Reviews

For some reason I missed reading Doris Lessing before now. What an extraordinary first novel this is.

It is quite painful to read Lessing's description of the wretched marriage of two people who should never have met, let alone married. That pain is matched with the dull horror of her descriptions of the exploitation visited on the native population by the occupying Europeans. Their attitude is summarised in one brief statement: "A white person may look at a native, who is no better than a dog." (page 143) And of course behind all the harshness and despising of the Africans was fear of them.

A brilliant denunciation of the whole colonial system.

notrix's review against another edition

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dark informative reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

It's a difficult book to review. Whilst it is very well written it evokes disgust against white supremacy. The novel portrays the desparate life of one of the many white colonialists settlers who relied on their white supremacist convictions to raise their pathetic lives above everyone else's, exploiting land and local indigineus peoples for their benefit and profit only.

maigahannatu's review against another edition

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dark informative sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Mary is a town girl, content with being single until she hears people speaking disparagingly of her. Then she feels she should marry, so when Dick, a hard working but unsuccessful farmer, proposes to her, she jumps at the chance. But the isolation, the heat, the poverty, the loveless marriage, and a revengeful relationship take their toll.

This book is not a happy one. I feel sorry for Dick. He tries so hard in his marriage and his farming. The book also shows the ways in which the whites of Rhodesia kept power and how Mary lost that power, of the evils of apartheid. The descriptions of Africa are beautiful.... The heat, the rain in its season, the sound of the cicadas.... Then there is the psychological undercurrent of trying to understand what made each person like they are.

The book is dark, but never graphically horrible. I could not put it down.

lemann's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Content Warnings

eccles's review against another edition

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dark reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

Struggling to process this. A story of the unhappy wife of a struggling white farmer in early 20c Southern Rhodesia; a woman who finds her way into marriage more or less as a way to avoid embarrassment, and who descends, through deprivation and bigotry, into madness. While the specific personalities and relationships here, the husband and wife and their occasional interactions with the small local community of white farmers, form the frame for the tale, the substance of the text is the author’s representation of the deeply - incomprehensibly deeply - dysfunctional relations between the white farmers and their “native” workers. A profound racism informs every action, thought and feeling of the main characters, all of which contribute to a primeval soup of inhumanity that is catalysed, by one worker’s presence, into the personality collapse that consumes our pitiful anti-heroine. I suppose as a picture of the psychological horror-show of white settler life in Southern Africa, this is book worth reading, but I found it hard-going: the constant racist abuse, the - to the modern reader - unimaginable imbalance of power between the whites settlers and the local people, the clubbiness of the settler community that manages to be oppressively supportive, judgemental and viciously exploitative at the same time, and of course the endless grinding, hopeless failure of the principle couple. There was a distance in the telling here, a flatness of tone, which, as well as making the story harder to engage with, leaves me convinced that the author hated the story and the characters as much as I did. I’m left with a sense of respect for the authorial craftsmanship, but regret that it’s now in my brain.

imdillionen's review against another edition

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5.0

Now this is a great novel. Painful, poignant, masterfully written. Especially chapters 9 & 11 are amazingly well crafted.

I saw a review here, saying that they still didn't know why Moses killed Mary. Some people are stupid as stones.

angharadmiller's review against another edition

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challenging sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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