The Four-Gated City

infobox Book |
name = The Four-Gated City
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author = Doris Lessing
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country = United Kingdom
language = English
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genre = Novel
publisher = MacGibbon & Kee
release_date = 1969
english_release_date =
media_type = Print (Hardback & Paperback)
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isbn = N/A
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"The Four-Gated City" is a novel, published in 1969, by British Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing. It concludes the five-volume series "Children of Violence", a literary achievement which took nearly twenty years. "The Four-Gated City" is sometimes regarded as one of Lessing's most important works. [Prof. Horace Engdahl, the Permanent Secretary at the Swedish Academy said that "The Four-Gated City" is Lessing's most important work. In "Dagens Nyheter", October 12, 2007.] The book, which finishes like a science fiction story with its bloody end to an epoch, created a stir upon publication, with claims that the novel promoted communism. ["The Four-Gated City; By Doris Lessing," by Mary Ellmann, in the "New York Times", May 18, 1969.]

Plot summary

The series "Children of Violence" develops the central character, Martha Quest, from her birth in Southern Africa at the end of the First World War, through an adolescence, youth and marriage shaped by the Second World War.

"The Four-Gated City" is set in Post-War Britain. Martha is in London as the 1950s begin. She is integrally part of the social history of the time - the Cold War, the Aldermaston Marches, Swinging London, the deepening of poverty and social anarchy. The volume ends with the century in the grip of World War Three. In the year 1997, Martha dies on a contaminated island off the northwest coast of Scotland. Most of the people of Britain have died before her, in 1978, of multiple afflictions: bubonic plague, nerve gases, nuclear explosions.

Remarks

Lessing takes on the medical profession, which she believes is destroying that part of humanity which is in fact most sensitive to evolution. She criticizes the scientists who have created and perpetuate a climate in which "rationalism" has become a new God, she claims that everyone has "extra-sensory perception", in varying degrees, but has been brainwashed into suppressing it, and that schizophrenia is the name of our blindest contemporary prejudice. [http://www.dorislessing.org/thecity.html "The Four-Gated City"] page at Doris Lessing's website. Accessed 2007-10-12.]

Notes