by Doris Lessing.

HarperCollins. 260 pages. $25.95.

BY G. WAYNE MILLER
Journal Staff Writer

Doris Lessing has a noble ambition in The Cleft. Would that she had achieved it.

A harsh assessment, yes, but Lessing, the British author of Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, among many other celebrated books, is much better than this. Ponderous prose, excessive detail, muddled narrative, and a disturbingly graphic obsession with genitals are among the many failings of The Cleft.

Lessing’s theme, one she’s frequently explored in a literary career spanning six decades, is male-female relationships — in this case, their prehistoric origins, how the mating urges of primitive humans began to evolve into this vastly more complicated thing we call love. Lessing creates a mythology of an ancient people, the Clefts, who are all female. The moon, perhaps, makes these women pregnant, allowing the generations to unfold; it can’t be men, for there are none, and never have been, not even fantasized.

The Clefts bask, mermaid-like, by the warm sea, passing their days Edenically on the sunny rocks of The Cleft. In her imagined voice, a Cleft tells us: “Sometimes I think we lived in a kind of dream, a sleep, everything slow and easy and nothing ever happening but the moon being bright and big, and the red flowers washing down The Cleft.” Wonderful prose, wonderful metaphor. Too bad Lessing didn’t hit the high notes more often.

Into this idyllic world a baby boy is mysteriously born — a sort of reversal of the biblical progenitor Adam, who begat Eve from his rib. Fear and revulsion accompany the arrival of the new creature, whom The Clefts call Monster. More Monsters are born. After sometimes mutilating their genitals, the Clefts abandon them on the rocks, where giant eagles carry them away to live someplace inland. The Monsters, some of them deformed, survive and grow. They become interested in girl Clefts, and girl Clefts (though not the still-revulsed elder She Ones) become interested in them.

And then we have page after page of what can only be described as cave-people pornography. If Lessing’s intent was to disgust, she succeeds. “Squirts,” “tubes,” “things” . . . I’ll stop now. In the last quarter or so of The Cleft, a new breed of females and males separate into two bands, the women led by Maronna, the men led by Horsa. The women continue as caring beings; the men momentarily slide toward Lord of the Flies. In the end, the bands reunite. It’s Lessing’s reworking of the old adage that the sexes can’t live with each other, and can’t live apart.

The book closes with a hopeful, lyrical touch. Horsa, who has glimpsed a distant promised land, seeks a better future. Have we reached it an eon or two later? If past is prologue, Lessing, in this awkward book, hardly thinks so.

gwmiller@projo.com