A Ripple from the Storm was not technically the next book in sequence for my Doris Lessing project (for which I am reading all her work in order of publication in a very leisurely fashion). After A Proper Marriage, the second book in the Children of Violence quintet, came Retreat to Innocence (1956) and after that the short story collection The Habit of Loving (1957), with the non-fiction Going Home (1957) in between. Ripple, the third Children of Violence book, didn't appear until 1958, and so at my current reading rate (one Lessing book every 6 months) wouldn't have reached the top of the TBR pile until late 2011. But since I have a pitiful memory, I decided it would be best to put aside the strictures of chronology temporarily and work at finishing the quintet before I loose the thread of their plot.
Thus we find ourselves once more in early 1940s 'Zambesia' (read: Southern Rhodesia), just a few short weeks after Matty Knowell (nee Quest) has seperated from her first husband Douglas, and abandoned her three year old daughter Caroline, in order to pursue a life of Communist activism. She is now a key member of the 'Group', a rag-tag bunch of like-minded misfits and agitators held together under the leadership of Jasmine, the ultra-organised administrator of every left-wing organisation in town, and Anton, the uncompromising German refugee we first met in A Proper Marriage. An indifferent legal secretary by day, Martha spends all her free time in the evenings and at weekends pinging from one political gathering to the next - if it isn't Sympathisers for Russia or the Social Democratic party committee, it is long, exhausting meetings of the fledgling Communist Party of Zambesia. She barely has time to eat or sleep, never mind remember that she has a family: Douglas and Caroline couldn't be further from her mind, and her parents barely register on the radar, despite Mrs Quest's increasingly pathetic attempts to control her daughter's behaviour. If it weren't for the presence of RAF Comrades in the 'Group' we would hardly know there was also a world war going on.
Over the course of the novel's 300+ pages Martha vacilates once again between all-or-nothing enthusiasms and a deadly lethargy that threatens to overwhelm her. Just like before her political activism is semi-detached to her personal passivity, so that while she expends great energy on the distribution of Communist publications in the 'Coloured quarter', she allows her personal life to simply happen around her. Both states are familiar to readers of Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage, to the extent that this third book feels at first like a repeat of the last one: same-old Matty, same old themes. The Communism is more blatant, but the underlying cynicism is the same, same, same. There is even another rushed, thoughtless marriage, this time to the anally retentive Anton, and if Martha isn't pregnant it is only out of sheer luck.
Even more than the previous two installments Ripple oozes moral pessimism and, more than that, a helpless, gut-wrenching hopelessness that never quite broke the surface in the early books. At the end of A Proper Marriage Martha gave us the impression that she was making a break with her previously destructive behaviours, that she was abandoning husband and child to be more 'true to herself'. But who are we kidding? This isn't Paulo Coehlo. This is Doris Lessing. And not only is it Doris Lessing, it is a story modelled so closely on Lessing's own life as to be in spitting distance of an autobiography. Lessing knows that 22 year old girls do not rise to the surface of the life that is drowning them and gulp down clean air; on the contrary, they kick down, swim deeper and make the same mistakes again, only worse the second time round.
It is worth remembering this: that, despite everything that has happened to her, Martha is still in her early twenties. Her corruscating wit and chilly rationalism has yet to mature into anything approaching wisdom. So that while Martha wants to be astute and cool and independent, she is still too confused and rebellious to understand how to be any of those things:
Martha said to herself: I must walk slowly and enjoy the moonlight. She was conscious that the moment she left the group she felt as let down as if a physical support had been removed. 'I'm not alone enough - I should enjoy it when I am.' But she was almost running across the park. As usual a demon of impatience was snapping at her heels, pushing her into the future.
The trajectory of A Ripple from the Storm is the slow, torturous death of this naive Martha, whose childish urgency is gradually worn down by the reality of the situation she finds herself in. That is, the political situation in Zambesia, which is absolutely stagnant, and the situation in her personal life, which is almost equally disastrous.
The book gives the possibility of successful relationships between men and women very short shrift indeed, with the breakdown of not one but three marriages: that of Martha and Anton (doomed from the beginning) as well as the shot-gun marriage of Martha's friend Maisie and the thirty-year union of left-wing doyenne Mrs Van. Lessing takes these marriages apart like a child pulling the legs of a spider, and shows no remorse. She shows no remorse, I imagine, because she despises the ways in which (she perceives) relationships make less of people than they ought to be. Women, she says, often construct themselves entirely in the light of their love affairs:
There is a type of woman who can never be, as they are likely to put it, 'themselves', with anyone but the man to whom they have permanently or not given their hearts. If the man goes away there is left an empty space filled with shadows. She mourns for the temporarily extinct perons she can only be with a man she loves; she mourns him who brought her 'self' to life. She lives with the empty space at her side, people with the images of her own potentialities until the next man walks into the space, absorbs the shadows into himself, creating her, allowing her to be her 'self' - but a new self, since it is his conception which forms her. Such a woman is recognizable often enough not by her solitude but the variety and number of her acquaintances and friends with whom she may be intimate but who, as far as she is concerned, do not 'really' know her.
This both is and is not a picture of Martha. I'm sure that, if accused thus, the character would heartily deny it, while at the same time accepting the truth of it with a self-deprecating grimace. I'm sure of this because that is what Lessing herself does: as always, she is as harshly critical of the faults she recognises in herself as she is of those she recognises in others. Martha's marriage to Anton allows her to examine another trait which she finds both distasteful and utterly compelling: the sexual dynamics of power. Martha marries Anton partly because she wishes to be recognised as his closest and most loyal Comrade, his equal; only to discover that, against all expectations, he wants her to be his wife. She thought that politics could unsex her, but couldn't have been more wrong. He wants her to be less of a Communist that before; to be weak so that he can feel strong, even though this implies his own weakness. He wants the part that of her that performs for men, and is dishonest in the performance. A part of her, in other words, that she thought she had put to bed along with Douglas, Caroline and the sundowner parties:
She understood that what she had to do was to put her arms around him and apologize. But she was fighting against the final collapse of her conception of him. She knew that the moment she put her arms about him, to coax him out of silence, that creature in herself she despised would be born again: she would be capricious, charming, filial: to this compliant little girl Anton would be kind - and patronizing, as she repeated to herself over and over again, in a fierce resentment. But this would be a mask for his being dependent on her; she would not be his child, but he hers.
These are pretty solid clue, I think, as to Lessing's overall philosophy of relationships: best not to bother. If this weren't enough to prove it, Ripple also gives us Marjorie, married and pregnant to a low level beaurocrat, looking forward to a life of being second-rate, and Maisie, pregnant by her feckless boyfriend and then forced into a loveless marriage with another man for the sake of respectibility.
Because Lessing abhors nostalgia - she calls it the 'old enemy' - there are few if any concessions to hope or the possiblity of change in A Ripple from the Storm. Mr Maynard, the magistrate who feels increasingly frustrated with Martha's life-choices (not least, I imagine, because her life choices do not include Mr Maynard) and her views, gives voice to the worst thoughts of Lessing's colonial demons:
'Good God,' he exclaimed, really angry, speaking from his depths. 'What do you suppose you are going to change? We happen to be in power, so we use power. What is history? A record of misery, brutality and stupidity. That's all. That's all it ever will be. What does it matter who runs a country? It's always a bunch of knaves administering a pack of fools...'
Martha wants to believe in the possibility of change, but the reader observing her and the 'Group' with their petty conflicts and impotence, can't help but see any efforts they make to promote peace or equality as pathetic nonsense. As pathetic as Martha's delusions of power during one of her exhausted collapses:
...her hands were not hers. They seemed to have swelled. Her hands were enormous, and she could not control their size... Everything she was had gone into her hands. ...she felt the tips of her fingers touch the vast balls of her thumbs as if girders had been laid across a ravine. The world lay safe inot her hands. Tenderness filled her. She thought: Because of us, everyone will be saved. She thought: I am holding the world safe, and no one will be hurt and unhappy ever again.
As the novel draws to its close Martha begins to understand this ridiculous impotency herself. Mrs Van, the stalwart Social Democrat councillor campaigning for an 'African branch' of her party complains 'If things were done in a regular manner, these situations need not arise!' And Martha retorts: 'Regular? What's regular about anything that happens? Don't you see that it's all a farce...everything.' The novel ends in a blaze of pointlessness, representing the lowest ebb of Martha's emotional life so far:
We're all mad, she thought, trying to make it humorous... The fact is, I'm not a person at all, I'm nothing yet - perhaps I never will be.
Martha examined two very clear convictions that existed simultaneously in her mind. One, it was inevitable that everything should have happened in exactly the way it had happened: no one could have behaved differently. Two, that everything which had happened was unreal, grotesque and irrelevant... She was overwhelmed with futility. She lay down on her bed, her back to Anton, who was already freshly analyzing the situation, and allowed herself to slide into sleep like a diver weighted with lead.
Reading A Ripple from the Storm is like suffocating; minute by minute it deprives you of air. First, the passivity, the inevitability of making mistakes; and then the social injustice and the inhumanity of war, colonialism, racism; and then, worst of all, the revelation of the farcical, petty inconsequentiality of the people who are trying to put it all right. It has all the bitterness of the first two novels, but squared. Which is why Icouldn't really recommend this book to anyone thinking of embarking on a journey into Lessing. Not only because it requires you to know (or at least recognise) Matty, but because it gives you almost no respite from the darkest night of the author's soul. It is truly literature as confessional; a book that feels as much like a flogging as a story. I'm intrigued to see where the next book, Landlocked, can go from here.
But wait. There is a reason - beyond morbid curiousity - why I keep coming back to this deeply troubling, horrifically wonderful writer. In every novel Lessing leaves something unexpected behind her for me. In this case it is the temporary switch in focus during the last third of the book from Martha to James Jones, one of the 'Group's' RAF Comrades. His experience of Africa is, for me, classically Lessing, with its corrupt beauty and its 'tart' darkness. No matter how thrifty of prose, economical and despairing the rest of the book is, there is still something like poetry to be had from this at least:
He settled himself, head back, motionless, moving his eyes only to take in the moon, the trees, the grass, the soft gleaming trash that littered the soil. City boy from blackened, cold streets, he breathed the fresh tart air of the high-veld in and out of tainted lungs, fingered grains of heavy soil that clung to his fingers, frowned at the moonlight about him and thought: This is something like it. Never see a sky like this at home. The grass behind him was a solid wall, grown to its July strength, the sap no longer running, each stem taut and slippery as fine steel...
~~Victoria~~