"These people still lived inside the shadow of their war, they were still rationed, their buildings were still thinned or ruinous, men had been killed, men had not come back from fighting."
This is what England looks like when Lessing's alter-ego Martha Quest arrives from her native South Africa. She has left behind two marriages, her children, and everything she has known to this point in order to start a new life—her life. Up to now, she feels as if she has been sleepwalking, playing a role written in a drama authored by a malevolent puppetmaster.
The notion of being asleep, or living by remote control, is central to the novel. On the dedication page of "The Four-Gated City", Lessing reprints an old dervish teaching story from Idries Shah's "The Way of the Sufi." G.I. Gurdjieff, who channeled many Sufi ideas, made "remembering oneself" in order to "wake up" a key aspect of the spiritual exercises he taught his students. I don't know what Lessing's position was towards Gurdjieff (she most certainly would have heard of him) but she made no secret of her admiration of and debt to Sufism. What does Martha want? "I want," she says succincntly, "to live in such a way that I don't just turn into a hypnotized animal."
On the ship to England, she observes with horror how her fellow passengers exist in a kind of senseless narcotized cycle of eating, drinking, fucking, and sleeping that may be exaggerated on a pleasure-cruise, but the true horror is that this is essentially no different from how everyone lives all the time. If nothing else, it is the life-condition favored by the majority of people, a state seen as ideal, as living the "good life," proven by the the very fact that the cruise represents for the people lucky enough to be able to afford it the height of luxury, refinement, and enjoyment.
Once in England, Martha hopes to find a more progressive society than the one she left behind in South Africa. But she is soon disillusioned. Attitudes in England may be subtler, more politely expressed, but they are every bit as ignorant, bigoted, and fearful as those she thought to escape in provincial South Africa. Racism is refined, reasoned,and rampant; political intolerance well-bred and vigorous. Conformity is enforced with the bit, if not the whip; the iron hand strikes, though it wears an expensive suede glove.
Short of money and in need of a job, Martha first visits an old lover. Jack is a hedonistic painter, or at least he masquerades as a painter, because saying he is a painter gives him license to be a hedonist and to live as he does: which is basically as a squatter in a large house where he entertains a steady stream of women who drift in mainly from the upper classes. Jack was in the navy and narrowly survived a harrowing wartime experience which left him ever-hungry for food and sex. Martha spends a night with him and realizes that she can spend no more than that. Jack understand the world through his body. Martha understands it through her mind. They can only meet in bed. Though she has nowhere else to go, Martha knows that accepting Jack's offer to move in with him would be a mistake, as well as an easy way out. But even worse, it would represent a failure to act, an instance of cowardice, a betrayal of her independence and the whole reason she sacrificed her past to come to England. It would amount in effect to a kind of death.
She turns Jack down only to find herself taking a live-in secretarial position to an upper-class businessman and sometime writer. Mark Coldridge lives in what was once an English house in the grand tradition now fallen into neglect. He is unhappily entrenched in a dysfunctionally neurotic family situation with a mad wife, a sad child, and an overbearing mother that reminds Martha painfully of her own failed marriages. The irony is bitter. Here she has crossed an ocean in search of something new and has landed smack in the middle of "what she had lived through already." She plans to leave the employ of Mark Coldridge as soon as she possibly can, but finds it harder than she thought. "If you start something," she finds, "get on a wavelength of something, then there's no getting off, getting free, unless you've learned everything there is to be learned—have had your nose rubbed in it."
Apparently you don't need to die to experience karma. It seems to operate with a grim economy not only from incarnation to incarnation, but within one's present as well. Martha will stay with Mark Coldridge and, despite her fierce resistance, find herself slipping back into her enabling, nurturing, self-effacing "housewife conditioning." But she's conscious of it, fighting against it, and this makes all the difference. When one is in prison the first step in making an escape is to know that you are imprisoned.
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