Home Is Where the Horrors Are THE FIFTH CHILD

By Paul Gray

Most horror stories appeal to a collective memory of childhood, the sense of being small and vulnerable in a world filled with large, mysterious beings. Portrayals of innocence or helplessness stalked by danger produce responses that are largely involuntary and hence all but fail-safe: a reader's skin crawls, a moviegoer looks away from the screen or screams. One variation on this formula is its mirror opposite: an evil child is born into an unsuspecting, defenseless society. This situation crops up in folk literature, with tales of changelings or of sleeping women seduced and impregnated by incubi, and occasionally appears in popular entertainments like The Bad Seed and Rosemary's Baby. Not many serious writers have risked such a plot. It reeks of discredited superstitions and demonologies; it suggests, contrary to liberal, enlightened opinion, that wickedness is inborn and intractable.

So perhaps it should not be surprising that the latest of Doris Lessing's more than 30 books tells of the birth of a monster. Throughout her long, distinguished career, Lessing has specialized in bucking currents. Her early fiction carried a strong, if artfully submerged, feminist message. Later, when the women's movement gathered force, she did not join the parade but rather devoted her energy to a cycle of five science-fiction novels. She criticized the West when its power seemed paramount. When the enemies of democracy grew threatening, she changed her emphasis; in The Good Terrorist (1985) she showed civilized London under siege by mindless anarchists. The Fifth Child admirably continues this iconoclastic tradition; it is scary, engrossing and radically disturbing.

At a London office party in the mid-1960s, boy meets girl. David Lovatt, 30, and Harriet Walker, 24, share the same unfashionable dream of settling into married life and having lots of children. David, whose parents divorced when he was seven, wants to create the stable home he lacked while growing up; Harriet, a virgin, hopes to replicate her untroubled childhood. They find a huge Victorian house within commuting distance of London. It costs more than David's salary as an architect can provide, but his wealthy father agrees to take on the mortgage payments.

Despite the initial skepticism of relatives and friends, the Lovatts' experiment gets off to a brilliant beginning. In quick succession, four healthy children are born. Over Christmas and Easter vacations and during the summers, the house overflows with in-laws: "People came and went, said they were coming for a couple of days and stayed a week." Harriet's chores and recurrent pregnancies are eased by the almost constant presence of her mother, whose labor subsidizes this enterprise just as thoroughly as the money from David's father. But cost hardly seems to matter, measured against what it has helped to achieve: "Happiness. A happy family. The Lovatts were a happy family. It was what they had chosen and what they deserved."

Immersed in the coziness of their own creation, sensing themselves admired by their less fortunate houseguests, David and Harriet succumb to smugness. "We are the center of this family," David informs his mother. "We are -- Harriet and me." Harriet chimes in, "This is what everyone wants, really, but we've been brainwashed out of it. People want to live like this, really."

When it comes to bizarre horrors, though, there is no place like home. Harriet's fifth pregnancy disrupts the insular domestic bliss: "David saw her sitting at the kitchen table, head in her hands, muttering that this new foetus was poisoning her." Harriet complains to her doctor, but he refuses to see anything wrong: "He made the usual tests, and said, 'It's large for five months, but not abnormally so.' " After long agony, the child is born. Seeing him for the first time, the mother says, "He's like a troll, or a goblin or something." Harriet names him Ben and brings him home to his father and siblings, who learn to shun and fear him. The infant is physically precocious and incredibly strong, and he betrays no trace of human sympathy or fellowship. A dog and a cat about the premises die mysteriously, apparently strangled. David and Harriet come to view Ben as an enemy, one who "had willed himself to be born, had invaded their ordinariness, which had no defences against him or anything like him."

The Fifth Child can be read simply as a hair-raising tale; the struggle $ between the Lovatt household and the "alien" who comes to live there is as full of twists and shocks as any page turner could desire. Lessing's style is straightforward, sometimes almost telegraphic: "In September, of the year Ben became eleven, he went to the big school. He was eleven. It was 1986." This spareness suggests parable, a single accessible version of complex truths. Yet beneath its clear surface, Lessing's novel roils with several possible meanings. Perhaps David and Harriet, in their zeal to create a haven for themselves and what they call the "real children," have blinded themselves to humanity that lies "outside the permissible," beyond their constrained definitions of themselves. Maybe Ben represents a dangerous, violent streak in the species that must be either tamed or excluded from the realm of civilized life.

Lessing is much too canny to answer the questions her story so teasingly raises. Her artistry here, as it has so often been in the past, remains provocative. Family and society represent attempts to ward off all that is wild, destructive, unreasonable. But Lessing suggests that these controls, these apparently benign attempts to make life secure and bearable, may in fact spawn the monstrous.