Read my post on The Fifth Child here.

Doris Lessing’s Ben, in the World tells the story of The Fifth Child’s Ben Lovatt after he leaves his childhood home. He begins his adulthood with Mrs. Biggs, a nice old lady who does her best to take care of him and teach him basic survival skills and concepts. Nevertheless, Ben continues to be taken advantage of by others as he is nowhere near as smart as the average human being, including all the fools that manage to make good use of Ben in their fumbling, deceitful ways. Following Mrs. Biggs’s death, Ben’s life spirals downwards. He encounters misfortune after misfortune, and is cheated, lied to and used continually. Ben, in the World thus has rare and few truly happy moments for Ben, the unlucky fifth child rejected and unwanted by his own parents.

The book is told in the third-person-limited perspective, giving readers a glimpse into Ben’s mind as well as some others he encounters. Ben, in the World not only serves as a sequel to The Fifth Child, but also offers answers to many of the mysteries in The Fifth Child. The book gives us a glimpse into Ben’s thought processes and feelings.

Ben inversely mirrors other people. Despite his enormous physical strength, he has a significantly reduced mental capacity. Lessing’s writing mirrors this limitation; it is clipped with little mental or emotional depth when written from Ben’s perspective. His mind usually lacks any complex motivations or understanding of the events around him, as compared to the minds of those around him. As if to compensate, Ben seems to have a heightened physical awareness— he can hear, smell, sense and see things much more sensitively. This perhaps suggests that he is somewhat animalistic, an idea reinforced by the large number of times Ben is referred to as ‘a throwback’. In contrast, when the book is focused from other people’s perspectives, they usually have an extremely limited awareness of physical facts and details except in extreme circumstances. Instead, they spend a lot of time in their heads, with ideas, concepts and narratives. As such, I propose that Ben serves as a revealing and subversive mirror for the largely rotten mass of humanity writhing around him like ruthless cannibals who cannot see beyond their own desires.

A Brief Portrait of Ben Lovatt

Ben is presented as not only a throwback, but also a rejection of modern civilization. His preferred diet consists of meat and fruit. He strongly dislikes carbohydrates, especially bread, which is processed. This is interesting, as meat and fruits are usually eaten as close to their natural forms as possible (bar some fire), while bread requires mass cooperation and machinery to make, two markers of modern civilisation. He also hates other things this combination creates, such as elevators and airports. His typing as a caveman of sorts is confirmed, when another character , Alfredo, finds caveman drawings of people that look just like Ben high up in some remote mountains far from civilisation.

Like most survivors of extreme childhood trauma, Ben’s adult life rumbles along the deep grooves carved out by his early experiences. His relationships with men and women are particularly affected. Women seem to represent a fraught and inconsistent source of comfort. Mrs. Biggs takes care of him, yet she does not show any understanding of his family’s situation, pressuring him to come in contact with them even though they are a deep source of distress for Ben. Despite all of Ben’s obvious stress and discomfort, she is unable to see beyond her own ideas of family as an inherently and perpetually helpful and benign entity. While the other women in the book are slightly more sensitive to Ben’s physical cues, they choose to ignore them when it becomes inconvenient and more beneficial to do so. All the women in Ben’s life—beginning with his mother Harriet Lovatt—can only offer an uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing compromise. Despite all the comfort they provide, the threat of betrayal is always imminent. They all have some looming thing (a man; a family; a disease) that may take away their power— and their ability to take care of Ben— at any moment.

Men on the other hand are almost universally hateful, overpowering and scary, like his father David Lovatt and the men in the institute Ben was sent to as a child, who would presumably have done all the heavy lifting. Ben observes men from a cautious distance. Usually, it is a man who holds the most power over him.

Kindness and happiness in Ben’s life are precious, temporary and costly things. He only experiences true, unadulterated happiness once — when he sees the pictures of the cave people. This experience is but short-lived and bittersweet, tainted by the fact that he is yet again being betrayed and lied to. Fittingly, the scene of him ‘finding his family’ is but an illusion— they are nothing more than two-dimensional drawings briefly illuminated in an opportune moment. This mirrors the times he thinks he has found friends or family—Mrs. Biggs, Rita, Richard, Teresa. They all leave and/or betray him shortly after he thinks he has found respite and home with them.

Ben Lovatt Vs. Humanity

Ben lacks sophistication. He is largely unable to hide anything and can only pretend to the degree a small child or animal can. He is regularly insulted by others; they call him a ‘throwback’, a ‘yeti’ and an ‘ape’. When he is captured by evil scientists, he is kept with the other animals in his own cage. His caretakers and abusers treat him like he is other, not like them. These terms— and the cage— imply that these others see themselves as more evolved than him, more sophisticated, cleverer, and better. They also appear to be so— they understand the complicated workings of the world and even live in apparent cooperation despite their differences, as Ben notes. Yet, no matter what airs they put on, they are metaphorically stripped bare when they are with him. He puts their humanity under a microscope and exposes their true nature.

Taking advantage of Ben is all too easy, easier than taking candy from a child— when put to the test, everyone, except Mrs. Biggs, cannot help doing so. In all of Ben’s misadventures, Lessing usually presents a ‘good guy’ and a ‘bad guy’. The bad guy is blatantly bad— they openly admit plans to rob and use Ben. They look at him without seeing him, seeing only all the different ways they can use him to gain profit or fame. The ‘good guy’ tries their best to protect Ben. They try their best to sympathise with him, to recognise and honor the humanity they believe resides in the sub-human creature sitting before them. They do all they can to treat him well and equally. Furthermore, these ‘good’ people— Rita, Richard, Teresa— beg sympathy themselves. Lessing goes into great detail about their back stories— they have all fought hard to earn themselves a decent lives; this is presumably why they sympathise with Ben so much. They represent the best of humanity in the worst of situations.

They all eventually reach a crossroad, where they have to choose between advocating for Ben or exploiting and overlooking him for their own benefit and as much time as each one spends straddling this dilemma, they all eventually choose the latter. They always, always give in to their greed, to the base and primal instinct for self-preservation. Despite all their mental capacities, they turn out to be no better than Ben, no different from the throwback, the yeti. When put to the test, they prove themselves as beastly and violent as Ben, albeit in more sophisticated ways. He is the ultimate test for someone to be good just because and one after another, they all fail miserably.

Ben therefore serves as a subversive and revealing mirror. As a ‘throwback’, he reveals that perhaps the modern person isn”t as cooperative, selfless, trustworthy and evolved as we all claim to be. From his ghastly biological family to the different groups that use and abuse him, Ben reflects and illuminates the beast in each of them, teeth bared and crouching behind all their complicated narratives and understanding— the true author of their motivations despite the fancy robes of civilisation they try so hard to clothe it in.