Word: martha
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...scoreboard on which the hits and misses of the second half of the twentieth century have been recorded. That that score is most often a losing one should surprise no one. In this, the final volume of her Children of Violence quintet, Mrs. Lessing takes her heroine Martha Quest from the ruins that passed as London after World War II and deposits her on the brink of the twenty-first century amid its assorted, but not at all surprising, cataclysms. As Martha passes through each successive decade (the late fourties and an attempted return to normalcy; the espionage...
...novel opens, Martha, in her thirties and a white refugee from colonial Africa, is wandering through a dislocated London where cellars are damp and paint is blistering and wood is rotting. In evoking a gray, totalitarian world, and in showing how, no matter what minor fluctuations the government undergoes, the poor never escape that world, this novel reflects Orwell's paternal influence. Politics, particularly the opposition politics of the Labour Party and those groups to its left, become the novel's initial concern. Yet, for Mrs. Lessing, politics are now something of a dead end. She sardonically delights in unearthing...
...confirm his suspicion, Martha's employer and sometimes lover, a leftist writer by the name of Mark Coldridge, retreats to his study, which he wallpapers with world maps on which various colored markers denote War, Famine, Riots, Poverty, Prisons, "like medieval Humours...
...have had their troubles. There is no question that they are frequently separated. On one journey alone last summer, he was seen in the company of another lovely blonde on Aristotle Onassis' yacht. Such incidents might be recounted about innumerable people in Washington and elsewhere; it is only the Martha's Vineyard tragedy that suddenly makes them seem pertinent...
Mary Jo had been looking forward to the weekend on Martha's Vineyard. It meant seeing her old friends from the Boiler Room, perhaps playing some nostalgic games of touch football and having yet another chance to root for a Kennedy. She had never worked directly for Ted Kennedy. In fact, some of her friends remember that, in comparison with his brothers, Ted Kennedy was not an idol to Mary Jo Kopechne...