The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

The very last prompt I had left to finish in my 2019 Back to the Classics Challenge was to read a classic from Africa, Asia, or Oceania. In looking over my Classics Club list of books, I was disappointed to see that there was nothing left on it I could read that qualified, so I did some research. After a bit of Googling, I came across The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing. This novel, set in South Africa and dealing with racial issues between black and white citizens, was a big success upon its publication in the 1950s. This was Lessing's first novel, and she went on after it to write many more, eventually winning the Nobel Prize for Literature for her body of work. Intrigued, I decided to choose this one for my challenge and got started reading it last week.

The novel starts off with a newspaper clipping describing the death of a white South African woman named Mary Turner. The article explains that she was murdered by her servant, a black man named Moses, in a robbery attempt. The action then flashes back to Mary's early life, with the rest of the novel describing the series of events that lead up to her death.

Mary struggles through a poverty-stricken childhood and finds some success after moving to Rhodesia and working as a secretary. She's happy living the carefree life of an unmarried woman with her own salary until she overhears some offhand comments from her friends criticizing her for not settling down. Greatly bothered by the perceptions of those around her, Mary decides to marry Dick Turner, a struggling farmer from rural Southern Rhodesia. After they exchange vows, Mary leaves her city job and moves with Dick to his farm. It doesn't take long for her to realize that she has made a terrible mistake.

Dick, while a nice man, is almost completely inept at farming and plagued with bad luck. He barely turns any profit on his crops, and is prone to starting big, expensive projects without thinking them completely through. The home he takes Mary to is hardly a home at all; it's a two room shack lacking in almost every modern convenience. At first, Mary makes the best of her situation, and works to improve the house and perform her wifely duties. However, she quickly becomes bored and miserable and sinks into a deep depression.

Contributing to her depression is her forced interaction with the black servants that work on the farm. Mary, like most of the white South Africans around her, is deeply racist. She doesn't trust the servants in her employ, believes them to be animal-like and ignorant, and is verbally abusive to them. Her attitude towards them is so poor, in fact, that she develops a reputation for cruelty which affects Dick's ability to keep and acquire workers. After running through several house servants that quit under her tyranny, Dick hires a young man named Moses for the job, and tells Mary, in no uncertain terms, not to drive this one away.

As time moves forward, and Mary's depression worsens, she finds herself developing friendly feelings towards Moses. She comes to rely on him for more and more tasks, eventually needing him to feed her and dress her, both jobs that are entirely unacceptable for the times. This intimacy frightens her and disgusts her, but underneath her revulsion, she has some sort of strange affection for Moses, and this combination of fear and dependence prevents her from sending him away. Dick, who has been willfully ignoring the taboo closeness of the pair, eventually comes to the conclusion that Mary is too mentally ill to continue living at the farm. He dismisses Moses from his post and makes preparations to leave, but before they can depart, Moses returns to their home in the middle of the night and commits the crime that the novel starts off with.

The Grass is Singing was a striking novel. Lessing's prose was deeply emotional and had a strong impact on my mood while reading. Mary is not a lovable character (her naked racism prevents that), but as her depression spiraled out of control, I felt my own feelings spiraling downward too. This is one of those books that carries a cloud of gloom with it. Everything had a weight to it that felt real and very bleak. Similarly, Lessing's description of the South African setting was oppressive, with the incredible heat and wildfires mirroring the tense situations Mary faced at home. Her failing marriage, her mental health, and her relationships with the servants were all unbearable to her, and there was a constant feeling of approaching doom lurking in the background.

Lessing's exploration of the racial politics of the area forms the main theme of the novel, although I did find myself a bit confused about what her ultimate message was. She is undoubtedly anti-racist, and the novel is peppered with comments and plot events that point to the cruelty and hypocrisy of the social structure of the times. Mary's story shows the tragedy that results when human feelings clash with deeply ingrained racial beliefs. Moses is kind to Mary, and this simultaneously repulses and attracts her. These conflicting feelings, plus her fragile mental state, lead her down a path to destruction. What was missing here, however, was the black perspective. While the narration hops around to focus on several different white characters, Lessing doesn't spend much time on any of the natives. I would have really appreciated more information about Moses's feelings for Mary, and how those feelings led him to commit murder. I assume he had an inner battle raging between his anger over his treatment at the hands of the whites and his affection for Mary, but without any passages explaining his thoughts, the ending felt rather nebulous. It was an obvious missing piece in the narrative.

It is this lack of black perspective that lowered my overall rating for The Grass is Singing, but it was still a very interesting and worthwhile experience. In a literal sense, it was an easy read. In an emotional sense, not so much. It left me feeling drained, but in a good, book hangover kind of way. I am glad that my Back to the Classics Challenge led me to explore this author and this part of the world. I would probably have never heard of this novel otherwise, so, as usual, participating in reading challenges has pushed me to make new literary discoveries.


Challenge Tally
Back to the Classics 2019 (A Classic From Africa, Asia, or Oceania) 12/12 Books Read - Complete


Total Books Read in 2019: 72