The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog Doris Lessing Fourth Estate, 288pp, £15.99 ISBN 0007152809

Presumably, there are among Doris Lessing's readers those who seek out first and most excitedly her science fiction. But who are they? Where do they hide? I cannot help but wonder why, if reading Doris Lessing, one would choose these books; or why, if reading science fiction, one would choose Doris Lessing.

Lessing's new novel is not simply a bleak fantasy, set, beyond the next ice age and well into its melting, in a desolate and doomed landscape where ignorance and violence prevail. It is the sequel to her earlier bleak fantasy Mara and Dann (1999), which chronicled the travails of a brother and sister struggling to survive in a war-torn, post-apocalyptic world. The new novel finds Dann alone, and quickly establishes that his sister, Mara, has died in childbirth. He is extremely close to her, even unhealthily so, and while he remains ignorant of her death for the novel's first third, Lessing allows him a sympathetic grief, an unconscious mourning that has him weeping at unexpected moments as he makes his pilgrimage to the melting ice cliffs of Yerrup (could that be Europe?). Overtaken by emotion, he rescues a snow-dog pup, apparently a sort of feral white husky. He names the animal Ruff, and discovers in him a companion faithful to the end, a creature of human compassion and near-angelic goodwill.

The other characters listed in the unwieldy title are Mara's daughter Tamar (an unusually familiar name among the whimsical sci-fi gibberish proper nouns - Kass, Mahondi, Chelops, Marianthe - that pepper the book), who appears only late in the novel, thumb in mouth, trying to be brave when left with Dann by her father who is off, quite literally, to fight his own battles; and Griot, a long-time admirer of Dann's, who creates and manages an army in Dann's name, an eternally faithful eminence grise who uses Dann's increasingly hollow reputation as a means to attain power.

The complicated plot does not bear recounting. Those who want to know will read it, although I am not sure what they will be reading for. Lessing has never been a prose stylist, and much of the writing here is glaringly perfunctory. As an allegory, the book is heavy-handed: in the past ice age, so much knowledge has been lost; Dann and his cohorts have only the fragments shored up by forgotten forebears against their ruin - a host of books preserved behind what is perhaps Plexiglas, inevitably destroyed by contact with the air. (Such wisdom, and such foolishness, among the ancestors!) As a story in its own right, it is rambling and clumsy, dependent for form and significance upon its predecessor; and perhaps, indeed, upon a successor yet to come, as it seems to end practically in the middle of a thought. It is not a book particularly interested in characterisation: Dann is no Hamlet, for all his internal struggles. He combats his demons with inarticulacy, while many among his entourage and enemies seem to have been despatched from central casting, envoys from that nebulous world of past-as-future, or future-as-past, familiar from films from Mad Max to Gladiator and untold minor horrors between. It is a world in which people with muddied faces shuffle about wearing felted robes held together by clawed brooches. Any one of us could style their hair appropriately, or design makeshift boots for them to wear through the inevitable mud.

In her last, more realistic book (a collection of three novellas), Lessing displayed a certain indifference - steely, remarkable - to the niceties of scene-setting and character-building. What is notable and disappointing about this novel is that significant effort has been made: to conjure a "new" world, with all its quotidian trappings, and still peopled by men and women as we know them. Yet the "new" world proves tired and familiar, a second-hand stage set; and its people, too, remain anorexically thin. Readers of Lessing might happily choose another of her novels, while readers of science fiction might choose another writer. There seems no reason, in this instance, for the two groups to overlap.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website