From the TLS of April 14, 1950

DORIS LESSING
The Grass is Singing.
Michael Joseph. 9s. 6d.

Miss Lessing's first novel opens with the newspaper account of a murder in South Africa. The wife of an unsuccessful farmer has been stabbed by a dismissed native houseboy, for reasons which do not become fully apparent until the last page has been turned; though the book is in no sense a detective story, but a serious study of a woman's moral disintegration, set starkly down in a manner reminiscent of Llewellyn Powys's Ebony and Ivory sketches.

Mary, the daughter of a petty railway official who squandered his salary in drink, was a natural spinster until the age of 30, when a remark overheard by chance caused her to embark on a panic-stricken search for a husband. Her life with Dick, the farmer, was not happy ; his constant failures sowed early the seeds of discontent, and a slow horror of their surroundings (which the reader comes to share) soon grew upon her—a shrinking from the arid heat, the starving mongrels, the flies, the fever, the "implacable sky."

In a fit of fury she strikes a native labourer with her whip and persecutes him unjustly when, later, her husband engages him as a servant.

From that moment the tension mounts until the tables are turned by the African, and the chance intervention of a young "greenhorn" helps to promote the final tragedy in a powerful and bitter book.

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