Doris Lessing - The grass is singing
This
is the story of a white woman in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1940s.
Mary has a difficult childhood with a father who drinks, an unhappy mother and a
sister and a brother who die early. When she goes to a boarding school Mary
feels much better and dislikes going home for holidays. After school she stars
working in an office in town and lives in a girl’s club actually founded for
poor women. She is successful in the office and has a happy life for years with
a lot of friends and with going out every evening. But she is not interested in
men, she wears girlish clothes, is naïve and seems to become never an adult.
Once she overhears that her friends think she should marry. She soon does and
goes with Dick Turner to live on his farm.
Dick
is not talented for farming and poor and the marriage is unhappy. Mary does not
like the farm but prefers the town, she is not friendly to the neighbours and
does not know how to deal right with native servants. All servants leave the
house soon but Mary does not realize that it is her fault, that it is her who
behaves wrong. By the time she becomes mad, as well as Dick does. But then Mary
slowly becomes interested in the new house servant without realizing it. It
seems, that nothing “dangerous” happens, but nevertheless any kind of
relationship between a white and a native was a catastrophe there at this time.
The servant murders her at the end, I am not quite sure why, but maybe I missed
some important point here. The murder happens at the beginning of the book and
afterwards the whole story that happened before is told.
Doris
Lessing herself lived on a farm in Southern Rhodesia as a child an in her youth,
before she went to England. The life described is unknown to me and somehow
fascinating. The reason why I did not like the book very much at the end is that
I could not understand the feelings and the behaviour of Mary. She is such a
strange person, lives so far from reality and does not seem to gain experience
in nothing. Of course, that exactly is the main point of the book: the
psychological description of a woman going mad.
There
are a lot of words in the story I did not know, and I did not have a dictionary
nearby. I suggest to look after them in the beginning because they will be used
again.
The
book is called “a modern classic”, but I am not sure if I can recommend it.
July
11, 2006