The Cleft

The Cleft

First edition
Author	Doris Lessing
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Publisher	Fourth Estate
Publication date	2007
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	978-0-00-723343-4

The Cleft (2007) is a novel by Doris Lessing.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]}

Plot summary

The story is narrated by a Roman historian, during the time of the Emperor Nero. He tells the story as a secret history of humanity's beginnings, as pieced together from scraps of documents and oral histories, passed down through the ages.

Humanity was made up, in the beginning, of solely females who reproduced asexually. These females were a calm race and had few problems. They lived by the sea and were partially aquatic. They called themselves "Clefts" - after The Cleft - a fissure in a rock which the females deemed sacred, and which had a resemblance to the female vagina.

One day, a cleft gave birth to a male child - to what the clefts dubbed a "Monster". This caused such a fright that the boy was killed by the clefts. But more "monsters" were born, and the clefts left them on a rock to die. Eagles, which lived nearby, saw the dying babies and swooped down and carried them off, to deposit them in a nearby valley where they were then suckled by beneficent deer. The children gradually grew older and able to fend for themselves. Soon, as more boys were brought by the eagles, a tribe emerged.

One day, a female wandered over to the valley and was raped by the now adult men. She fled and gave birth to a new, mixed child nine months later. When she told her story to the rest of the clefts, the two tribes soon came into contact with each other. The matriarchs of the clefts, however, feared the "monsters" and decided to try to kill them off.

References

Works by Doris Lessing Novels The Grass Is Singing Martha Quest The Golden Notebook The Four-Gated City Memoirs of a Survivor Shikasta The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five The Sirian Experiments The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire The Good Terrorist The Fifth Child Ben, in the World The Sweetest Dream The Cleft Short stories "Through the Tunnel" "Flight" Collections, including essays Prisons We Choose to Live Inside The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels Autobiography Under My Skin Walking in the Shade Science fiction Canopus in Argos The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 Other Alfred and Emily