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Mary’s older brother and sister died of dysentery when she was a child, and the period of grief that followed was “the happiest time of her childhood,” when her parents briefly stopped squabbling. Mary’s father, an alcoholic, would spend their family’s little money on liquor at the store, a fact that always caused arguments between Mary’s parents. They are simple establishments that sell food, clothes, and other necessities, operate as local post offices, and usually house a bar. Tony, meanwhile, briefly takes a job in copper mining, before reluctantly ending up in an office job.Ĭhapter 2 begins with a description of the stores that are distributed throughout southern Africa.
#Lessing, doris. the grass is singing trial
The trial takes place and it is decided that Moses murdered Mary while drunk and hoped to steal valuables from her. Moses will be hanged no matter what happens, but Tony wonders if by staying silent he is complicit in a “monstrous injustice.” The next day, Tony packs his things and leaves the farming district. The policemen take Mary’s body to the car, and Tony is left wondering whether he should insist on telling Charlie and Sergeant Denham his theory about why Mary was killed. However, Tony begins to feel that they are not actually interested in his testimony, and the interview ends abruptly. Sergeant Denham arrives, and he and Charlie question Tony. Inside the house, Charlie’s assistant Tony Marston explains that he found Mary’s body on the veranda. Charlie drives to the Turners’ farm to find Moses in handcuffs, and puts Dick in the back of his car. Denham then sends six native policemen to the Turners’ farm, and shortly after they arrive the houseboy, Moses, turns himself in. When Mary’s body is discovered, the Turners’ neighbor, Charlie Slatter, sends a note to the local police sergeant, Sergeant Denham. Dick and Mary are poor and do not socialize with the other white settlers in their farming district. Mary Turner, the wife of Dick Turner, has been murdered, and a “houseboy” has confessed to the crime. We’ll meet again on Tues, 10th November to discuss An Italian Education by Tim Parks.The Grass is Singing is set in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the 1940s. For many it was unputdownable, sparse, dry and desperate. One member of our group called it a brilliant vision of Hell.
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Lessing laid the stresses and strains of colonial Africa bare while she described with intense detail the difficult life of its society’s misfits, the poor white farmers Mary and Dick Turner. So what is the real story? The Grass is Singing was an immediate critical sensation when it was published in 1950. The next day the police sergeant and the adjoining farmer, who was first called to take charge, are not the least bit interested in what the farm hand has to say. Only four people were near the house at the time: the woman, her husband, a new farm hand and the house boy.
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The house boy has confessed and will hang. The novel is set somewhere in southern Africa. But she’d always been a sharp-eared child, listening closely to the adult conversations that drifted over her discussing the quotidian problems and dramas of the white Africans in what was then Rhodesia. In an interview at the age of 80+ she said that, rereading it recently, she was surprised it was so mature for a 25 year old. What made The Grass is Singing so impressive? It’s the first novel of the Nobel Prize winner for literature, Doris Lessing. We had a warm enthusiastic discussion of a bleak, dispiriting book.