THE CLEFT
Doris Lessing
HarperCollins
Fiction
ISBN-10: 0060834862
ISBN-13: 9780060834869

Doris Lessing has been writing for more than 50 years and has long been considered "the matriarch" of contemporary British literature. Now in her 87th year, she has written THE CLEFT, a very studied and controversial book.

Of it she told an interviewer, "I saw a science magazine which said that the basic human type is feminine and that men came afterward. So I've written a story based on this… I noticed that my typist at the publishing house was shocked by some of the words I used. I can't wait to see what people make of it." She opined upon this notion in another interview, when she said that the work was controversial and "not politically correct. Some people will hate every word."

These comments resound with the confidence and sense of impishness she displayed when the diary of a good neighbor and IF THE OLD COULD, each by Jane Somers, was published. This event came about as the result of a bet wherein she wanted to prove that an unknown writer does not get the same attention as one who is established. When those books barely sold, they were combined into a paperback titled THE DIARIES OF JANE SOMERS by Doris Lessing and it flew off the shelves.

Lessing drastically changed direction when she wrote a science fiction series that resulted in her removal from the list of possible Nobel Prize winners. If she had not been so punished for her courage to explore new fiction forms, then THE CLEFT would have been the one that struck her off the list. Clearly, Lessing has never been afraid to follow her muse wherever it takes her and to write in her own inimitable way about the issues she finds important. As a writer, she has never been cowed.

And her oeuvre can be seen in evolutionary stages: in her very early works she wrote about Communism, which reflected her strong attitudes towards "society" and the mechanisms that make it work --- or not. In novels like The Children of Violence quartet and the golden notebook, her socialist views were entwined with her never-changing take on female-male relationships. Then she published the soft science fiction series, which wove together strong themes about human psychology and Sufism (which is the belief system by which she lives her life) in a new form but not one that changed her core message.

Now, in THE CLEFT, Lessing retells the story of how humankind evolved. This is a satiric portrait of the woman-man conundrums, mistakes, values, etc. that still shape the issues (rightly or wrongly) expressed in men are from mars, women are from venus. Feminist readers and free women hopefully will read between the lines in order to see what Lessing is really trying to say. 

The narrator of this highly speculative and provoking tale is an aged senator who lives in ancient Rome. He discovers some ancient manuscripts, gleaned from oral histories, that tell tales that become the stuff of myth and legend. As he works his way through the fragments of the old writings, he finds a compelling but disturbing story: in a prehistoric time, in a "place near the sea," is an isolated community populated only by women known as the Clefts. These "sea creatures" evidently lived very peaceably --- laying in the sun, swimming, residing in caves and having no "intelligence" beyond their primitive survival skills. Any concept of learning, thinking, philosophy, insight or interference by other two-legged creatures --- namely men, a species they have never seen --- is nowhere. Their home is situated under a rock formation called The Cleft, which resembles female genitalia. Their existence seems safe in that they simply procreate at the whim of the moon tides and give birth only to girls.

Then, inevitably, a baby who looks like nothing the "Shes" have ever seen is born. At first this "thing" is thought to be a "deformed mistake," but as they continue to be born, they are labeled "Monsters" or "Squirts" (readers need no gloss to understand this comical reference) and left on the Cleft for the eagles to eat. Others are castrated in a gruesome attempt to transform them into girls. Eventually, they stop torturing those babies, stick to the original plan and leave them to become food for the eagles, a constant presence in this small world. But, unbeknownst to the Shes, the eagles take the infants to a safe place, nurture them (which saves their lives) and allows them to grow up. They mature, learn to build a community of their own, go on to invent fire, and build rafts so they can navigate the river beside their space. For the most part, they are content but feel "some kind" of drive within themselves that needs relief, though they don't know how to find it.

As time passes, one of the young women ventures over the mountains to see what happened to the Monsters. She lands in a place of horror. "Then she was standing in the middle of a large group of Monsters. They were of all sizes, some children, some already past middle age…all of them naked, and when seeing them, the monsters, with their squirts pointed at her…she screamed, as if she had been doing it all her life. [Then] instincts that had ranged free an untrammeled and often unrecognized spoke all at once…the mass rape went on, it went on, they were feeling hungers it seemed they could never sate." Of course, the Cleft died.

As the story moves on, an inevitable coming together of Clefts and Monsters arrives. The Clefts begin to get pregnant and give birth to both Clefts and Monsters. The moon is no longer the means to procreation, and "civilization" now has a footprint. Ironically, a short time passes before the division between the sexes begins. The men see themselves much as men have seen themselves forever; they use their size and physical strength to control who does what. The women are expected to care for the children and feed the men. This makes for dissention between the two groups, but Squirts and Clefts using their bodies seem to quiet things down. Since time is not a concept remotely available to those who tell the history, readers have no way to place any of the so-called "events" in context. The old Roman scribe explains this over and over as he too finds it frustrating not to know when "this" or "that" happened.

THE CLEFT is a frame story that works on several levels. The narrator, who lives in the time of Nero, tells of his life and alludes to the society he inhabits. Between these bits of information, readers are lured into the interpretation of the ancient writings he brings forth --- an alien notion of how the human race began and flourished. Then, we meet a Cleft named Maire who is interrogating a Monster, someplace, sometime. The senator and readers who "get it" will understand that the author is still playing with the "intercourse" between women and men. Lessing comes full circle in her observation that women are stable and men lack the facility to rise beyond the level of being the second and weaker creation. She follows her muse further into soft sci-fi rife with phantasmagoria and heretical notions that have always provoked her readers while clearly enchanting her.

    --- Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum

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