Mary is far from being a sympathetic character. Plagued with unmitigated boredom, embarrassment at their poverty, loneliness, isolation, increasing estrangement from her husband, and the gradual erosion of her hope for a better future all contribute to the gradual deterioration of her mind.
#Lessing, doris. the grass is singing series
Every detail spells misery-from the intolerable heat to the blinding sun to the parched, unforgiving earth to the incessant chirping of the cicadas to Dick Turner’s yet another in a series of failed new ventures.
Lessing sustains a relentless tone of impending doom throughout the novel. The final chapter skillfully conveys her muddled mind as she struggles to discern what is real and what is imaginary. Her disappointment in life and abject loneliness coupled with an attraction and repulsion she feels toward Moses eventually leads to her total breakdown. Anger soon transforms to disengagement and apathy. Her restlessness transforms to anger when she learns of her husband’s incompetence in managing his affairs and his total inability to eke out a decent living. She is shocked to discover the meager condition of his home and farm. She marries the first man who asks her-Dick Turner, a farmer. She is happy being a reliable, “sisterly” friend without romantic attachments or desires until she hits the age of thirty when she becomes focused on finding a husband. The novel then shifts back in time to reveal the events leading up to the murder.Įager to escape her drunken father and embittered mother, Mary moves to the city where she leads a contented, financially independent life as a secretary. But the cruelties that men and women visit on each other? That continues, for human nature is what it is.The Grass is Singing by the 2007 Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing, is a scathing indictment of South Africa apartheid as revealed through the tragic lives of Mary and Dick Turner and Moses, their “house boy.” The novel opens with the newspaper announcement of Mary’s murder and Moses’ arrest. The title is from T S Eliot`s famous poem The Wasteland. Then, there is the black man himself, an enigma but a seething enigma. The white woman swung between extreme fear and revulsion at the native. This is South Africa (Zimbabwe, to be precise) in the times of apartheid, where the white man `liked his natives either one way or the other: properly dressed according to their station or in loincloths.` Those who did feel a pang for the black man could not stand out against the society they were joining soon, `they coarsened to suit the hard, arid, sun-drenched country they had come to.` Lessing paints an accomplished portrait, one riven with sadness, a tale of the blurring of all those lines that are essential to one people lording it over another. How can there not be, given the unmoored drifter that Dick Turner, who farms his veldtland in fits of whimsy given the complex Mary Turner, her head a-churn with so much hope, all dashed against severe disappointment again and again, tearing herself to pieces with her own anger given the relentless scorching indifference, even cruelty, of the land they live and work on. There, of course, is no train but there definitely is going to be a crash. Within a few pages, the reader knows that she is going to bear painful witness to a train crash of devastating proportions. What a masterly depiction of human frailty. The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing (Harper Perennial)was my pick for a TBT read. And once in a while, the reader needs to go back to her bookshelf, pick up an old favourite and slowly sink into the world inside those pages.