Novel: Landlocked

Overview
Landlocked (1965) is the fourth novel in Doris Lessing's "Children of Violence" sequence and continues the long, probing portrait of Martha Quest as she confronts the erosion of earlier certainties. The narrative follows her return to an unnamed African colony after time away, and examines the tension between her youthful revolutionary commitments and the smallness and conservatism of the place she once sought to leave. The book moves quietly but insistently, attending both to political shifts and the intimate compromises that shape a life.

Setting and context
The novel is set in an unnamed Southern African colony closely modeled on Rhodesia, where colonial structures and the social order press in on individuals and political movements. Postwar change and the rumblings of political unrest are present but constrained by local conservatism and official repression, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere. Lessing situates personal disillusionment within this stifling milieu, showing how place and history conspire to make lofty ideals difficult to sustain.

Plot sketch
Martha returns from overseas and discovers that the landscape of her homeland has shifted in ways both obvious and subtle. Old comrades have changed, political energy has been damped, and everyday life imposes its own demands and compromises. Rather than dramatic plotting, the novel unfolds as a series of encounters, adjustments, and interior reckonings: attempts to reconnect, the slow unravelling of expectancies, and the sheer weight of habit and social constraint that make movement away from the status quo precarious.

Themes
Landlocked explores political disillusionment, the limits of activism in a repressive colonial setting, and the intimate consequences of ideological struggle. The title's metaphor of being "landlocked" captures more than geography: it signals emotional, cultural, and moral encagement. Questions of belonging, memory, and the cost of remaining true to past commitments recur, as does the tension between individual aspiration and the centrifugal forces of home and community. The novel also meditates on gender and the ways in which expectations about wifehood, motherhood, and domestic life intersect with public feeling and political possibility.

Character and development
Martha remains Lessing's central engine: restless, observant, impatient with hypocrisy yet culpable in her own compromises. Her interior life, thoughts, disquiet, and shifting self-assessments, drives the narrative more than external action. Secondary characters are sketched economically, often as embodiments of social attitudes or historical forces that press against Martha's sense of identity. Relationships are depicted with psychological nuance; their strains illuminate how the personal and political are braided together in ordinary lives.

Style and significance
Lessing's prose in Landlocked is spare, clinical at times, and unsentimental, marked by close psychological observation and a relentless attention to social detail. The novel functions as a bridge between the earlier, more declarative political engagements of the sequence and the later, more expansive, visionary concerns of its conclusion. Its strength lies in the patient mapping of small defeats and the stubborn endurance of desire and thought amid constriction, making the book a subtle yet powerful study of how large historical forces are experienced at the level of everyday life.