Child of evil

Ben Lovatt is the definitive outsider: an outcast existing by instinct, ever moving between the concern of a kindly few and the grasping self-interest of others. Sustained by his dangerous temper and bizarre innocence, his life is an empty nightmare of suspicious longing and heartbreaking trust. His pain is all the greater because he seems passive and it is up to others to determine exactly how much he understands about anything, including the strangeness which has set him apart from everyone.

Justice, outrage and morality dominate this astonishing late performance from Lessing, whose honest anger at society's multiple cruelties has made her one of the 20th century's most enduring, campaigning writers of witness. As with Nadine Gordimer, the early Amos Oz and a host of Eastern European and Latin American writers, her message has often overshadowed her art. Personal freedoms and the role of the individual have preoccupied her through a long career. Her life and experiences have also provided her with rich material. Yet, for a writer with such a powerful sense of self as well as of politics and society, she is also well capable of calling upon the devices and detail of story. This new book is one of her most tightly plotted and, while an exciting, profoundly moving work in its own right, the full power of Ben, In the World can only be appreciated by reading it as the sequel to one of Lessing's finest achievements, The Fifth Child (1988), a modern horror story.

Ben, the vulnerable child-adult of this new book, is an 18 year-old who looks 35. In the earlier novel he's a dangerous child who looks like a small man. Between the two books, Lessing has shaped a character who could not only have stepped from the pages of a Victorian novel, but is both devil and angel. The terror lurking at the heart of The Fifth Child is Ben, who somehow becomes an object of pity and sympathy in this new book. Savage and helpless, he is desperately aware of being different. Lessing has worked hard at making him more character than mere metaphor - and succeeds.

In the earlier book, Ben represents all evil. His parents, Harriet and David, are each in their way misfits; innocent yet determined and selfishly devoted to creating a domestic paradise intended to be the envy of all. They set about having many children to adorn their rambling old house. The fact that their lifestyle is dependent on endless financial support from David's parents is a reality rather than an embarrassment. The domestic scenes contain some of Lessing's most convincing descriptive writing, the characterisation and dialogue are so authentic it is as if the reader is sitting in the same room, observing the small triumphs and tensions.

The babies continue appearing, the resentments increase. But the fifth pregnancy proves apocalyptic. Once Ben is born he assumes the threatening role of thief and murderer, terrifying his siblings and destroying the Lovatts. Finally he is despatched to a special home for misfits. There the plan amounts to drugging him until he dies. But Harriet rescues him.

The success of that book is due to Lessing's direct reporting of events. In his sequel, she takes up the story and sustains a detached, neutral tone. By now the Lovatts, both battered and ruined, have at least managed to escape Ben. The narrative becomes an odyssey of injustice and faint hope. Having fallen in with a petty criminal whose prostitute takes a fancy to the physically freakish Ben, he is then sent to France as a drug courier. Left on his own he is taken up by a film-maker who brings him to South America. Whereas The Fifth Child is largely domestic, this new novel is a dramatic, picaresque and fast-moving morality play in which Ben meets other outcasts also seeking a place. Despite his transformation from villain to sympathetic innocent and, ultimately, sacrificial victim, there is a narrative cohesion between the two books. Lessing's candid tale emerges as both ancient and modern, a visionary, compelling and shocking portrait of one individual's hellish journey.

Eileen Battersby is a critic and Irish Times journalist