Mara and Dann: An Adventure - Hardcover

Doris Lessing

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060182946 ISBN 13: 9780060182946

Publisher: Harperflamingo, 1999

Synopsis

One of the most venerated of contemporary writers imagines a distant future plagued by drought, where a seven-year-old girl, accompanied by her brother, encounters a variety of strange peoples in her insatiable thirst for self-knowledge. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Doris Lessing was born Doris May Taylor in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: Her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Her mother installed Doris in a covenant school, and then later in an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury, from which she soon dropped out. She was 13, and it was the end of her formal education.

Lessing's life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against the cultural and biological imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood. Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing is a process of "setting a distance," taking the "raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general."

Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individual's own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good.

Over the years, Lessing has attempted to accommodate what she admires in the novels of the 19th century their "climate of ethical judgment" to the demands of 20th-century ideas about consciousness and time. After writing the Children of Violence series (1952-1959), a formally conventional bildungsroman (novel of education) about the growth in consciousness of her heroine, Martha Quest, Lessing broke new ground with The Golden Notebook (1962), a daring narrative experiment in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing depth and detail. Anna Wolf, like Lessing herself, strives for ruthless honesty as she aims to free herself from the chaos, emotional numbness and hypocrisy afflicting her generation.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing began to explore more fully the quasi-mystical insight Anna Wolf seems to reach by the end of The Golden Notebook. Her "inner-space fiction" deals with cosmic fantasies Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971), dreamscapes and other dimensions (Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974), and science-fiction probings of higher planes of existence (Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979-1983). These reflect Lessing's interest, since the 1960s, in Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufi mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation can come about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of society.

Lessing's other novels include The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Fifth Child (1988); she also published two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers (The Diary of a Good Neighbor, 1983, and If the Old Could., 1984). In addition, she has written several nonfiction works, including books about cats, a love since childhood. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 was recently joined by Walking in the Shade: 1949 to 1962, both published by HarperCollins.

Reviews

Tenderly perceptive, Lessing's first far-future novel since her celebrated Canopus in Argos: Archives series of the late 1970s-mid '80s features two appealing orphans precariously reaching adulthood on Earth thousands of years from now. The Ice Age brought on by the ecological rapaciousness of today's society is receding, bringing lethal drought to the Southern land of "Ifric," where a power struggle in her family has stranded seven-year-old Mara, who is fiercely caring for her even younger brother, Dann, in a remote village of neo-Neanderthals. Even under desperate conditions, Mara's thirst for knowledge outpaces the thirst for water that, over the years, drives her?sometimes alone and sometimes accompanied by Dann, who as he grows up insists on following his own dreams?toward the icy North, where remnants of Earth's old technological glories await. She and Dann endure numerous hardships and adventures along the way: Dann becomes addicted to "the poppy" and gambles Mara away on a roll of the dice; Mara works as a spy and is kidnapped to be a "breeder." Lessing spins a glowing hymn to human endurance around the sweet, shrewd, indefatigable Mara, one of her most engaging heroines. Though Lessing sanitizes Voltaire's savage satire of Western civilization here, her innocent-but-canny Mara proves as effective as Candide at surviving the worst and celebrating the best that human beings can do to one another. This novel is a resounding affirmation of humanity and what it holds dearest, from one of our most gifted storytellers.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Lessings 22nd novel, a dystopian allegory set in ``Ifrik'' (formerly Africa) thousands of years hence, is a ponderous, hectoring, fascinating second cousin to her Memoirs of a Survivor (1975) and The Four-Gated City (1969) (and quite reminiscent, incidentally, of Norman Mailer's similarly forbidding Ancient Evenings). After a global war and second Ice Age have decimated the continent and a more recent drought has made ``civilization'' only a distant memory, two children, seven-year-old Mara and her younger brother Dann, are abducted and forced to join a slow northward migration, toward water and the remnants of destroyed cities. As they grow to adulthood, together and apart, both are subjected to numbingly repetitive ordeals: capture by conflicting ``armies''; enslavement for various purposes (Dann suffers both drug addiction and homosexual rape, while Mara is exploited as a spy and as a ``breeder''); and hairbreadth escapes (rather too many) from their several oppressors. Eventually reaching a northern territory where specific knowledge of their culture's past is available, Mara and Dann learn the secret of their own originand the duty they were born for but now reject. Neither plot nor characterization is Lessing's strongest suit, and the story's climactic developments may strike some readers as willful overkill, but this often frustratingly turgid tale generates considerable power nevertheless. The world Lessing's opaque protagonists inhabit has been imagined in weirdly convincing detail: cities (``as temporary as dreams'') lie drowned beneath scarce remaining rivers, which run shallow and are infested with ``water dragons'' (crocodiles) and other exotic predators; men struggle for dominion over exhausted land; and women scheme to outwit male ``rulers.'' The powerful, almost erotic attraction between brother and sister is virtually palpableas are Mara's fierce hungers: to give birth, be loved, and learn the history of the world crumbling around her. As demanding and intermittently infuriating as anything Lessing has ever writtenand as necessary. She isn't a stylist, and she takes no prisoners, but this writer remains one of contemporary fiction's genuine thinkers and visionaries, and it would be folly to ignore her. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Mara and her brother Dann are abducted as children and raised by strangers in Ifrick, or Southern Africa, thousands of years in the future. All traces of the technological society of the 20th century have been obliterated by the advance of glaciers that cover most of Europe. The ice cap is finally retreating, but as global warming opens new lands in the north, it also turns the south into a barren desert. Mara and Dann join the great migration to Yerrup, encountering outposts of culture where ancient artifacts are preserved. Mara's insatiable curiosity about these things supplies most of the background for this adult fairy tale. The book's pacing is painfully slow, but the obsessive level of detail may indicate the author's personal involvement: there are obviously some elements of autobiography here. This long novel misses the mark as an adventure story, but it may appeal to diehard Lessing fans. For larger fiction collections.?Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch., Los Angeles
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harperflamingo
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060182946
• ISBN 13: 9780060182946
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 407