A review by eccles
The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

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.