“If you get yourself into a state over your boys then you are finished.” A series of houseboys leave or are dismissed, much to her husband’s frustration: She also finds it difficult to deal with the natives employed both on the farm and in the house. “…possessed with the thought that her father, from his grave, had sent out his will and forced her back into the kind of life he had made her mother lead.” A series of money-making schemes fail one after the other – keeping bees, breeding pigs, opening a store – Mary sees their onset in his “familiar rapt expression.” Mary’s repeated request to have ceilings put in their house is one example of her inability to escape from the poverty of her surroundings, and contributes to her obsession with the heat, which she feels “beating down from the iron over her head.” Worst of all, she feels like she has been returned to the childhood she thought she had escaped from, becoming: Year after year he scrapes by, always dreaming that the next year will be the one when he strikes it rich. Her husband, Dick, is well-intentioned but feckless. The marriage is a mistake, but one which cannot be undone. “But all women become conscious, sooner or later, of that impalpable, but steel-strong, pressure to get married.” Ten years later, nothing has changed – “The truth was she had no troubles.” What, then, makes her consider marrying a poor farmer and moving many miles away from the city life she is used to? Simply the social pressure to be married: “By the time she was twenty she had a good job, her own friends, a niche in the life of the town.” However, she is able to leave this life behind: Her happiest times are at boarding school – “so happy that she dreaded going home”. Lessing, however, is primarily interested in Mary, asking the same question as Marston: “What sort of woman had Mary Turner been before she came to this farm and had been driven slowly off balance by heat and loneliness and poverty?” Mary’s life begins in relative poverty, we discover, with an alcoholic father and a mother driven desperate by making ends meet. “When old settlers say, ‘One has to understand the country,’ what they mean is, ‘You have to get used to our ideas about the native.’” Marston is new to the country, and quickly convinced that finding the truth of what happened is not in the best interests of the white settlers: “You know as well as I do this case is not something that can be explained straight off like that… It’s not something that can be said in black and white, straight off.” As Marston, Dick Turner’s new assistant, tells neighbouring farmer, Charlie Slatter: With both victim and murderer known the interest for the reader is in discovering how we reached this point. Like Spark, Lessing was not afraid to use genre to her own ends, and the novel begins with the murder of Mary Turner by her black servant, Moses. The Grass is Singing is Lessing’s response to the racism of the continent, and life, she left behind to bring the novel to England where it was published in 1950, but it also touches on a number of other themes which she would return to over the years. Later, I was lucky enough to see her a number of times at The Edinburgh International Book Festival where she was a frequent visitor. Unusually this didn’t put me off, and I went on to read the copy of Briefing for a Descent into Hell I found in the school library, and then her Canopus in Argos series, which was being published at that time. I was introduced to her at school where we studied her first novel, The Grass is Singing. Lessing is personally important to me as she was one of the first modern writers I read who could be described as ‘literary’. Both spent time in Southern Rhodesia – Spark after she married in 1937, Lessing when her parents moved there in 1925 – before coming to London in 19 respectively. Though very different in style – Spark, sharp and certain, Lessing discursive and doubtful – their lives were not entirely dissimilar. 2019, however, marks the centenary of the birth of another important British writer, Doris Lessing. Last year, for the centenary of Muriel Spark’s birth, I began reading her novels in chronological order – a project which will continue into this year, with seven still to read.
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