The Grass Is Singing: A Novel Paperback – September 16, 2008

This novel can really rattle you. You know pretty much from the beginning that Mary Turner, the novel's heroine, who has been found dead at the opening of the story, was doomed. Then you gradually collect understanding of why and how she was doomed when you start reading about her frivolous party years in a town somewhere in South Africa. Mary is quite content partying with and befriending men but not marrying them. She slowly turns into a figure of ridicule when he friends marry and she turns into an old maid. Finally a suitor presents himself: a farmer who is not well-off but who is in awe of her even though her looks begin to fade and she still reads the same sentimental novellas as when she was a young girl.When she follows him to his farm somewhere deep in Rhodesia their marriage is a disaster from the very beginning. How could it be otherwise: she, a conventional, prejudiced, colonial woman of average intelligence who is not used to working with her hands (she used to have a well-paid job as an office clerk). And her husband the farmer has some kind of ADHD or bipolar problem which causes him to start growing new crops and developing new experimental projects that he abandons before they can reap the results.The story relentlessly follows the steep slope downwards, and everything is described with depressing, yet gorgeous precision. If you'd like to experience what Africa is like, the sounds, the sights, the smells of the bush, the animals and the people, you will feel them right here in the poetic, highly knowledgeable and emotional descriptions. There are several opportunities for things to develop and for Mary and Dick Turner to make a change in their pitiful lives, but due to the roles in which they themselves and their upbringing have cast them, they never succeed. Things get even worse when Mary is forced to keep a black male servant who frightens her. She has fired too many servants so her husband threatens her that she cannot get rid of this one. This guy however, Moses, is the victim of some slight of Mary's and he will be her eventual murderer. Moses completes the list of characters who are predictable in the way they act because they are locked in their historical (colonialist) and cultural framework. We are not surprised when Mary slowly becomes mad: Moses abuses and seduces her in a way that she can't resist although she wants and needs to. Our suspicion that Mary is the victim of childhood sexual abuse (by her father) is confirmed.One word about the title of the novel: if you think the title is highly evocative, you will not be disappointed by many other descriptions, for instance of the dark threat of the bush or the mind-numbing, all-pervasive heat. Some passages are hard to read, yet they are profoundly moving and/or thought-provoking: such as why Dick and Mary don't have children, their sexual dysfunctionality, the relationship with Moses, and the shame of the shoddiness and dirt in Mary and Dick's household.*** I had read this book as a 16-year-old, but didn't remember the story that well. But I did remember that I had gone to pieces reading it that time too.

This was my first book by the famed Lessing. It focuses on the relationship of a poor couple eeking out a living on a farm in South Africa. When I first started out on this book I was convinced that the story would focus on Apartheid in South Africa. There are different elements of these aspects in the book, but I did not find that race was the main topic. To my surprise the core of the book is about something completely different (from my perspective) in terms of life paths, dreams and expectations versus the brute force of reality. There is also a perception of the power of the past and the present reflected in the characters of Moses and Mary. It seems to me that the novel is a study of sanity in the face of those forces. The true main character is the landscape, the unrelenting flow of time and seasons in the African grasslands under which both human structures and minds crumble. I found myself quite a bit fascinated by the unfolding of the story. The part I am particularly drawn to is when Lessing muses about the South African landscape, the colors of the sky and light, as she embraces the reader with the sounds of insects and scents of dust and flowers. The heat of the world is apparently relentless warping the perception of goals and dreams. Mary's crumbling existence and psyche are depicted in a way that makes me feel uneasy, but allows us to connect to reality. A great read making me interested in other works by Lessing.

Most certainly 3 stars possibly more. My hesitation is that the central character, Mary, who is so carefully and sympathetically drawn, is also sexless in a way that isn't sufficiently explained. To that extent I find her a little bit unbelievable. There is a very briefly mentioned instance of “that event” which might be to do with the sexual relations of her parents or it could be an allusion that her father’s sexuality impinged on her young teenage self in a physical way.Perhaps Lessing, at the time of writing this book in the period just following the war thought that the psychological entrails of behaviour not useful to explore but rather that the situation in the time of the situation IS the focus. Or, it could be a point Lessing is making; that the sexuality of women is a plaything of men and that women do not have a sexual identity.However, the novel is a story of the descent into madness of Mary and her sad and unanchored husband and their lonely relationship over fifteen years on their unsuccessful farm in the veldt. Their home – not much more than a shack - is small and hot and a statement of their poverty yet their sense of dignity as white people in of the period. The only other human contact on a daily basis is with the Africans who are the farm workers and house servants and yet the extent that there isn’t any shared humanity by the whites for the Africans is at the core of the book and the descent into insanity of the two white people. It is all achingly intransigent.