At the start Martha Quest is a fifteen year old English girl (though time flows quickly... she’s 19 or 20 at the 40% mark and remains about that age for the rest of the book). At the beginning, it’s about 1935: between the World Wars, Hitler is name-dropped, and Martha lives on a farm in Africa. She’s isolated and doesn’t really have a friend her age, another girl, to talk to except for one whose outlook doesn’t match hers. She’s literary, argumentative, and sometimes perplexing, at least to me.The narrative is not 1st person but it is very intimate. Martha Quest’s thoughts dominate. Occasionally there are brief jumps to other points of view, such as her mother’s and that of an older, inappropriate man. (There is even a longer passage later that is from an omniscient point of view and details the establishment of a Sports Club, and it is engrossing.) Martha is a very interesting girl who terrorizes her parents and others around her. If you don’t like her or can’t sympathize with her or don’t find her interesting, then, you may want to pass, but I was fascinated most of the time and/or flabbergasted.Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize in 2007. The quality of her writing here is definitely of the highest caliber. Her portrayal of Martha as a feisty thinker who is interested in various -isms such as socialism and racism and colonialism and women’s emancipation (before it became an -ism?) seems to indicate a historical claim that may explain the Nobel. Based on this one work, I do wonder about the award and her worthiness or distinctnessiness, because other writers, other women, are also close observers who produce vivid amusing prose that gets to the heart of interesting things. I guess I’ll have to read more of her work to judge...There are scenes, very vivid scenes. At first I did not necessarily think they linked together and built on each other except to develop Matha’s character or to put aspects of her on display. Later, after I read three-fifths of the story or so, I began to sense how the scenes did build toward a theme or conclusion or maybe only a feeling about people, especially young adults and how they interact and explore the world. Some things did not necessarily make sense to me, such as when Martha avoided Joss or when she backed out of her college exams or kept hanging around with Donovan or...The novel may appear plotless at first, and to some extent, maybe it is, though I did not find it boring. Far from it, though my true rating is probably somewhere between 3 and 4 stars, not 4. There were times at the beginning when what was on display - Martha’s musings - did not fully enchant me, but those doubts did not last.Observing Martha as a young woman in pre-World War 2 Africa filled me with wonder because her experiences and the people she met reminded me of being that age in the late 80s and 90s, not that her details and my details were exact matches of course, but I developed a real affinity for Martha (and therefore Doris Lessing who was a contemporary of my grandparents!). People may tell you that times were different and people were different (and of course in ways they were), but Lessing proves that like-minds transcend generations and circumstances and even genders (even if they aren’t necessarily passed on through the same families).I don’t know what my expectations were exactly or why, but the story is more conventional, more ordinary, than I thought it would be. It’s a coming of age story. Martha escapes the farm when a friend arranges a job for her at his uncles’ law firm in the city. She hangs out with a guy named Donovan, who has hang ups or ways that annoy Martha (and amused me), and then falls in with... and so on.Here are only a few of many things that I enjoyed. They are random and not necessarily representative or what you, in your infinite wisdom, would highlight:“Martha followed her mother obediently, and suddenly found herself saying, in a bright flippant voice, ‘That dirty old man, Mr. McFarline, he tried to make love to me.’ She looked at her father but he was slowly crumbling his bread in time with his thoughts.”- Despite detailing Martha’s internalizations closely, Lessing does offer the reader opportunities to observe and judge her environment without spelling everything out, such as here. “At one moment she scorned him because he had dared to treat her like an attractive young female; and the next because he had taken her at her word, and simply offered books; and the confusion hardened into a nervous repulsion: Well, she could do without Joss!”- Lessing often captures the chaotic thoughts of adolescents quite well, at least as I remembered them while reading her writing.“Martha, at first sight, might pass for the marriageable and accomplished daughter it seemed that Mrs Quest, after all, desired. In her bright-yellow linen dress, her face tinted carefully with cosmetics, she appeared twenty. But the dress has grass stains on it, was crumpled, she was smoking hungrily, and her fingers were already stained with nicotine, her rifle was lying carelessly across her lap, and on it was balanced a book which, as Mrs Quest could see, was called The Decay of the British Empire.”- Hilarious, isn’t it? There are quite a few moments like this.“...she looked from him to the charming young man, his son, and wondered how soon the shrill and complaining strand in his character would strengthen until he too became like his father, a bad-tempered but erudite hermit among his books…”- Good thing my wife did not read this book before we met. If she had had the opportunity to compare me with these guys, I’d probably still be a bachelor.
Since she won the Nobel (and received it with what I thought was funny, dry nonchalance--utterly unimpressed with herself) I finally made good on a years-old, smiling-nodding pledge to a former roommate of my brother's (Ploughman anyone?) that I would check out some of Doris Lessing's stuff. It helped that there was a hilariously large English books section at the Brockihaus (massive 2nd hand store common in Switzerland) where we went halloween costume shopping last year. I made my Palin powersuit selections rather quickly, and while male friends tried on dresses and everyone browsed various clownish Fasnacht Guggämusik get-ups and put on smelly wigs, I went and found a couple Doris Lessing books and The Great Gatsby.It took me forever to get through the two 'Children of Violence' books I bought. Of the five, this is the first, and the other one I read (the Four-Geted City, review forthcoming) is the last. Suffice it to say that I will not be rounding out my experience with the middle three.At first, 'Martha Quest' really charmed me. There have been so many books about disaffected adolescents at odds with society and expectations, struggling with identity, rebelling for the sake of rebelling, blah diddy blah...some of them are OK, some of them are garbage, a lot in between...but it honestly never even occurred to me that it would be far more interesting if this conflicted Holden Caulfield protagonist were a girl. The perspectives Lessing explores through the volatile eyes of Martha Quest, a tragically attractive destitute farmgirl from an English family on the Veld in South Africa in the 30's, are myriad and surprising and fresh--and one can assume they were even more astonishing to readers at the time of the book's writing. Martha moves to the 'city' at 16 against the wishes of her parents and is confronted all at once with enormous moral and personal quandaries...racism, nationalism (English-Dutch), sexism, class divisions, sex and boys, work and money, drinking and smoking, anti-semitism, the approaching war in Europe...She approaches all of this with a genre-typical mix of independence, occasional obnoxiousness, feigned disinterest, pendulation between over-self-confidence and crushing self-doubt...and gradually tries to orient herself politically and socially in a way that she can accept, nonetheless cordially navigating the immense pressures of überconservative South African white society.That's the book. I guess I didn't realize at the moment I started it that it was the first in a quintet, and that it was going to be exposition from cover to cover. I kept waiting for a punchline, for a plot to begin, for a point. Apparently Lessing had much bigger plans, and this whole book was serving the basic purpose of providing a very detailed social and psychological background for a complicated protagonist who would move through the next four books over the next four decades. Unfortunately, though I liked Martha, and though the context was wildly new to me (I've only read one other book based in SA, but it was modern SA and by JM Coetzee...overwhelmingly male perspective...), it just wasn't enough to compel me through thousands more pages of non-story.
What do You think about Martha Quest (2001)?
Doris Lessing is described as "one of the most serious, intelligent and honest writers of the whole post-war generation"(SUNDAY TIMES). I found her book curious. Although I appreciated her in-depth exploration of a young woman's transition from living with her parents on a sheltered farm in Africa to working in an urban setting with all its temptations, I had trouble liking the protagonist. She couldn't make up her mind, and all her flip-flopping was annoying. I couldn't wait to finish the book, but for the wrong reason.
—Diana Stevan
We are caught in the flow of Martha's psychological time. Years pass in a treacly flood of hot, irritated afternoons, a single moment of transcendent commune with the universe lasts hours (and takes up several pages), and busy days in the city expand to fill decades with a handful of weeks. I can imagine readers complaining about 'pace' since little happens, but the book engages me, Martha's time is the slow river of story I share gladly with her, and I am happy to swim leisurely in her companyI can also imagine readers complaining that Martha is unlikeable. I cringed at pride wounded so easily it condemns Martha to bouts of even deeper loneliness, and again at her delusion of having finished her rebel self-education. But I cringed because I recognised myself and the teens I know, and I loved Martha because I love myself and my young acquaintances. If I have a criticism of the character, it's that Lessing is too harsh on her avatar. The whole book is flavoured with a bitterness and rage at herself (because I cannot but think Martha is herself - she knows her too miserably well) as well as at her colonist parents and their generation, at the disease of whiteness that gives Martha a poisonous sense of entitlement, that trammels and decays and impoverishes all their lives. Yet it sings, it sings its exotic fury and familiar frustration. Those turns of phrase! The homage of the wolves. And when the natural world enters it is a poem that soothes the heart; the thunder mutters.Distance is created between Martha and the world by the use of her name, always Matty or Miss Quest to others, always Martha to the reader. I think the only exception is the Cohen bothers, who offer her the most vital of all gifts, recognition. The most excruciating thing about her is that Martha responds weakly or negatively to most of the attempts made to reach out to her, but while I have my head in my hands over this, I'm learning the lesson: keep reaching out. Reach out gently but relentlessly. Keep holding out that hand, keep offering that recognition, for as long as you possibly can afford. Because we are all of us irrational and hampered and prone to making decisions we know in our bones are terrible. Oh, if I could have back and live again the years of my life between sixteen and twenty, when I too (despite having parents entirely unlike Martha's, who instead of swaddling my spirit and cramping my mind, taught me joy and set me free) was pulled helplessly by forces I perceived to be outside me, but were actually my socialisation!I feel that Lessing is cultivating shoots of political awareness in this phase of Martha's story to bear fruit later. Martha's political attitudes are skilfully integrated into both the fraught surface formed by action, relationships and psychological focus, and the agitated background where destructive human geographies rot in racial (anti-black and anti-Semitic) and national bigotry and gender hierarchies. Lessing draws each of these very distinct dynamics in multiple sketches. Martha's interrogation by a Dutch patriarch, and the hideous scene in the Club where the wolves force a black waiter to dance are only the seismic shocks of constantly building tensions released. Lessing's discussion of the speech of white bodies and eyes (windows on poisoned souls) also develops the sense of this environment very subtley. Although Martha is influenced and affected by the atmospheres that often disgust her, she is able to effect some opposition by pressing the men into talking with her genuinely instead of in the 'jargon' of Club convention. This human scene is contrasted with the sublime lyrical and epic natural world and the possibilities of 'illumination' it offers (with its changing light). Martha glimpses liberation in landscape, but she is cut off from it for the moment. The gulf Lessing allows between people and land reflects colonial visioning of land as property to be taken and owned and nature to be conquered and used, its inhabitants put to work or casually killed for meat. It struck me that Martha resolved not to kill deer ever again when she shared a moment of transcendence with them, but that she later breaks the promise. For me this epitomises her lumpy, partial and constantly shifting critical resistance to colonial (un)consciousness. Mud, I think, is a crucial signifier; the dreaded touch of mud, of the earth itself, actually grants Martha some healing, nourishing experiences. I relate this to another scene when Martha's relaxed co-worker is pictured sweating and marked by dust, but these 'flaws' enhance her appearance in Martha's eyes. Something is germinating here and it might be the seeds of feminist decolonisation...
—Zanna
Compelling, vivid picture of coming of age of young white woman in British colony in Africa in 1938-39 immediately prior to outbreak of WWII. Truthful depiction of sexism, racism, classism, and antisemitism of that era. Moving and truthful evocation of feelings of 19 year old moving to town from farm to town and striking out on her own for the first time. The breadth of feeling the author is able to convey leaves me in awe. The main character is often confused and does not understand why she makes the choices she does, yet her struggles are always comprehensible to the reader.
—David Lauver
