"The Grass is Singing" by Doris Lessing

 The debut novel of a Nobel Laureate.

Between the ages of 6 and 30, Doris lived in Zimbabwe, which was then called Southern Rhodesia and was a country ruled by white colonists, mostly ex-English, who farmed; she was brought up on exactly the only-just-paying-its-way farm that is described in the book. A hallmark of the book is its immersion in the life: it is ultra-realist and she paints word pictures that make the reader feel very much inside the scene described.

The story opens with a newspaper cutting detailing the murder of Mary, and the arrest of the 'houseboy' Moses. Peter, Mary's husband has gone mad. The bulk of the novel is therefore not so much a whodunnit as a whydunnit. 

The plot is that lower middle class Mary (only surviving child of a mother and an alcoholic father) spends her young adult life as a very efficient office girl, enjoying an active social life and being taken out by men. But she begins to feel that something is missing and so, after a very short courtship, and despite the fact that she has, it seems, zero interest in sex, marries Peter, a struggling farmer on an isolated farm. The loneliness and boredom she experiences are tangible. She is also very bad at managing the native staff, tending to be a disciplinarian, while her husband cuts them some slack. Things go from bad to worse. Peter, despite having lots of good ideas, is unable to make the farm pay. (The neighbour, who is rich, has made his money by utterly degrading the soil system; his farm is now almost entirely infertile.) 

It is beautifully written with so much detail and verisimilitude. But at the end I was unsatisfied. I couldn't understand what made Peter mad. Throughout the book he has met his trials with stoicism and fortitude. The murder of his wife didn't seem big enough to tip him over the edge. Nor did I understand why Moses (so named, I assume, because the Moses in the Bible kills a cruel overseer of the oppressed Israelites during the sojourn in Egypt) killed Mary. He must have known she was leaving the farm the next day. Why did he suddenly snap? So, although the setting was brilliant, I was unable to suspend my disbelief in terms of the psychology of the characters.

The portrayal of the black 'natives' may offend modern sensibilities but for its time this would have been an indictment of the racism endemic in Zimbabwe then.

Mary makes an abortive attempt to run away exactly half way through the novel which suggests good pacing although I felt that the interminable but inevitable break down of the marriage made the novel drag slightly in the second half. 

Selected quotes:

• "It was the tradition to face punishment, and really there was something rather fine about it. Remarks like these are forgiven from native commissioners, who have to study languages, customs, and so on; although it is not done to say things natives do are 'fine'." (Ch 1)
• "'White civilization' ... will never, never admit that a white person, and most particularly, a white woman, can have a human relationship, whether for good or evil, with a black person." (Ch 1)
• "Loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship." (Ch 5)
• "He had become accustomed to the double solitude that any marriage, even a bad one, becomes." (Ch 7)
• "A poverty that allows a tiny margin for spending, but which is shadowed always by a weight of debt that nags like a conscience, is worse than starvation itself." (Ch 7)
• "When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid) his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip." (Ch 8)
• "He was obeying the dictate of the first law of white South Africa, which is: 'Thou shalt not let your fellow whites sink lower than a certain point; because if you do, the nigger will see he is as good as you are." (Ch 10)
• "Charlie was fighting to prevent another recruit to the growing army pf poor whites, who seem to respectable white people so much more shocking (though not pathetic, for they are despised and hated for their betrayal of white standards, rather than pitied) than all the millions of black people who are crowded into the slums or on to the dwindling land reserves of their own country." (Ch 10)
• "She said suddenly, 'They said I was not like that, not like that, not like that.' It was like a gramophone that had got stuck at one point." (Ch 10)
• "Time taking on the attributes of space, she stood balanced in mid-air." (Ch 11)

Wonderful descriptions.

Other novels reviewed in this blog written by Lessing, who won the Nobel Prize in 2007:

• Her breakthrough, feminist novel: The Golden Notebook
• The Fifth Child and its sequel Ben, in the World
• The Good Terrorist

May 2023; 206 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God