The new novel from one of the greatest twentieth-century writers. Doris Lessing returns to the world of visionary fiction, last visited in her acclaimed 'Canopus in Argos' quintet of novels in the 1980s. It is sooner than you might think. And the earth's climate is much changed -- it's colder than ever before in the north, and unbearably dry and hot in the south. Mara, who is seven, and her four-year-old brother Dann find themselves somewhere very strange, not home, getting used to all these new names...They are taken in by a kindly, grandmotherly woman, to make a new life in this unforgiving rocky terrain. Their new guardian seems to be of their kin, and the caution and curiosity of her neighbours confirms to the alert Mara that she and Dann are in some way marked as notable, so special that many will come to seek them, many to suspect them, and disguise will often seem the best option. This new life is hard: hunger, dirt, thirst and danger are the children's constant companions as they grow into their selves.
Drought and fire carry off their adoptive home and force them to set off northward into the unknown, to experience a series of adventures, cultures, trials, revelations and crises that bring them through to an altogether altered world, where they can start to learn and build anew, to achieve a new kind of notability. Doris Lessing has written a compelling, troubling and entertaining novel that, through the remarkable odyssey of a brother and sister living in the imagined future, manages to tell us a great deal about the present we only dimly perceive and scarcely know how to value.
Industry Reviews
Lessing is a wise woman, a prophet - one of those rare human beings who see beyond their own place and time. Mara and Dann may be her greatest book. It retells a very old story, about a brother and sister who are parted and reunited again and again as they travel towards the cold and at last return to summer. It haunts our imagination because it reflects human history during recurrent ice ages. Lessing makes her story like a river, letting it wind on and on in a deceptively simple style that recalls the oral storytelling to which, in her book, the people of 'Ifrik', or Africa, have long ago returned. As Mara and Dann, travelling always north through Ifrik towards the hope of water, slowly find out, they are living 20,000 years after ice has covered the northern hemisphere. South of the ice mountains of 'Yirrup', life means survival - fighting off starving people, giant insects and scorpions. Death is nothing, books a confused memory, love something warned against in half-remembered stories - Mam Bova (Madame Bovary), Anna Kren (Anna Karenina). But Mara and Dann love each other above all things, a love that is tested by betrayal and by a final, climactic sexual tempting. Lessing's extraordinary vision makes the mind spin and the heart ache for the littleness of our 'cities... temporary as dreams. Like people...' Review by MAGGIE GEE Editor's note: Maggie Gee is the author of The Ice People. (Kirkus UK)
