mad) capped with a dystopian conclusion that serves as an object lesson in why serious novelists should stay away from predicting events into any future near enough for readers to call them on it. I found the ending not so much shocking as desperate and I was very disappointed by how Lessing’s tale of Martha’s life spun off into such long-winded entropy. The Four-Gated City is an overlong bore of a book.

I could not stand it! And I am a great Doris Lessing fan. The only book of hers I don't like. I enjoyed all the Martha Quest books, comparing my own life to hers as I grew up in Africa and have been involved in leftist politics all my life. The Golden Notebook is one of my very favorite books. I did not feel friendship or love in that house and family. Martha never lived her own life of created anything after she became a housekeeper and listening post for these people.. She settled for letting life waft her around and surrounded herself with selfish wimpy people who used her. The way she let men treat her made me cringe, although her one experience of love win Africa was very moving. Good for political theory, philosophy, sufi mysticism and social critique, but a mildly sickening plot. I did like the last little post-apocalyptic bit, especially the sheep island and paranormal powers. Love Doris, but my least favorite book of hers and least-favorite characters..

Martha Quest, a young woman with a complex personality and various almost childish, barely controlled defence mechanisms in place, flees the South Africa she grew up in to find a new life in post war Britain.The change from the hedonistic society she knew to the apathy she finds there makes adaptation seem impossible. She is hounded by friends of her family who cannot understand why she won't take a boring office job, or join in their circle which epitomises her life before.She at last finds a strange job helping an author tidy up his manuscript, and from here gets absorbed into his complex extended family. During the years of the novel this family grows and evolves, the members mature; and Marta's role as mediator super partes puts her in a complicated position of impotent power with responsabilities she would rather not have.The elder relations still try to influence public life as they did before the war, with parties and meetings. The younger ones seem completely out of touch, becoming whizz kids or drop-outs.The evolution of the political world, adapting new comunication technologies to their power play, wrong foots the family who lose the grip they thought their birthright. The country slides towards some ill defined catastrophe as the politicians' spin loses contact with reality.Martha escapes with a number of members of the family to a remote island, where they manage to scrape a living. The dramatic denouement is not mere survival, but the preciousness of abilities that some members of the family had already had, and which had caused them to be institutionalised, in the 50's and 60's.Lessing's prose handles the intricazies of these relationships with clarity and compassion, her tale seems prophetic, not only of the vices of today's political world but of a man-made catastrophe that we will perhaps face in the near future.

good

great book

very good quality like new

Finding this difficult to get into.