Tea & Tedium

CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE: MARTHA QUEST AND A PROPER MARRIAGE by Doris Lessing. 605 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.50.

We are all prisoners of our mechanisms, of the harsh or easy tyrannies of our bodies and of society. Possession of intelligence does not change this galling truth; it merely makes us aware of it. The rebellious spirit is jerked short by the end of the chain.

This is the theme that slowly surfaces in these first two novels of what Doris Lessing plans as a five-novel-cycle. The heroine is a girl of middle-class English parents who was born and grows up in a British colony in Africa. Her name, Martha Quest, is recognized first as lame symbolism and then as intentional irony. Martha is not questing for anything. Her father is an unsuccessful farmer and a passionate hypochondriac her mother is a graceless worshipper of convention.

When the reader meets Martha in the mid-1930s, she is a 15-year-old rationalist who contemptuously understands everything about her parents except how they got that way. Yet by her early 20s, she herself is, by what seems at the time her own choice, the wife of a standard-model civil servant and the mother of a conventional child. Although she has "views"--she disbelieves vaguely in the color bar--she is accepted placidly by colonial suburbia. Then she discovers that she feels as if she were going mad. Older wives smile kindly and say, Yes, that's right, everyone feels that way.

In this situation, an American housewife would get a divorce or take a course in something. By the end of these 600 pages, Martha has indeed left her husband, and also joined a Communist Party cell. But Martha is moved to redecorate her mind by impulses that would prompt a less intelligent woman to change the slip covers in her living room. She serves the cause of world revolution because she is bored with serving tea cakes.

Doris Lessing has the rare skill to deal seriously with a female main character who falls into the large but artistically troublesome range between prostitute and nun. Perhaps because the novels are more autobiography than fiction, the author suffers curiously from her heroine's flaw of vision; she is unwilling to look with interest at anything outside Martha.

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