Places Where I've Lived: 7 (The Four-Gated City, Part One)

I read a lot of Doris Lessing during this time.  I first came across her writing in an anthology of short stories during my time in college.  Her writing stuck with me and I wanted to read more.  My neighbour upstairs suggested I read her Children of Violence series.  The first four novels of the series were set entirely in southern Africa, following the youth and young adulthood of the protagonist, Martha Quest: her divorce from her first and second husbands, her involvement in the communist party during the Second World War and her increasing preoccupation with discovering her soul, her authentic self.

This all comes together in the fifth and longest volume "The Four-Gated City" set entirely in London from 1949 to 1969 then projecting forward into an imaginary apocalyptic future that sees large swathes of the First World countries rendered uninhabitable by a nuclear holocaust.

The story opens in postwar London in a small café in South London.  Martha Quest has just immigrated to England from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).  She feels for the first time in her life absolutely and unconditionally free and hops from cheap inn to bedsit until she lands in an upper middle class home as the secretary of an eccentric writer and caretaker of his dysfunctional family.  She has abandoned communism, feeling sick of the many inconsistencies and hypocrisies and finds herself searching for an ideal and mythical reality that she imagines as a kind of archetypal city.

With her employer and sometimes lover, Mark Coldridge Martha maps out this fictitious city which is an ordered and integrated whole of well planned streets, houses, buildings and gardens.  Everyone has a useful role or function to play in this city which seems to be governed by a kind of spiritual anarchy.  No one knows where the divine power comes from that seems to hold everything in a dynamic order until a foreign army invades and conquers the city.  In the library in the centre of the city a small empty room is discovered to be the source of this energy.