While most writers are happy to have a single character successfully ‘develop’ during the course of a novel, in ‘The Cleft’, Doris Lessing – who is patently not most writers – can describe no less than the evolution of a complete human race. But being Lessing, hers is a very alternative history of the origins of man.
Indeed, at the outset of this account – told from the viewpoint of an Ancient Roman historian – men don’t even exist among the Clefts. Lessing’s suggestively named all-female coastal tribe of unspecified time and place muddle along in the gloaming, getting pregnant by swimming in the sea, giving birth only to baby girls, and keeping their population sustainable by lobbing the occasional surplus newborn down The Cleft – essentially, a huge geological vagina. As I say, she’s not most writers. Trouble, and the novel’s complex philosophical cycle, starts when the first Monsters (boys) are born.
Predictably, initial disgust on the Clefts’ part turns to curiosity then to having sex on the rocks with grown-up Monsters, to – eventually and inevitably – the Clefts becoming entirely reliant on the Monsters to get them up the duff. This process is egged on by the benign force of a swooping convocation of eagles – the most unfathomable aquiline metaphor since Augie March’s adventures.
It’s a remarkable set piece – part sci-fi anthropology, part mythological parable – Lessing’s efficient, restrained, near-biblical language sustained with unflagging brio for 260 pages. Coming from a reluctant feminist, this could have been a cranky boys-versus-girls polemic. It’s not; the disorienting themes – how we know history, how we consider gender and its relations – are far too nuanced (read: difficult). In fact, ‘The Cleft’ leaves us clearer about only one thing: that perhaps men and women just aren’t meant to get along.
