Mine by Robert McCammon

McCammon turns the suspense up to 11

The author dedicates this book "to the survivors of an era when the whole world was watching." He is, of course, echoing the chant of anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in 1968, and some aspects of the book probably resonate best with those of us who remember the unrest of that era. Nevertheless, it's a gripping thriller, lacking in any of McCammon's usual supernatural elements, and the core story could easily happen today.

Review

Mine is the story of two women. The first, Mary Terrell, is a former left-wing, violent radical who has been wanted by the FBI since 1969. Back then she was called "Mary Terror" because she was an effective soldier in the war to take down the system, an enthusiastic participant in bombings and shootings. She was also in love with a charismatic radical leader they called Lord Jack. She even became pregnant with Jack's child but miscarried during a violent shootout with the feds. 

Twenty years later, Mary is living a marginal life under an assumed name, one in a series of false identities. She's good at disguises, good at acting, having taken drama classes in college, though she can never hide the fact that she's six feet tall. Mary has become more and more divorced from reality, however, as time has gone on. She's paranoid and schizophrenic. She has a closet full of mutilated baby dolls that she "raises" as she fantasizes of returning to Jack with their baby and living out the idyllic hippie marriage to him she had always imagined. They're mutilated because her violent temper always overcomes her, and she ultimately "murders" each of the dolls.

Laura Clayborne, the other woman in this story, is 36 years old and pregnant for the first time. Laura had been a bit of a hippie herself back in the day, but now she's a senior reporter and book reviewer for the Atlanta Constitution's lifestyle section. Her husband Doug is a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. She drives a BMW; he drives a Mercedes. From the outside they have a good life. They don't really love each other any more, but they have a baby boy on the way and maybe that will make things better. (Doug is having a secret affair, though.)

After an evening of dropping acid and having sordid sex, Mary comes across a cryptic message in the back of Rolling Stone she'd bought earlier that day. "Mr. Mojo has risen. The lady is still weeping. Does anybody remember? Meet me there. 2/18, 1400." Mary instantly recognizes these as coded terms used by her group, Storm Front (a hyper-violent offshoot of the Weather Underground). The author of the message is proposing that the old team get back together on February 18 at 2PM. Twenty-six days from now! Mary knows where the "weeping lady" is. And she is doubly sure the writer is Lord Jack himself. Mary is going to reunite with the love of her life, the man she still thinks about every day, after twenty years. And, she decides, she's going to bring their baby back to him. Mary is happy and begins to lay plans.

Doug is with his girlfriend the night Laura's water breaks. She knows because she followed him. But now she has to get herself to the hospital fast. It is a difficult delivery. When it is over, Laura leaves a message for her husband on the home answering machine, knowing it is over between them. Her baby, David, is only two days old and resting on Laura in the hospital bed when a tall nurse enters the room and tells her she needs to take him to be weighed. Mary has used her skill in deception to case the hospital, modify a nurses' uniform to match theirs, and take the baby out a back door with a disabled alarm. She wasn't after Laura's baby in particular, but stealing a boy baby is a real bonus. She knows Lord Jack will be pleased to have a son!

Mary begins her cross-country trek to find Lord Jack. Laura is at first hysterical with fear, rage, and grief, but she pulls herself together and develops a steely resolve to get her baby back. And thus begins the chase. The cops are useless and her husband is out of the picture, so Laura takes matters into her own hands, chasing down the clues to Mary's past, ferreting out the surviving members of her terrorist group, and following her trail. Mary Terror is no easy target, however; she's already left several people dead in the wake of her journey, and more will die before it's over. All the while, the newborn baby in her possession pushes the levers of her violent temper with his crying, raising the specter of those mutilated dolls even as Mary tries to remember that she's doing it all for Jack. 

Mine consists of 400 pages of nerve-wracking suspense interspersed with nail-biting scenes of violent conflict and gore, parallels, reversals, and twists. If that sounds good to you, I'd suggest starting it on an evening when you don't have to get up early the next day.

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

Doris had some ambivalent feelings about motherhood

The Fifth Child is a very short novel, consisting of 132 pages in the Vintage edition, told in a continuous, limited-third-person narrative that has neither chapter breaks nor line breaks. This lack of any sort of pause has the effect of compelling the reader to keep turning pages and to make short work of the book. Nevertheless, Lessing packs a tremendous amount of resonance into the story, leaving you with as much to ponder as you would find in many a longer work. 

Review

The novel opens at a large office party in London during the swinging '60s. Two of the people attending that party -- David Lovatt and Harriet Walker -- stand apart from the festivities because they don't feel particularly at home in this milieu. The wallflowers spot each other across the room. Recognizing that they are two of a kind, they meet, find a quiet place to talk, and eventually go back to David's apartment. They find that they have the same attitudes toward many things, including an old-fashioned desire to have a large family.

In short order, they begin living together in David's flat and then get married. Both want to find a big house in which to raise children. The search takes them outside of London, where they eventually find a three-story home that captures their hearts. Living there will mean a long commute to work for David, however, and it's more expensive than he can afford on his salary. David's father, James, has remarried to a wealthy woman, though, and they have more than enough money to help the young couple with the mortgage, which they willingly do.

Children then come in quick order, as well. Luke, Helen, Jane, and Paul are born in the course of six years. The large house becomes the center of the extended family as David's two sets of parents and his sister and Harriet's widowed mother and her three sisters' families all come to spend Easter and summer and Christmas holidays around the enormous dining table, eating and drinking, partying and playing together, sometimes for weeks at a time. Harriet and David's wild, impractical dream has come true. David's father James helps with the finances, while Harriet's mother Dorothy comes to live with them for months at a time to help out with the children and the household chores. The children are each and every one lovely and smart and happy.

But David and Harriet aren't content with just four children. It's all so wonderful that they want the happiness to keep growing. Why not have six children? Why not eight? Their parents and siblings constantly warn them not to overdo it, but the young couple will hear nothing of it. Harriet does want to take a pause after Paul's birth; but one night, far too soon, David makes love to her again, and, again, she's pregnant.

This time the pregnancy does not go well. The fetus inside her seems to grow too fast, moving about, delivering powerful kicks, making her sick all the time. She thinks the unborn baby is poisoning her. She's sure it is going to rip its way out of her. The fifth child, Ben, is born after only eight months; but he weighs eleven pounds. The infant is enormously strong, and he has a forehead that slopes "from his eyebrows to his crown," where a thatch of yellow hair grows. Harriet thinks he looks like a troll, or a goblin. 

Within only a few weeks, Harriet begins feeding Ben from a bottle; his hunger is too great and his powerful gnawing too painful for her to breastfeed him. He seems to have no need of maternal affection. Even as an infant his eyes are cold and malevolent. While still a baby, he kills a terrier that someone in the family had brought over. Shortly afterward he kills the family cat and nearly succeeds in breaking the next-youngest child Paul's arm. The other children come to fear him, as do the other adults in the extended family. Ben had already begun the strain the happy family before he was born by keeping Harriet always in pain and unable to tend to her other children. Now, as a baby, he is so frightening and destructive that Harriet has to watch him all the time, essentially abandoning David and her other children. 

There comes a time when David and the other adults prevail on Harriet that Ben must be institutionalized. When she finally agrees to this, they bundle him up and ship him off to an unnamed place in Northern England. Things then begin to normalize in the Lovatt family, though Paul remains traumatized because his fear of Ben had known no limits. Eventually Harriet insists on going to see Ben, to find out how he is being treated at the institution. It turns out to be a nightmarish place that makes the place Frances Farmer was put into look like a spa, a place where unwanted children with physical and mental maladies are dumped, never to be visited by their kin again, and where most die after a short time. Harriet finds Ben drugged into unconsciousness, covered in piss and shit, and naked except for a straightjacket. She insists on taking him home, even though the attendants at the institution warn her that she has no idea what she's getting into.

David and the other children feel utterly betrayed by Ben's return. And, indeed, Ben is filled with an uncontrollable rage that begins to destroy the family again. The older children, Luke and Helen, go off to boarding schools and spend their breaks with the grandparents. Jane soon follows suit, moving in with Harriet's sister during the breaks. Only Paul remains at home, terrified and becoming more and more socially maladapted himself. While Harriet hates Ben, she can't bring herself to abandon him to be killed in an uncaring institution, even if it ruins everything else in her life. 

As the novel goes on from this point, we see Ben grow older and form relationships outside the family. By the age of eleven he is already the leader of a gang of older boys while he remains cold and unknowable. Harriet and David believe he is a throwback to some earlier level of evolution, a genetic anomaly that may be closer to the Neanderthal than the human. In any event, the dream of the big happy family is long dead. As the couple muse over what life might be like someday when Ben is gone, Harriet expresses her belief that they were cursed because they wanted too much and were struck down for their hubris. David rejects this, seeing it only as bad luck, an unfortunate roll of the dice.

This summary really doesn't convey anything of the rich complexity and strangeness of the novel. For such a short book, it has a large cast of characters, most of whom I have either not at all or else barely touched on. And what exactly was Doris Lessing getting at here? Certainly every parent understands what a fearful thing the throw of the genetic dice can be, as well as the sometimes ambivalent feelings we have about our children. Then, too, there's the anxiety we all feel about the fact that forces in the world we can't control can destroy everything we've tried to build for ourselves.

 
Lessing once said she didn't understand why critics were always trying to explain what a novel is "really about." She's right to leave you pondering. I understand there's a sequel to The Fifth Child, called Ben, in the World. I'll probably read it.