The book is about a girl, Martha, growing up in Africa, as Doris Lessing herself did; it thus seems to be autobiographical, though I don’t know that it is.

Her father is ill and talks only about the war and illness.

Martha quarrels with her mother, who is extremely prejudiced, and argues with her father.

She is friends with two Jewish brothers, one of whom, Joss, lends her books.

She gets a job in town at a legal firm with Joss’s help, leaves home and lives by herself.

Joss introduces Martha to the Left Book Club. Martha is against the colour bar, dislikes racial prejudice in all forms, is an atheist and believes in socialism.

The book is well-written and very readable, though I didn’t find it very exciting. ( )

Era un po' che brancolavo nella letteratura straniera. Brava, nonostante abbia vinto il Nobel. No, scherzavo. Certo che quello ad Al Gore quest’anno ha fatto perdere mille punti a questo premio. Già distrutto da Fo. Ma, allora, non è solo un problema italiano. Parliamo del libro. Bello ed intenso. Una storia semplice, ma una storia. Ed in Sud Africa, per delle ore, con Martha Quest ci sono stato. Questo è il significato della lettura, il viaggio. Ripeto un che libro che va, di sostanza ed equilibrio che racconta la giovinezza di una giovinetta; inglese, di media famiglia borghese, in Sudafrica. Madre apprensiva, padre distratto. Dalla fattoria alla città, con il primo lavoro, i primi amici, i primi baci, le prime esperienze sessuali. Una altalena di emozioni e sentimenti che rendono bene. Forma strutturata, elegante, c’è. I Primi passi di una rivolta, più interiore che altro, verso i luoghi comuni e le banalità; penso un po' autobiografico. Volendo quello che accadde in Europa nel periodo precedente la seconda guerra mondiale; visto da lontano, dal Sudafrica, con problemi diversi. Un bel libro. Semplice e piacevole. Non, certamente, un capolavoro. ( )

In Lessing's own words: Martha Quest has a simple plot. She has a childhood in the bush, quarrels with her mother, is taught politics by the Cohen boys, reads, escapes into a big town, Salisbury (Rhodesia), learns shorthand typing, plans all kinds of attractive futures, but is swept away into dancing and good times, and marries a suitable young civil servant while the drums are beating for the second world war. Lessing says in her autobiography "Under my Skin":

In short when I wrote Martha Quest I was being a novelist and not a chronicler. But if the novel is not the literal truth, then it is true in atmosphere, feeling more true than this record is trying to be factual

Martha Quest is Doris Lessing and it is amazing how closely the novel keeps to those facts revealed in her autobiography. I read the autobiography earlier this year and reading Martha Quest felt like a re-read of it, but with Lessing revealing much more about herself and the people around her. It is no secret that she used people from her life in Africa as models for her characters, what is surprising is that her memories of them in her autobiography were so similar to those is Martha Quest.

The novel starts with Martha's life as a 15 year old, already struggling with her overbearing mother and semi invalid father. They have a small farm out in the veld and are barely able to scrape a living, but it is not their hardships that are described but Martha's love of the landscape and the freedom to be herself. Racial tensions are evident not only between the White rulers and the black Africans, but more potently as far as Martha is concerned between the English, the Afrikaans and the Jews. It is the Jewish family that provide her in her seventeenth year with a means of escape to the town, by securing for her a place as a typist in their relative's law firm. At last she is free from her mother, but soon falls in with the crowd at the Rugby club. From the books that she has been devouring she is aware of racism in Africa, but the sight of a group of black prisoners chained together in town provides her with a reality check. Just as she was out of step with her parents, she finds herself out of step with the crowd at the Rugby club and it is only her alcohol fuelled life style that tides her over. She is a confused young woman, deeply conscious that the society that has embraced her is horribly at fault and some of Lessing's best writing centres around this confusion. It is a mad whirl of a life with alliances that define the young peoples place in their own devil may care society, but for Martha/Lessing undercutting all this is her need to revolt. She takes a Jewish musician as her first lover, but this feels more like a revolt and it cannot be sustained. Martha/Lessing reveals more of herself in these passages than she ever did in her biography; she comes across as prickly, super critical; this is her thoughts on Douglas the man that she will marry and the only person she meets at the Rugby club that thinks remotely like her:

She was still capable of being critical. For several days they were together for all their leisure time and she looked surreptitiously at him, with a feeling of disloyalty, and the round rather low forehead struck her unpleasantly-there was something mean about it, something commonplace; the shallow dry lines across it affected her; as for his hands, they were large and clumsy, rather red, heavily freckled, and covered with hair. Soon she averted her eyes from his hands, she did not see them, she did not see his forehead, with those unaccountably unpleasant lines, like the lines of worry on an elderly face.

This is fine writing, because it mirrors what Martha must keep hidden from herself concerning the colonial attitudes around her, in order to survive. It also reveals something of Lessing's own character as one gets the feeling she is describing her first husband. Reality, memories, feelings become inextricably linked as Lessing delves deeply into her life to write this novel. Martha sees her forthcoming marriage to Douglas as another escape. As a couple they will be able to forge a path for themselves and she will have the security she needs; she will be accepted, however she knows she does not love him and is aware she is deluding herself with the idea of a perfect marriage.

Martha Quest is an excellent study of one woman's struggle to be articulate and to make herself heard. She cannot escape the pressures of being a young single attractive woman in a society, where not only do men reign supreme, but they are in the majority. It is of course Lessing's own struggle and as such portrays brilliantly, life in an African colony just before the outbreak of world war II when attitudes are hardening and the only means of survival for someone like Lessing is to flee the country. This book is the first part of Lessing's children of violence series and I am looking forward to reading the next three. A four star read. ( )

Read during Winter 2002/2003

The first of a 5 book series that I finally have all 5 of and can start to read! Although it is written in the third person, it feels very much placed inside Martha's thoughts and emotions. She is a teenager through the novel and full of all the conflicts you would expect of a teenager. She lives in South Africa before the outbreak of WWII. It's hard to like her because you live inside her head so much; she wants to grow and think and express herself but is plauged with doubts and constantly does what she resents the next minute. It is not a peaceful exsistence. She fights with her parents and friends. Life does not become better when she leaves her parent's farm and goes to work in the city. There are more conflicts and she falls into a life that she hates but pursues doggedly. I wanted to tell her to get herself together but I think she might have at least two or three more books of suffering before it is done.

Set in a British colony in Africa during the lead-up to the Second World War, this first novel in the Children of Violence series follows young Martha Quest as she attempts to reconcile her strong (but not yet fully formed) social/political convictions with the pull of leading a conventional life. There are good things going on here: an in-depth examination of the multiple layers of racial and social injustice present at the time; an exploration of the lack of educational and professional opportunities available to women; and an honest and respectful look at some of the inherent shortcomings of organized political group activity, while still championing the ideals for which they fight. All that being said, I struggled with this novel, mainly because my tolerance level for self-absorbed teen angst is quite low and there's an abundance of it here in the character of Martha. It wore me out! In addition, Lessing falls short in developing some of the more important secondary characters. I would have liked to get a better sense of them. ( )