SOURCE: Simon, Linda. “The Alien.” World & I 16, no. 2 (February 2001): 235-40.

In the following review, Simon contrasts the protagonist and themes of Ben, in the World with those of The Fifth Child.

“It would be a good thing if man concerned himself more with the history of his nature than with the history of his deeds.” This remark by the nineteenth-century German dramatist Friedrich Hebbel serves as an epigraph for Doris Lessing's Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (1987), a collection of five essays that reflect on the causes—biological or social—of human behavior, essays that consider how often and how much we are dominated by our savage past, as individuals and as groups. What, Lessing asks, is our inherent nature: Are we barbaric, brutal beasts who must be socialized into civility? Or have we, as a species, evolved genetically from our bestial past to transcend our animal nature...