Book Review: "Martha Quest" by Doris Lessing

"I am so tired of it, and also tired of the future before it comes." -Olive Schreiner

This quote, by South African author and activist Schreiner, opens Doris Lessing's 1952 novel "Martha Quest". These words are appropriate in capturing the mind and heart of the book's eponymous heroine, who, in this first installment of Lessing's masterwork series titled "Children of Violence", we see in the early years of her burgeoning womanhood. Sensitive and wise beyond her age, the young Martha is a tangled spirit struggling with her own contradictions, sense of self, and the inhumanity of humanity.

Like much of Lessing's early work, this book takes place in a changing Africa, between the World Wars, populated with British wealth and arrogance and Native displacement. Martha, 15 and tomboyish at the novel's outset, is a passionate force of repression and emotion, which she attempts to identify and put meaning to throughout the story's unfolding.

She observes the world around her with a ferocious intensity. She notes the complete disillusionment of the white settlers -- two of whom are her detached, uninvolved parents, who have no trouble telling their only daughter that she was unwanted and therefore not as wholly lovable as her older brother. She witnesses the brutal victimization of the native population by nearly everyone around her, baffled by both the disgusting prejudice of the whites and the resigned acquiescence of the natives. She sees this discrimination at work in her friendship with the Cohen brothers, Jewish and independent and intellectual, for which she is ostracized by her parents and community in a monstrous subtlety that is ever-so-British. As Martha makes her way to the big city to forge her own autonomous existence, she is confronted again with people at home, work, and play, who are equally adrift in a sea of discord, detachment, and incomprehension.

Is it any wonder, then, that Martha Quest is not only exhausted, but is utterly lost in trying to reconcile her own identity and ideals with a world that is equally lost?

The beauty of "Martha Quest" is in her courageous examination of this world. She makes no apologies for her mass of contradictions, understanding, it seems, that this may well be the one universal element we all share. This is precisely the reason I love Doris Lessing. She takes a character to which I may have no outward similarities and, through fearless investigation of the character's existence, makes her story both timeless and universal.

And of course, there is the language. The dazzling passages are simply beyond anything in modern literature. Lessing's descriptions of the landscapes - both internal and external - are riveting and lush with the tiniest pinpoints of detail and lucidity. Feeling an author's scenery and characters is one thing (and challenging enough). Being right there with them is something much more powerful, beautiful, and, ultimately, rewarding.