Product reviews

Four Gated City

Martha Quest moves to London and gets a job as a secretary to the writer Mark Coldridge; she also begins an affair with him. This book becomes apocalyptic as Martha first envisions a utopia of a four-gated city "where black and white and brown lived as equals, and there was no hatred or violence." then we find that Coldrige is planning such a utopia--in Africa. However, Lessing projects the end of the world by the 1990s, appropriately ending the mad violence that has made Martha's life--and, by extension, the reader's life also--what it is.