Every time I read a particularly captivating book by an author who I haven’t read before, I feel like kicking myself for discovering him or her, as the case may be, so late in my reading cycle. It has been an unfailing ritual with me! My latest discovery has been Doris Lessing and what a revelation she has been! Some of you guys out there may be thinking “Ain’t seen a bigger dud”, but what the heck – never late than never!It was pure serendipity that the book that my paw rested on was ‘the grass is singing’, Doris’s first novel, set in Southern Rhodesia, today’s Zimbabwe. An intense and captivating book, Doris brings to the fore her powerful experience of life in Southern Rhodesia, the country that her father chose to travel to make his pot of gold by going the farming route. The reader is pitch forked right into the middle of the action from the word go as Doris throws open a window through which we see and intimately experience the life of the main protagonist Mary Turner.
Mary shows us how deep the racial divide ran between the white settlers and coloured natives. Her life exposes the subtle but unmistakeable class system within the whites themselves and their unrecorded and unspoken rules of camaraderie. More importantly it is through Mary 
that we learn the rules of engagement with the coloured – so biased, so inhuman, that at times it fills you with a sense of loathing for the people who could have behave thus.
that we learn the rules of engagement with the coloured – so biased, so inhuman, that at times it fills you with a sense of loathing for the people who could have behave thus.As we journey along with Mary in the rural hinterland of Southern Rhodesia, we experience the natural vividness of Africa, feel the searing heat of the midday sun thru Mary’s tin roofed house that misses a ceiling, and get swallowed by the nights filled with strange sounds.
As Mary gradually disintegrates and the racial lines, that were drawn so taut in her life, dissolves we experience the utter destitution that human’s are capable of bringing onto themselves, by their actions and inactions. Mary also brings to the fore, how our life’s journey is decided by our childhood experiences and how utterly incapable we are to escape its death like vice.
As Mary gradually disintegrates and the racial lines, that were drawn so taut in her life, dissolves we experience the utter destitution that human’s are capable of bringing onto themselves, by their actions and inactions. Mary also brings to the fore, how our life’s journey is decided by our childhood experiences and how utterly incapable we are to escape its death like vice.
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