It is always a low single-storeyed building divided into segments like a strip of chocolate, with grocery, butchery and bottle-store under one corrugated iron roof. Lessing's descriptions of Mary's surroundings evoke feelings of powerful oppression, such as the horrors a local store holds for a child: This is Mary's story, beginning with her unhappy childhood in a remote South African dorp, an ugly cluster of buildings at the centre of a farming community hundreds of miles wide. Having given us the circumstances of the murder, Lessing then reaches back in time to tell the story leading up to it. It's only the viewpoint of newcomer Tony Marston, that brings a sense of the establishment being more intent on closing down a potentially scandalous situation, than on seeing that justice is done. For years they've shunned social engagements and struggled to make a profit from their crops, living like the 'poor white' Afrikaners who are despised almost as much as natives by the British colonial community.
The Turners, Mary in particular, are widely regarded as misfits by neighbours like Charlie Slatter, first to arrive on the murder scene. The story opens with an announcement in the newspaper of a death on a remote farm Mary Turner has been murdered by her 'native' houseboy Moses.
THE GRASS IS SINGING MARY'S DEATH HOW TO
The Grass is Singing, set in 1940s Southern Rhodesia, is Lessing's first novel and it may be short, but it sure knows how to pack a punch. My book club settled on The Grass Is Singing, mainly because at only 206 pages long, it appeared the least daunting of her works. Simon at Savidge Reads felt much the same and launched a #DorisinDecember initiative. I don't know about you, but the announcement of Lessing's death last November jolted me into the realisation I have no opinion about her writing, for the simple reason I haven't read any of it.
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I'm beginning with The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing because, of all my recent reads, this is the one that made a lasting impression. From the beginning, they are distant and cold, but, except when Mary briefly runs away, fear of loneliness and lack of money keep them together.I haven't posted a book review recently, as I've been watching and writing quite a bit about theatre, not to mention the endless distraction of preparing for a family Christmas! This doesn't mean I haven't read anything, though a teetering tower of books has accumulated, ready to review during this lovely interlude when the mad pre-Christmas dash is over, but a return to work in January seems deceptively far away. Dick is also in a hurry to wed, because he is very lonely and unhappy clawing a bare living from a subsistence farm and living in a bare, ugly little house. But, after overhearing her friends laugh at her as sexless and immature, she resolves to marry, and when Dick Turner asks her she consents, though she has met him only twice. The bulk of the novel is the story of Mary's life.Īfter a loveless, wretched childhood, Mary is contented with her life as an office worker in a city in Rhodesia. The novel begins with a newspaper clipping about the death of Mary Turner, a white woman, killed by her black servant, Moses. The novel created a sensation when it was first published and became an instant success in Europe and the United States. It takes place in Southern Rhodesia, in southern Africa, during the 1940s and deals with the racial politics between whites and blacks in that country. The Grass Is Singing is the first novel, published in 1950, by the British author Doris Lessing.