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Ben, in the World

Author: Doris May Lessing
Publisher: Flamingo
Category: Book

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Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

6 reviews
Sales Rank: 485517

Media: Hardcover
Pages: 192

ISBN: 0002261952
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780002261951
ASIN: 0002261952

Publication Date: June 5, 2000
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Ex-library book with usual stamps. Reading copy only.

Also Available In:

•	Paperback - Ben, in the World
•	Hardcover - Ben in the World
•	Paperback - Ben, in the World: The Sequel to the Fifth Child
•	Hardcover - Ben, in the World: The Sequel to the Fifth Child
•	Audio CD - Ben, in the World
•	Hardcover - Ben, in the World
•	Paperback - Ben, in the world
•	Paperback - Ben, In the World : The Sequel to the Fifth Child
•	Audio Cassette - Ben, in the World

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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.co.uk Review
Described as "one of the world's great living writers', Doris Lessing's fiction continues to compel, and surprise, her readers. In the context of Lessing's writing career, the tale of Ben, in the World, the sequel to Lessing's powerful The Fifth Child (1988), is a long, and complex, one. It goes back (at least) to 1957, and the appearance of her short story, "The eye of God in paradise" (included in The Habit of Loving). That story includes the description of a child, "a desperate, wild, suffering little creature", who bites if you get close to him. That child haunts both Mary Parrish (the protagonist of the story) and, it seems, Doris Lessing. She returns to him in The Fifth Child, a short novel dedicated to the problem of how to tell the difference of "Ben": the fifth child born to an idyllic middle-class family. Who, or what, is Ben? Beast, goblin, throwback, alien, or a "normal healthy fine baby"? Wrestling with that question--the ethical difficulty posed by the appearance of difference at the heart of "normal" life--The Fifth Child allows for a hesitation in knowing what, or how, to think about Ben. Ben, in the World pursues the theme, but with far more certainty. Now eighteen, but looking thirty-five, Ben is estranged from his family, forced to find his way in a basically hostile world: "And Ben left: he had no home in this world." By now, Lessing knows him well; the narrative voice constantly intervenes to direct the reader's response to Ben, to the people who surround him and his (sometimes unlikely) experiences in Europe and South America. The misery, and alienation, of Ben's life remains Lessing's preoccupation, offset only by the friendship of the odd individuals she depicts so skilfully--and, finally, the waywardness of Ben's quest to find people like himself. Vicky Lebeau

Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...

3 out of 5 stars

A rather disappointing sequel to "The Fifth Child" February 9, 2006
2 out of 4 found this review helpful

Ben is now eighteen. Broad face, delineated features, a perpetual stupid grin on his face. Most people compare him to a kind of misshapen dog. He roams the streets of London with gangs of miscreants. Later he is taken by Matthew Grindly to a cider farm to pick apples but one of the workers snatches away the envelope containing his pay. A couple, Johnston and Rita, use Ben to carry cocaine to Nice where they abandon him. Then a film maker, Alex Beyle, spots Ben and takes him to Brazil where he vaguely plans to use him in a film about a prehistoric tribe.
The novel unfortunately lacks the intensity one can find in "The Fifth Child". Although one can feel some measure of pity for Ben being dragged around and exploited by various people, the story is not as powerful and gripping as it was in the first novel.

5 out of 5 stars

Compelling June 8, 2004
2 out of 4 found this review helpful

This is a strong follow-up to Doris Lessing's story "The Fifth Child". And I must say that I am so glad she wrote it, as the first book ended suddenly with few explanations, so it made for a completetion of the story to read the second one. Some of it was pretty far-fetched, but I felt it compelling enough to include a mention of it in an assessed essay I have just written for a University literature course.

5 out of 5 stars

Ben, in the World November 27, 2003
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

Superb follow-up to 'The Fifth Child'. I never realised quite how involved I had become in the plot or how much I had come to care about the central character, Ben, until the shock ending. This book really does make you think about alienation in the modern world and how society treats thos who are different.

1 out of 5 stars

Crude cliches from an author in terminal decline. March 30, 2001
9 out of 17 found this review helpful

Doris Lessing has written some fine books, but really there is nothing to be said that can possibly redeem "Ben in the World". The theme of alienation is treated with sledgehammer crudeness to the point where the book is nothing more than caricature. The central character, Ben, is a genetic throw-back, physically and emotionally ill equiped for the world into which he is born, but the facile treatment of his trials leaves the reader uninvolved. The plotting is cursory, with little beyond a set of hollywood stereotypes filling in the spaces around Ben. We are expected to believe in, not one, but two "hookers with a heart" (as crass a cliche as one can imagine) and a brutal and exploitaive scientific research organisation bent on using and abusing the eponymous hero. What we asked to take seriously is little more than the staple of cheap television sci fi, kids stuff really, but not worthy of consideration as literature. Evil scientists conducting secret experiments without regard for morals or the human consequences may well have been adequate devices for fiction when Wells wrote "The Island of Doctor Moreau" (though I would argue it was cheap stuff even then), but in this day and age we surely deserve a more sophisticated analysis of the machinations and complex morality of science. In Ben we have a pure hearted and ingenuous hero, trusting and always likely to be exploited, but again he seems little more than a crude symbol of a far more interesting and equivocal figure which Lessing, it seems, could not bring her self to devise. As a study in the alienation of a born outsider the work is superficial and as an examination of society's tendency to exploit and abuse the weak and vulnerable it is laughably simplistic. Such paucity of invention and reliance on standard off the peg signifiers is surely a sign that Lessing is written out. The picaresque element which sees Ben transported around the world to be exploited at every turn, only seems to emphasise how lazy this book really is; no location is drawn with any genuine sense of place and one might be forgiven for imagining that Lessing relocated the action periodically simply to mask her own failure of invention.

This is a lazy book in terms of its themes and their development, but it is also quite frankly, a badly written one. There have always been those who argued that Lessing's technique as a writer lagged behind her powers of invention, but now with the cupboard of ideas so bereft her written prose is cruelly exposed. There are sentences in the book which, were they the work of a less celebrated author, would have been edited out long before publication.

It is very sad to see an ageing writer so obviously in decline, but it is perhaps an indication of the cowardice of those around her that they allowed her to publish a work which can do nothing but diminish her reputation. Was nobody brave enough to tell her how inadequate this book really is?

5 out of 5 stars wonderful storytelling September 2, 2000
6 out of 8 found this review helpful

An incredible book filled with emotion and intelligence. Ben feels very real, you get to know and care about him. Then life intervenes. Ben is a unique character and this book is one of the best I've read in recent years. Doris Lessing continues to write the kind of readable fiction that few other writers can produce. Intelligent, moving and important.